Qmmp with Winamp Alien Assault skin.

Winamp used to be the go to player for a sense of personality and identity.

But its coming back ! Also see www.mywinamp.com. I’ve not tried the latest Windows version as all my primary machines run Linux. So I was amazed to find a project I had not noticed … Qmmp, active since 2007 with recent updates. Qmmp is a true Winamp clone for Linux ! It has similar plugins and amazingly can load “.wsz” Winamp skins, although not the new “modern” Winamp skins but there’s plenty of the rest of them to be getting on with.

Qmmp with Winamp Expensive HI FI Sony 2005 skin.

There are many skins in this archive or archive.org has the original Winamp skins download page with thumbnails.

I didn’t find the archive.org page until recently so wanted to show all the skins in the archive as thumbnails. I wrote this script to extract them.

#!/bin/bash

# --- Mass Winamp skin thumbnail extractor, Michael Z Freeman 2020
# Each ".wsz" skin file has a "main.bmp" in it that can act as a thumbnail/preview.
# Zipinfo sometimes reports bad zip file but bmp extracts anyway.

for file in *.wsz
  do
    # Must have "./" before archive file name because some filenames start with "-" that zipinfo interprets as an option.
    # Some zip files sometimes have multiple "main.bmp" hence "head -n 1" to select first entry.    
    main=`zipinfo -1 "./$file" | grep -iw main.bmp | head -n 1`
    base=`basename "$main"`
    # "o" - overwrite files wihthout prompting !
    # Must have "./" before archive file name because some filenames start with "-" that unzip interprets as an option.
    unzip -Cjo "./$file" "$main" -d /tmp
    # Must have "--" beforefile name because some filenames start with "-" that mv interprets as an option.
    mv -f -- /tmp/$base $file.bmp
  done

Copy all the “.wsz” files to a separate directory and run the script in there.

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