Rachel Thomason | Executive Director

2/08/02

By now, every college student must know about Winamp, the mp3 music player, because I can hear Winamp's motto "it really whips the llama's ass" coming from my neighbor's apartment. While I'm sure that most of the mp3-listening population has downloaded a skin or two, how many of you have tried to make your own? It's not as hard to do as you think. With a little patience and a few software tools, you will be on your way to skinning that boring base skin with designs of your own.

Before writing this article, the following steps were Whim-tested to produce the following Whimamp skin! I also made another test skin that matches my web page. Both these skins are fairly basic and by using the following skin creation steps, I expect all of you to show me up! Who knows, your skin might be featured right here on Whim!

Step 1: Get the Latest Version of Winamp
Download version 2.78 here. (We recommend the Full version.)

Step 2: Tunes
Open Winamp and queue your favorite play list. Music makes this process go faster (but may make your computer go slower).

Step 3: Template
Download and unzip the files that make up the regular Winamp design.

Step 4: Open the Design
Open the files in a graphics program (There are 14 of them. I suggest starting with the file named "Main.bmp").

Step 5: Modify the Design
Modify or paste your design over the original. (You may need to change the file mode to RGB if you want to use layers, etc.) Replace the old file with the new one. (Make sure the file extension is still .bmp).

Step 6: See the Results
Creating skins is a lot like coding HTML; you have to do a little at a time and check the results often. To see your new player window design, press Alt+S on your keyboard. This will launch the Winamp Preferences dialog box. Select Skins at the bottom of the list and your skin should appear in the window to the right. (You may have to set your skins directory.) Too much work? Try right clicking in the player window and selecting Skins. Each time you modify your graphic files, you have to "reload" the skin.

Step 7: Modify Environment Values (Optional)
Ok, now your graphics are looking great, but what are those three text files in your skin's directory? The text files you see control non-graphic aspects of your skin. These files must be opened in a text editor such as Notepad, WordPad, or Microsoft Word.

• Pledit.txt - controls the play list color values. Use the Normal, Current, and Font fields to control the text, NormalBG to control the background of the window, and Selected BG for the song's highlight color. The values must be in Hexadecimal format (If you have Photoshop 5.5 or higher, use the color picker to get the Hex value. Otherwise, here is a good converter).

• Region.txt - this file is for more advanced users. It allows you to change the shape of the player by specifying the outer points of the design. This file comes documented, so I won't bore you with the details.

• Viscolor.txt - this file controls the visualization colors. (See those moving lines just under the time counter?) To modify this file, you must use RGB values. To see what each line does, take a look at Whim's file.

Step 9: Group and Use Your Skin!
The last step in the process is to zip your skin up into something useable for other people. The easiest way to do this is to open WinZip (or a similar program) and create a new zip folder. Next, replace the .zip extension with a .wsz extension. You are now ready to send your skin to Winamp.com to be downloaded by all your friends!

While creating a skin is a lengthy process, it gets easier each time you do it. Good luck and let us know how you are doing!