Feel free to email me from the link at the bottom of the page if you have any questions you’d like to ask or info you’d like to share regarding the topics discussed

The tutorial is available here.

The skins archive is available here.

I saw one of those Y2K/Frutiger Aero videos on the internet showing off some cool Windows media player(WMP) skins and I quite like the aesthetics of older software like that. First I messed around with it in a windows virtual machine. It was pretty straight forward on modern windows, you have to click a few buttons to get the legacy media player, but as far as I remember it’s all there already and worked well. After that I tried to get it to work through wine. That turned out to be a little more work as(shockingly) most people don’t really care about a 20-ish year old media players that doesn’t do anything modern player can’t.

I’ve read a lot of people saying that Winamp, or even Sonique, were the better music players (I don’t think there was a single post mentioning WMP that didn’t also mention the superiority of Winamp and how it ‘whips the llamas ass’). Even taking into account the one thing it might seem like windows media player had going for it at the time, ‘skins’, both Winamp and Sonique already had skinning capabilities a year or two before Microsoft caught up! And from what I’ve seen there’s some good contemporary skins for both the competitors.

Where I think Microsoft won out to the point of people posting and sharing nostalgic videos about WMP, where I haven’t seen any videos showing its competitors from the time, is due to coming preloaded with pretty much every install of Windows at the time. Again with all the ‘Frutiger Aero’ and Windows XP stuff, it just seems down to nostalgia for what was ubiquitous at the time most of these people were growing up.

Beyond the nostalgia though, I do find the design of a lot of these skins unique and interesting. Some of the earliest Microsoft offerings are a little kitsch, I think the green head is from a little later and seems to be a favourite of many. There’s also a couple of one offs from different companies of varying quality but some of the skins seem a little more flashy with custom animations and sound effects, parts that slide out or pop out into custom boxes, these are mostly thanks to ‘The Skins Factory’ (More about them here.) who were really ahead of the rest in terms of polish, working directly with Microsoft and big name companies to create licensed promotional skins. They’re artifacts of a time when most websites had a ‘downloads’ section with wallpapers and compressed to bits trailers and video clips.

Some of the more interesting ones are Batman Begins, Lollapalooza 2003, and Halo 2, as well as some lesser know gems in the likes of Wild Well Control (An oil well control company based in Houston involved in mitigating the BP oil spill), then there’s the press the green button skin (A skin to go with the band of the same name who released an EP for Microsoft to commemorate the launch of Windows XP Media Center Edition. Available here), and one last one Kakuto Chojin (A short lived Xbox fighting game that was pulled from shelves months after release due to a controversial music track. More info here). So for me a lot of these skins have appeal beyond their looks, there’s stories behind a lot of them that are undeniably tied to the era they come from, the golden age of digital marketing and 2000s design.

Mainly due to this visual appeal and nostalgia I decided to look a bit into preserving them and seeing how they could be a little more accessible by tinkering with WMP using wine. I couldn’t say I’m any kind of an expert in dealing with it but reading around and reading some debug logs I think I’ve written a decently useful guide that should hopefully make it straight forward enough for anyone who wants to check these skins out on their own system. There’s definitely a couple graphical bugs, music playback seems to only work after toggling the play/pause button, but I think the most important part, the skins, work more than well enough to check them out and mess around with them yourself. I hope you enjoy them as much as I do :) -Jake