Unfortunately, due to recent changes in Wine, support for 32bit prefixes has been removed completely. This method does not work on the current version of Wine and I am looking into ways to fix this

I talk about why I did this Here

The Skin Archive is available Here

Requirements

Install the following packages with your preferred package manager:

• Wine (version 10.8 was used)
• Winetricks (version 20250102-1 used)

Introduction

I’m just going to assume we’re starting fresh here just to cover all options. If you don’t know Wine it’s a Windows compatibility layer for Linux, macOS, and BSD, And Winetricks is an all in one solution for various problems in Wine.

We’re going to use the Windows Media Player 10 package in Winetricks. It does everything WMP9 does but with less graphical glitches. I haven’t looked into anything older, I’m not sure about backwards compatibility of some of these skins, most of which were made for WMP9 and above, although skins were introduced with WMP7. The reason we’re going with WMP10 even though it’s not the newest version, is just down to it being, at least from my messing around and testing, the easiest version to get working.

WMP10 has the least amount of graphical glitches, although it and WMP9 have some bizarre audio playback issues. Tracks need to be started by pressing the play/pause button twice(first to pause it, and then upon pressing play the song will play) there also seems to be an issue with the playback speed? The progress bar seems to be moving at double speed, so all the songs finish about half way across the progress bar, which I think leads to the next song not auto-playing, and if you seek past the halfway point of the progress bar it will cause WMP to skip to the next track. I tried reading around and messing with some DLLs but couldn’t figure out a way to fix it, I might come back to it but I kind of want to finish writing this right now. Reading on the Wine website some things made me think it might be due to a regression? That the issue was fixed but now has become unfixed but I’m not really sure. I can’t say I know a terrible lot about this kind of thing. It might be worth my time asking on one of the forums or filing a bug report, but I suppose it’s not really necessary for anything so there’s probably very little interest. This is more just a project for a bit of fun and to try and preserve the history of the skins available.

Procedure

Firstly if you haven’t used Wine before we’re going to need to set up a new Wine prefix, this will store all the files required for Wine to work. To do this in the default location in your home directory you can run the following:

1WINEARCH=win32 winecfg

If you already have a wine prefix in the default location you don’t want to mess with, you can use this command:

1WINEARCH=win32 WINEPREFIX=path/to/prefix/PrefixName winecfg

If you set your prefix somewhere other than the default location(~/.wine), you’ll have to prefix the following commands with:

1WINEPREFIX=path/to/prefix/PrefixName

Matching the path used earlier.

Next, you can simply run:

1winetricks wmp10

You should get a couple pop-ups for successfully registered DLLs, you can click okay on these and continue. You’ll then get the WMP10 installer, click ‘Next’, ‘I Accept’, next again, then you’ll be shown some options, I haven’t noticed any difference in using them or not, so I just click ‘Next’, followed by ‘Finish’. You should then get a pop-up completing the install, followed by WMP10. It appears grey at first so close this and run:

1winecfg

And set the ‘Windows Version’ near the bottom to ‘Windows XP’, press ‘okay’ and close that, now you can run:

1wine wmplayer

This should give you a nice blue windows media player, you can head over to the ’library’ tab and you should be prompted if you want to search your computer for files, you can point this to some music on your computer, or alternatively, right click the top bar, go to ‘file’ and then go to ‘open’. As I said earlier, you might encounter some unfortunate audio issues, such as having to press play/pause before a track will actually play, as well as no seamless playback between songs possibly due to an issue with the progress bar(although it does seem that in skin mode it works correctly?). I’m yet to find any way to fix these issues.

You can go to the ‘Now Playing’ tab and right click on the main section to choose between the some visualisations, all but the ones under ‘Battery’ work well for me.

To get to the skins, first you’ll want to download some from the archive Here or from any other source you’d like. Then you can place these in the skins folder located at /drive_c/Program Files/Windows Media Player/Skins within your wine directory, there should be some there by default. You can then right click the top bar or press the small drop down arrow to the left of the minimise symbol, go to view, and select ‘Skin Chooser’. Choose the skin you want from the list and click ‘apply skin’. If all has worked well you should now be able to enjoy any skin you’d like. There’s usually a little button on each skin to return to the full mode, and in full mode there’s also a button in the bottom right to enter into skin mode.