How to use skins

To use a skin in Winamp, just follow these three easy steps:

1. Locate your 'winamp/skins' directory and create a subdirectory with the same name as the skin.
2. Put all the files that belong to the skin in the new directory. Most skins are compressed with zip, so you should use winzip or pkunzip to decompress the files.
3. Start Winamp (if it's already running you don't need to restart it) and press ALT+S. A window appears where you can choose skin, highlight the one you want and press Ok. If you check the checkbox (Winamp 1.81 and later) Winamp will automatically change skin between each song.

Where to find skins

Skin file-format

Skins are just a collection of BMP-images in a subdirectory of the 'skin' directory, one subdirectory for each skin. There is not one image for each part of Winamp's interface, because several items are grouped into one image (e.g. all control buttons are in 'cbuttons.bmp'). You can also change the colors of the default visualization plugin. This is done with a file called 'viscolor.txt'. All files are optional and if one is missing the default (original Winamp look) will be used instead.

BMP-format

You can use any type of BMP-images (Windows or OS2, 1,4,8 or 24 bit, RLE or normal). There seems to be only one restriction; if main.bmp is a 1 bit image everything but the vis will be black & white.
The images can have any size (Winamp doesn't crash if they have the wrong size) but I recommend you to use the standard sizes. If the image is too big, Winamp will just use the top-left part of it; the extra pixels will just be ignored. If the image is too small, the part of it that isn't there just won't be drawn, i.e. you will see through it. Note that this is not true for main.bmp if it is too small nothing will be drawn there (not even things that normally would be drawn on top of main.bmp), it will contain garbage.

viscolor.txt

I think it is clearest if I show an example. r, g and b range from 0 to 255 (normal truecolor values).
--8<-- start viscolor.txt

r,g,b	// 0 = black (background color #1)
r,g,b	// 1 = grey (background color #2)
r,g,b	// 2 = top of spec
r,g,b	// 3
r,g,b	// 4
r,g,b	// 5
r,g,b	// 6
r,g,b	// 7
r,g,b	// 8
r,g,b	// 9
r,g,b	// 10 = mid of spec
r,g,b	// 11
r,g,b	// 12
r,g,b	// 13
r,g,b	// 14
r,g,b	// 15
r,g,b	// 16
r,g,b	// 17 = bottom of spec
r,g,b	// 18 = osc 1 (brightest)
r,g,b	// 19 = osc 2
r,g,b	// 20 = osc 3
r,g,b	// 21 = osc 4
r,g,b	// 22 = osc 5 (dimmest)

The images

First some note on the words I use:

• Image = an entire BMP-image.
• Final image = the result created by Winamp.
• Sprite = a small image within an image.
• Item = a thing that will be draw on the final image. Can be one or more sprites or a calculated image (i.e. the Vis)
• Hot area = an interactive area, something happens when you click there. Items are often hot areas.