README.md

A new workflow for creating classic WinAmp skins. Edit with ease, exercise full control, fully leverage the tools you prefer.

Give it a whirl on www.bamp.skin!

About

Bamp is a alternative specification for WinAmp skins that organizes the UI elements according their position in the final UI layout, with all elements that would occupy the same space separated across stacked layers. The corresponding converter allows for conversion to and from the standard WinAmp specification allowing you to test changes or modify existing WinAmp skins.

There are two primary advantages to editing skins in Bamp over WinAmp. The first is the layered approach. In the standard specification, each UI element is found in a different area in 2D space, across a wide variety of files of different dimensions, with very little to no relationship to its actual position in the user interface. Alternatively, Bamp provides users with a set of textures whose layout is much closer to how each element would appear when the skin is loaded, with elements that occupy the same space stacked in layers. For example, the unpressed and pressed state of buttons are defined in the same 2D space across different layers. All the user needs to do after defining the unpressed state is copy that element to the layer directly above in order to begin work on the pressed state. The way that the converter is written also allows artists to leverage the alpha channel to make the bare minimum changes necessary or to completely omit buttons from their design. This really comes in handy for elements such as the eq, balance, and volume faders that each have 27 states.

Layering Example

This is a subsection of the larger Bamp base layer as a simple example, to see the full layer, go to layer 29 and 30 in this Bamp Template skin, which was generated by converting a WinAmp template skin to Bamp.

This could be on the background layer, could be layer 00.png

On the layer above we have the changes necessary to create the unpressed, resting state of the button.

Next, if we would like to implement a separate "pressed" state we would make the minimum changes necessary on the layer above.

If we do not want to implement this, we would just leave that layer transparent, the pressed state will default to the unpressed state. The converter will collapse the layers one atop the other before splicing them into the map they belong to in the WinAmp specification alongside other elements. In this case shufrep.bmp.

The second is that Bamp allows you to stay in your image editor. In the original WinAmp specification there are two text files: pledit.txt and viscolor.txt that contain text representations of colors used in the visualization and playlist editor. Instead of requiring the tedious entry of RGB values and hexcodes, Bamp simply asks the user to set these colors in font_and_palette.png. The converter only samples the center pixel of each square region, so no need to be exact. Artists can utilize the palette management tools in their preferred editor to make sure the same colors are used. The converter will generate the necessary text files after converting to the WinAmp specification.

Side note: The parametric eq visualizer spectrum is simply scaled down to 1/4 size during conversion, so try to fill that one in as closely as possible.

Quick Start

The easiest way to get started is to use the webapp bamp.skin, it should be fairly self explanatory. If you would rather use the CLI offline, this repo can be installed as a pip package.

1. Download an existing skin you would like to modify from the WinAmp skin museum or if you would like to make a new one from scratch, download your favorite template skin
2. install this repo as a pip package

• pip install bamp

3. use the Bamp CLI to convert the winamp skin you downloaded to the Bamp specification. wsz and zip files are supported.

• python -m bamp --to-bamp --bamp-dir /path/to/output/bamp/directory --winamp-dir /path/to/winamp/skin.zip

4. edit the png image layers provided by Bamp in your editor
5. convert back to the WinAmp specification

• python -m bamp --to-winamp --bamp-dir /path/to/existing/bamp/directory --winamp-dir /path/to/new/winamp/output.zip

6. load the output WinAmp skin in an audio player that supports WinAmp skins

Preservation of History

There are often extraneous files within WinAmp skins that tell a brilliant story about why they were made, who made them, and the cultural context they were made in. Some effort has been made to ensure all files that do not directly contribute to the appearance of the skin are preserved in a directory named extra in the root of the skin. If you make a new skin or edit an existing one you are encouraged to leave something behind.

Motivation

Passionate artists and programmers have kept WinAmp alive as a personalized way to listen to music for 30 years. The skins you find run the gamut from charming, to hilarious, to downright beautiful. People are tickled when they see that a piece of software they use every day can be a meticulously themed after a video game they played in the 90s or in the architectural style of their country. If they memorize the positions of the buttons they can use skins that replace the UI with elvish runes or remove them entirely to make more space for Jackie Chan. Within these small collections of heavily specified bitmaps and text there is a bounty of possible expression. Given how difficult it is to create a fully featured WinAmp skin, it is impressive how many of them exist. Still, there is room for many more. My hope is that the "Bamp" format allows an artist to craft a fully implemented skin or modify an existing one in much less time due to the ease of iteration and ability to leverage the tools provided by their preferred art software, in my case Blender (I'm serious).

TODO

• I would love to add support for transparent skins. There are some old programs written in maybe pascal for generating region.txt files that could be translated to python, but this is a bit too much of an undertaking for the beta. If you want to edit and existing skin with transparency just make sure its regions.txt ends up in the root folder. It should be in the extra directory after the round trip conversion from WinAmp->Bamp->WinAmp. If anyone would like to help develop this support, open an issue if one does not exist at the time of reading this. I have a general idea of what is needed.
• Some old bmp files do not convert properly I think because they are old and being interpreted by the Pillow python library incorrectly, but I am not sure. It would be nice to have a process that eliminates this inconsistency.
• cursor support... cursors should be stacked in the same way other elements are, probably in the layers associated with the fader backgrounds

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Jacob Platania for supplying the BAMP logo and being the first to understand the scope of the project.