Guide: wall-mounted winamp-style media player

This is a guide for how to make your own Winamp-style wall mounted webplayer with your own skins. You can clone it using Base44 here, which is the easiest way to get started if you’ve never done something like this before, or if you can visit the Github page to clone the project. More instructions below!

Why make a Winamp player?

I’ve always loved the aesthetics of Winamp, and the massive amount of skins (over 100,000). And I also was inspired by a certain scene from Ex Machina — this is something I’d always wanted to have in my house, a one-touch dance-mode that turns on mood lighting and plays music:

I recently made a video about recording cassettes from a computer, and a lot of people were excited to see Winamp for like a split-second in the middle of the vid.

So I thought it might be cool to take this a little further, and make something that runs fullscreen on any iPad or tablet.

Also, I wanted to make this as cheap, modular, and easy to set up as possible. I set this up as a project on Base44 so you can tweak should your device have any issues. That said, I think it should be able to run on pretty much any tablet, screen or even an old iPhone.

Materials / Tools

• iPad / Tablet / Phone (in my video I use an A16 11-inch iPad)
• Wall mount — I used this one from Amazon
• Drill (you need to screw the mount into the wall).
• Free or paid Base44 account
• Some mp3’s you want to play

Steps

1. Open up WallAmp and click “Edit with Base44” and then “Clone this App.
2. Drag some mp3’s into the Base44 chat window, and ask it to “remove the example tracks, and replace with mp3’s”
3. Publish it, and copy the public URL it gives you
4. Paste that link into your tablet’s browser
5. Add the mount to the back of your tablet (or tablet case) and stick it to the wall. Make sure after you slide it out, that you screw the wall-mount in.
6. Play some music!

Bonus Steps

Here’s some more things that I personally did, that you might also like to do to make your project more fun:

1. You can load in your own skins — you can explore the Winamp Skin Museum at webamp.org, and then
2. Copy the link to any specific skins you like, and then ask Base44 to pull those skins in, (perhaps even just replace all the skins that I’m using)
3. Note that these skins don’t typically skin the visualizer, but you can ask Base44 to run the internal script to generate milkdrop skins for each skin you import.
4. For chatting with Base44, I really like using Handy — this lets you press and hold a button while dictating. There’s also a paid service called WisprFlow that is maybe even a little better — but I like that Handy keeps all my data on my own computer.
5. You can make this into a home screen app on iOS by opening it up in Safari, tapping the
6. Finally, at some point I’ll release more of a guide on how I’m doing some home automation to turn on/off lights from pressing a single button, but the short of it is that I used the iOS Shortcuts app to both open the player, and start a timer to turn on/off lights for dance mode. So as soon as I open the app, I have 10 seconds to press play which trigger dance mode.

I haven’t tested with every tablet device, but one huge benefit of using Base44, is that if you have any trouble with your specific device, you can troubleshoot and fix it all in their app.

You can also go to the project’s GitHub and fork it and use it for other projects.

Winamp notes

While the Winamp name, interface, and, sample audio file are property of Nullsoft, the code within this project is released under the MIT License.

If you have any thoughts or issues, or want to share what you make, please leave a comment below or reach out to me at tex@texs.org