Webamp: the Winamp 2 player, in your browser.

At a glance

How to use it

Drop one song or a whole folder's worth on the box above, or click it to pick files. The first batch replaces the empty playlist and starts playing; anything you add after that queues behind it. You can also drop files straight onto the player's own windows, the way you could onto the original. Everything else works the way it did in 1998: drag a window by its title bar, double-click the title bar to roll it up into "windowshade" mode, and right-click the main window for the menu.

The keyboard shortcuts are Winamp's: Z previous, X play, C pause, V stop, B next, the arrow keys for volume and seeking, S for shuffle and R for repeat. Closing the main window closes the player; the "Reopen the player" button under the stage brings it back with the playlist intact.

Skins

A Winamp 2 skin is a zip archive, renamed .wsz, holding a set of bitmap files (main.bmp, cbuttons.bmp, pledit.bmp and so on) and a few text files for colours and the window's clickable regions. Webamp reads that archive in the browser and paints the player from it, so a skin made in 1999 works here unchanged. Drop a .wsz on the box and the player changes at once; drop another to change again. Tens of thousands of them survive in the Winamp Skin Museum, which is run by Webamp's author. "Modern" Winamp 3 and 5 skins (.wal) are a different, scripted format and do not load.

The equaliser and MilkDrop

The equaliser is a real one, not a picture: ten bands from 60 Hz to 16 kHz plus a preamp, built from Web Audio filters, with the on and auto buttons and the preset menu of the original. It changes what you hear here; it does not change your files. To put an EQ curve into a file you can keep, use the EQ tool.

The fourth window is MilkDrop, the visualiser plugin Ryan Geiss released for Winamp in 2001, which filled a lot of bedroom monitors in the years after. Here it is Butterchurn, Jordan Berg's WebGL 2 implementation, which runs the original preset format: each preset is a small program of per-frame and per-pixel equations plus shaders, driven by the bass, mid and treble of whatever is playing. Presets change by themselves; click the window and press Space for the next one, Backspace for the previous, H for a hard cut, or L for the list. If you want the visualiser by itself at full size, on a file or on your microphone, or as a video you can save, that is the music visualizer.

What it is, and what it is not

Webamp is a reimplementation: its author rebuilt the player's behaviour and layout in JavaScript from the outside, without Winamp's source code, starting in 2014. It is not made by, or affiliated with, the owners of Winamp, and neither is this site. It is one of the projects catalogued on Recomp, a directory of decompilations and clean-room rebuilds, where you can see how it relates to the original.

Two limits are worth knowing. It plays through the browser's own audio element, so a format the browser cannot decode (WMA, most tracker modules, DSD) will sit in the playlist and not play; convert those first, for example with WMA to MP3, or play tracker modules in the module player. And the playlist lives in the tab: it is not saved when you close the page, and nothing here reads your music library.