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Winamp for the shelf: Fan recreates the popular music player as hardware

12.6.2024

Translation: machine translated

The Winamp media playback software as physical hardware: for some people, this would certainly be a dream come true. A software engineer and Winamp fan from Mexico has now realised this.

If you played music on your computer in the late 1990s and early 2000s, you probably used the free music player Winamp. With its striking bright green font on a dark background, the programme is also etched in my mind. The hackaday.io user Rodmg used Winamp as inspiration for a hardware project and constructed a physical music player with a Winamp look. He calls the player Linamp.

Here you can see the interface on sale:

In order to listen to music, Linamp must be connected to speakers. The device is equipped with a 3.5 millimetre jack plug for this purpose. These are the functions of Linamp:

Playback of locally stored music files in MP3, M4A and FLAC format as well as from the network
Playlist management
Display of a real-time spectrum analyser in Winamp's iconic bar visuals
Display of track information, including bit rate and sample rate
Control of output volume and balance
CD playback when an external CD drive is connected

Mini stereo system: made for a physical Winamp

Rodmg, another Winamp fan, explains where the inspiration for his Linamp project came from: He found a visualisation online of what a physical Winamp might look like. It reminded him of a mini stereo system from Aiwa, which consists of modules stacked on top of each other and which he recognised from his parents' house. Their front panel formats would fit very well with the main interface of Winamp.

3D rendering of what Winamp could look like as hardware.
Source: The source of the image cannot be identified, the image is shared on social media and forums

The realisation: touchscreen and Raspberry board

Rodmg designed the housing of his planned device based on the Aiwa model with the help of a 3D programme. He commissioned a specialist company to manufacture the metal housing and the front cover, which he also designed himself. Linamp was originally supposed to have physical buttons, just like the original rendering, but Rodmg opted for a 7.9-inch touchscreen instead. This allows more different content to be displayed, including the title information and the iconic spectrum analyser

The centrepiece of the device is a "Raspberry Pi 4" board with an integrated processor, four gigabytes of RAM, dual-band WLAN, Bluetooth, Gigabit Ethernet and USB 3. A 32-gigabyte SD card is used to store the songs. Rodmg used a 3D printer to produce various auxiliary parts that fix the cables and connections on the back of his device in place.

Rodmg describes that programming the software for the media player was more complicated than planning and realising the hardware. You can read the details in his project description. Rodmg makes the software available free of charge on Github.

Although the hobbyist does not say anything about the naming of Linamp, it is reasonable to assume that it is a combination of Linux and Winamp. The software runs on the Debian GNU/Linux operating system. <p

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Debora Pape

Editor

Debora.Pape@galaxus.de

Feels just as comfortable in front of a gaming PC as she does in a hammock in the garden. Likes the Roman Empire, container ships and science fiction books. Focuses mostly on unearthing news stories about IT and smart products.

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Winamp for the shelf: Fan recreates the popular music player as hardware

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