WinAmp
Introduction
In 2013 I owned a Walkman; It was portable, accessible, and allowed me to listen to around 250 songs anywhere. It got me through boarding school and got stolen multiple times. When I started making a lot of music in my 20s, didn’t know what to do with it. Some tracks were unfinished, but could be played to strangers. So in November 2025 I started to write code for an app that could be used to share some of that music!
I learned about Webamp and ReAmp both modern answers to the original Winamp player from 1997. The original app came with Microsoft machines and was really popular because of one thing : It was user-driven. For the first time a listener could personalise the skin, upload their music, make playlists and listen to them on personal computers.
Process
I was doing some sample problems on the freecodecamp website and it occurred to me to build something that I could use and so I started building immediately. I had wanted to learn how to code but was putting it off for a long time but once I got the hang of it - it became much easier and I started to pick things up in a few days. It was coding hell for about two weeks in the beginning and it took me about two weeks on version one because I was learning how code worked while building an app. Once I caught up with VSCode and Git, and understood a few basic commands AND understood how LLMs work everything clicked.
Purpose
This app is a tool for creators to write, demo, and share their work. It ships with ten tracks that I made and supports drag and drop so users can upload their own tracks. The repeat function supports gapless playback - the same function that your DAW uses when you loop a track and it allows you to write to a loop without having to open a DAW. Here's a list of all features :
- Media Player Control Buttons
- Stereo / Mono Playback
- Stereo Balance Control
- Draggable Titlebar
- Old MacOs Skin
- Shuffle & Repeat
- Gapless Playback
- Responsive UI
- Drag & Drop Files
- Volume Control