Developer builds WinAmp 2.9 in javascript

An American developer, Jordan Eldredge, has made an implementation of WinAmp 2.9 in javascript and html5. It also runs in a browser. Handy if you want to go back to the time when you used the software to run 64kbit MP3s.

Eldredge announced this week indicates that his project is ready and has support for all WinAmp windows. The code can be admired on GitHub, and there is an online version to try out. Which, of course, has support for playing music. This works by, for example, dragging a local MP3 file to it. The same is also possible with skins. There is a Twitter channel that an occasional skin tweet.

Well-known WinAmp functions, such as the equalizer and the music visualizations, also work. The developer tells TechCrunch that he got the idea by realizing that WinAmp skins work in much the same way as CSS sprites. He started it three years ago and mainly found satisfaction in the limitations of building in the browser, he tells the site.

The version Eldredge recreated, version 2.9, came out in the late 1990s. The software developed by Nullsoft had its first release in 1997. Two years later, AOL bought the developer.