The Winamp Skin Museum contains many different skins. Take a look through them, find something that suites your style, you can download it and convert it for use on your PyPortal. 

Inside the project bundle that you downloaded there is a directory named PyPortal_Winamp_Skin_Converter. Inside of there is a Python script that will do the conversion for you.

The next several steps need to be done on your PC, not the PyPortal device.

Download Skin

Go to the Skin Museum and find the perfect skin. Once you find it, right click on it's preview image and download the image.

The downloaded file should be a PNG image. If your downloaded file is a ZIP file then you accidentally downloaded the one that gets used with the real Winamp player. For our PyPortal we need the PNG preview image only. Right click from the main "grid" page on the skin you like to download the preview image.

By default the filename will be a long string of letters and numbers. You should change it to something shorter and more descriptive, especially if you plan to download multiple skins and swap them out! The skin I chose is a dark theme so I'll choose the name dark_theme.png. You can choose a name that is appropriate for the skin you chose.

Once you've downloaded the skin image copy it into the PyPortal_Winamp_Skin_Converter directory on your PC. It should be alongside of convert_winamp_skin.py. There is a .circuitpython.skip-screenshot file there also, but you don't need to use it. That is for our project files screenshot utility.

Convert the skin

The conversion script requires Python and the Pillow library, which is a friendly fork of PIL the Python Imaging Library.

If you don't already have Python on your PC, go to the Python downloads page and follow the instructions there to download Python for your PC.

Once you've got Python on your PC you can use pip to install pillow. Run this command to install it:

pip install pillow

Once you've got pillow installed you are ready to convert the skin. To convert it run a command like this, substituting in the name of the skin image file that you downloaded.

python convert_winamp_skin.py [your_skin_image].png

So for my dark theme skin I am running this command:

python convert_winamp_skin.py dark_theme.png

Skin files

This will create two files from your skin. These will get loaded onto your CIRCUITPY drive. They will be named like these: [your_skin]_240x320.bmp and [your_skin]_config.json

Copy both of these two files to your PyPortal CIRCUITPY drive.

The last thing to do is update the variables near the top of code.py on your CIRCUITPY drive to reflect your skin filenames. This is how mine look, yours will use the name that you selected previously.

# which skin background to use
SKIN_IMAGE = "/dark_theme_240x320.bmp"

# skin configuration for color values
SKIN_CONFIG_FILE = "dark_theme_config.json"

The PyPortal will reset when you save the files and draw the new skin and begin playing your playlist. You can download several skins and swap between them for whatever mood you're in.

This guide was first published on Feb 18, 2022. It was last updated on Feb 18, 2022.

This page (Custom Winamp Skin) was last updated on Feb 07, 2022.

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