In the late 90’s, as the trend of MP3 file sharing started booming, one media player emerged supreme, standing out from the others thanks to its plugins and custom skins and quickly becoming one of the most downloaded softwares for Windows. That software was Winamp, and now, Hackaday.io user Rodrigo Méndez aka Rodmg has built a hardware version of the beloved media player, calling it the Linamp.
The Linamp is modelled after mini stereo systems from the 80’s, specifically, an Aiwa one owned by Rodrigo. An anodised aluminium enclosure houses the inner workings of the player, which are based around a Raspberry Pi 4B running a Dietpi OS (based on Debian bookworm), and with a 32 GB SD card. For the main UI, a 7.9" extra-wide touchscreen has been used.
The Linamp’s UI is as faithful to the original Winamp with default skin, complete with real-time bar spectrum analyser, track information including bit-rate and sample rate, and playlist management. Rodrigo is also working on incorporating Bluetooth and Spotify playback, which would make the Linamp the perfect old-school device with modern functionality.
Linamp plays music files (MP3, MP4, FLAC, etc) off its internal file system, but it can also be connected to an external CD drive to play audio CDs, while getting track information from MusicBrainz.
Based in Mexico, Rodrigo is a software engineer by profession, and a hobbyist maker. While the Linamp is his personal DIY project (the full details of which can be found here), we can always hope that the amount of nostalgia out there for the Winamp Player can convince him to make the player on order for his fellow Winamp-enthusiasts.
Until then, you can play your perfectly curated lossless music collection on the Sony NW-A306 music player or the FiiO M11S, while the FiiO CP13 portable cassette player can bring those old cassettes back to life.