I never wanted a player that looks like Winamp. I wanted one that actually runs Winamp skins. The difference is bigger than it sounds. A Modern Skin is not a bitmap theme, it is a program. XML declares the widget tree, compiled Maki bytecode drives the behavior. Drawers slide, tabs switch, windows change their shape, all of it scripted by the skin itself. Repaint that and you have a pretty poster. I wanted the original.
That is why qtamp runs skins as real programs. qtamp is my Qt6-native music player and the reference player for qtWasabi, my independent reimplementation of a Modern Skin engine. Skins ship their compiled Maki bytecode with them, and qtWasabi executes it in its own Maki VM. The skin’s logic drives the interface exactly the way it did in 2002.
The name is a play on words. “Qt” as in the framework, “qt” as in cute. A Qt-native amp, and hopefully a cute one.
