NewAmp

A Winamp-inspired modern desktop music player for macOS, Windows, and Linux. Your local library. Your rules. No streaming. No cloud. No telemetry.

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What it is

NewAmp is a local-first macOS, Windows, and Linux music player for people who actually own their music. It indexes a local folder of MP3 / FLAC / OGG / Opus / WAV / M4A / AAC / WMA / AIFF / APE / WV / MPC / DSF / DFF and gives you a player that feels like a piece of hardware, not a subscription dashboard.

It scales to tens of thousands of tracks (tested at 60k+), runs entirely on your machine, and never phones home.

30-second pitch

• Four UI shells — Retro (Bloomberg-density Winamp 2 homage), Modern (rounded, content-forward), Liquid Glass (translucent stacked panes with backdrop-filter), Concourse (operator-console split-cells)
• Nine deck (compact-window) skins - Windowshade, Winamp Classic, Winamp Industrial, Record Player, Jukebox, Cassette Deck, Discman, Hotdog Deck, and Retro TV. Each declares its own native window size with no letterbox
• 13 color skins — Classic, Ops, Midnight, Neon, Amber, Oxide, Steel, Walnut, Jukebox, Terminal, Ice, Miami, Mono. Plus full Winamp 2.x .wsz skin import
• 0–100 decimal track scoring — Drag, scroll-wheel, keyboard-nudge, or double-click to type 88.3. Stars stay in sync for legacy sorts and smart rules
• 0–200% volume with a red-zone past unity — VLC-style amp boost, full 0 dB / +6 dB tick labels, runs after the master limiter so it amplifies without clipping. A perceptual (cubic) taper makes equal slider travel feel like an equal loudness change instead of crowding everything into the bottom 15%
• Resonance — the whole UI reacts to the live audio — not just a visualizer pane: the player's chrome itself breathes with the music. A live album-art accent wash, a beat pulse on the transport, energy-driven glow — all driven by one cheap CSS-variable loop that self-throttles to a clean static theme on weak hardware (and respects prefers-reduced-motion). Other players theme from static cover art or confine reactivity to a visualizer window; NewAmp makes the application body the instrument. Toggle in Settings → Performance & Resonance
• Magazine-style Home — greeting hero with blurred album backdrop, Today's Pick (high-rated track you haven't played in 6+ weeks, with a reason chip), Your Highest Rated rail, NewAmp News editorial card, Listening Stats This Week, plus the classic Harmonic / Taste / Loved / Heavy Rotation / Fresh Imports rails
• NewAmp Wrapped — a Spotify-Wrapped-style recap built entirely from your local play history, with a Today / Week / Month / Year / All-Time switcher: time listened, top tracks & artists, genre breakdown, a 24-hour listening clock + peak hour, longest streak, discoveries, and a DNA-derived "vibe" — exported as a one-tap shareable PNG card. No account, no upload
• Living Library Discover mode — local-first crate-digging missions that turn ratings, plays, skips, fresh imports, deep album candidates, and underplayed corners into playable sessions with Deck / Full Vis / Save as Playlist actions
• Audio DNA + Sounds Like — per-track perceptual fingerprints (brightness, dynamic range, band energies, onset density, etc.) extracted via local FFT, surfaced as a cosine-similarity "Sounds Like" panel on Now Playing
• Living Tags DSL — write expressions like tag(midnight_drive) when bpm > 110 and dna.energy > 0.4 and genre matches "synth|wave" boost 1.5 and the library reactively re-tags itself. Tags compose, cycle-check at definition time, and become first-class power-search filters (tag:midnight_drive). No music player has had this before
• Library Radio Brain — flip a toggle and your library becomes a tunable HTTP station on the local network (http://desktop:17117/library.m3u, /random.m3u, /tag/<name>.m3u, /audio/<id>). VLC on your phone, OBS, Sonos URL import — anything that consumes M3U works
• Spectral Cover Art — albums without real art render a stable, unique procedural SVG cover seeded by artist::album, so your collection looks intentional instead of placeholder-grey
• Bloomberg-density Now Playing with a tabbed side panel (On Air / Album / Lyrics), draggable spectrum-split, selectable spectrum styles, VU + waveform overview, LRCLIB-synced lyrics, optional karaoke mode, custom-lyrics editor, tempo trainer, practice A/B loop, track bookmarks
• Particle Flow — a GPU visualizer — up to ~140k particles simulated entirely on the GPU (WebGL2 transform feedback) through a curl-noise flow field that bends with the bass, turbulates with the treble, and bursts on every beat. Nothing in the Winamp lineage has had GPU-simulated particles. Falls back gracefully on machines without WebGL2
• Eviland — a visualizer that reacts to every instrument — the flagship, and unlike anything else in the Winamp lineage. Where MilkDrop pulses three lumped bands on one shared envelope, Eviland runs a 24-band spectral-flux onset detector so each instrument fires its own visual event — the kick blooms a red shockwave from the floor, the snare cracks white off-center, hats sparkle along the top, the lead drifts mid-screen — rendered into a GPU feedback field (WebGL2 float ping-pong) with curl-noise flow, dual-Kawase bloom, and transient-gated chromatic aberration. It has structural memory (detects verse/chorus boundaries and visually rhymes when a chorus returns) and anticipation (locks to tempo and leads the beat). Frequency maps to height, stereo to width — it reads like a spectrogram you can feel. Falls back to MilkDrop on machines without WebGL2
• Milkdrop visualizer + 24 in-house fullscreen modes — Butterchurn presets (sandboxed in their own frame so the main app needs no unsafe-eval; preset swaps are prewarmed off-frame and complexity-biased so transitions no longer hitch) plus Eviland, Particle Flow and five GPU shaders — Kaleido Bloom, Aurora Storm, Fractal Pulse, Starfield Warp, Spectral Tunnel — alongside beat-locked Tempo Pulse, club-strobe Lattice, neon waves/ribbons, plasma grid, prism bars, burning cloud, aurora, orbital rings and the rest. Real spectral-flux beat detection drives the visuals across the full frequency range (bass and mids/highs), and an auto hardware tier keeps it smooth on older machines. The fullscreen controls are a clean bar — preset picker, a labeled settings panel, and a ? keyboard-shortcut overlay — instead of a wall of cryptic buttons
• Auto DJ + smart playlists — BPM/key-aware harmonic mixes, taste-learning from plays/loves/ratings/skips, smart rules with min-rating filters
• Album art rescue + Metadata rescue — embedded art, folder art, Cover Art Archive, MusicBrainz lookup, and manual cleanup tools for rough local libraries
• Artist facts and images — musician-first artist context and large artist images without confusing bands for species, cities, albums, or other same-name pages
• Custom playlists — create named playlists, reorder tracks, export portable folders, and pick or drop playlist artwork for the playlist icon
• Native guitar tab companion — cache local/Ultimate Guitar-style tabs and pop out a native tab window when a playable match exists
• Audiophile chain - WASAPI on Windows, Chromium system audio on Linux, ReplayGain (per-track + per-album), crossfade/gapless playback checks, software limiter, 10-band EQ, lossless WAV export of any track, output-device picker with test tone where the OS exposes it
• CUE sheet playback — one-file albums split into playable, seekable tracks with performer/title/year/genre metadata
• Last.fm — full scrobbling + now-playing + offline outbox queue
• Profile, reviews & lists (local-first) — a Letterboxd-for-listening foundation: write reviews/diary entries on tracks, albums, and artists; build ranked lists; set your "five bags" favorites; per-item local/friends/public privacy. Export a self-contained static HTML profile page — no account, no server, nothing uploaded
• Local-first — SQLite library, sql.js, no account, no telemetry, no required network

Screenshots

Daily-driver views

Home	Albums

Now Playing

On Air — facts + spectrum	Lyrics

Shape-changing decks

Nine compact-window skins, each declaring its own native window size so the OS chrome stays out of the way.

Record Player	Jukebox

Windowshade (Winamp-classic compact deck)

Reactive tagging + sonic cartography

Living Tags workshop	Sonic Atlas

Visualizers

Tempo Pulse	Aurora

Lattice Strobe	Spectrum

Library polish

Spectral Cover Art	Grouped sidebar nav

Additional contributed deck and library captures live in assets/screenshots/.

Install

Grab the latest from Releases:

• NewAmp Setup <version>.exe - Windows NSIS installer, registers file associations for 20 audio formats + 4 playlist formats
• NewAmp Portable <version>.exe - Windows single-file portable, no install, no registry writes
• NewAmp Linux <version> x64.tar.gz - Linux portable build. Extract it and run ./newamp
• NewAmp <version> arm64.dmg / NewAmp <version> x64.dmg - macOS disk images (Apple Silicon / Intel). Drag NewAmp to Applications.

All artifacts are listed with SHA256 hashes in SHA256SUMS.txt.

Windows SmartScreen may warn on first launch depending on local trust state. Click "More info" -> "Run anyway", or verify against the checksum file before launching.

macOS Gatekeeper: notarized builds open normally. For an unsigned/dev build, macOS may say the app "cannot be opened" — right-click (or Control-click) NewAmp in Applications, choose Open, then Open again, or run xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine "/Applications/NewAmp.app". Verify against SHA256SUMS.txt first.

First run

1. Open NewAmp.
2. Empty Library view will offer to scan your default Music folder, or pick any folder. NewAmp will also surface one-click music folder suggestions for places it finds in standard locations (Music, OneDrive/Music, etc.).
3. Wait for the initial scan to finish (~10s per thousand tracks for tag + cover-art extraction).
4. Drop a .wsz Winamp 2.x skin file onto the window to install it. Or open Settings → Shell · Layout to switch the chrome shell, or Settings → Skin for the color palette.
5. Open Discover for a Living Library session, or press Ctrl+K anywhere to open the command palette (search anything: tracks, albums, artists, views, commands).

Theming

NewAmp has two independent style axes:

Axis	What it controls	Where to change it
Shell	Layout, sidebar, transport, glass effects	Settings → Shell
Skin	Colors — accent, ink, panel, glow, scanlines, LCD	Settings → Skin
Deck	Compact-window shape (record / jukebox / etc.)	Picker in the deck view

Custom skins:

• Drop a Winamp 2.x .wsz file onto the window — extracted via winamp-skin-import.ts (palette derived from the bitmap)
• Or use the Skin Workshop inside Settings to author and export a .newampskin.json

Audio

• Outputs through Web Audio's AudioContext. On Windows this uses the selected WASAPI device; on Linux it uses the system audio stack exposed to Chromium, typically PipeWire or PulseAudio.
• ReplayGain: tracks parsed for replaygain_track_gain / replaygain_album_gain tags. Per-track or per-album mode selectable.
• Software peak limiter sits in the chain by default and can be toggled with a single preamp dB control.
• Volume slider goes to 200% with a red-zone past unity (+6 dB) — like VLC. The amp runs after the limiter so over-100% boost stays clean.
• 10-band EQ with eqEnabled gate. Custom presets persist via settings.
• Export any track as 16-bit WAV from the Now Playing header.
• DSF and DFF files are accepted through the ffmpeg fallback path and decoded to PCM for Web Audio playback. That is DSD-file compatibility, not native/DoP bit-perfect DSD output. The Windows package includes ffmpeg-static; the Linux portable build falls back to system ffmpeg when the bundled platform binary is not present, so install ffmpeg or set NEWAMP_FFMPEG_PATH for DSD/WMA/AIFF-style fallback formats.

Build from source

Requires Node 20+ on Windows or Linux.

git clone https://github.com/evilander/newamp.git
cd newamp
npm install
npm run dev                  # development with hot reload

Build production artifacts:

npm run package              # produces Windows installer/portable + Linux tar.gz + SHA256SUMS.txt
npm run package:installer    # NSIS only
npm run package:portable     # portable .exe only
npm run package:linux        # Linux portable tar.gz only

Run the full smoke suite (~80 smokes, several minutes):

npm run release:gate:local

Release proof helpers:

npm run release:start-lastfm-proof
npm run release:record-lastfm-proof -- --token=<token> --confirm-live-write
npm run release:check-lastfm-proof
npm run release:start-listening-proof
npm run release:record-listening-proof -- --confirm-playback --confirm-output-switching --confirm-crossfade --confirm-gapless

Keyboard shortcuts

Winamp-style keyboard controls are available anywhere outside text fields:

Shortcut	Action
Space	Play / Pause
← / →	Seek ±5 s
↑ / ↓	Volume ±5% (clamps at 200%)
Ctrl+→ / Ctrl+←	Next / Previous track
L	Love / unlove current track
0–5	Set star rating
F	Fullscreen visualizer
Ctrl+K	Command palette
Ctrl+F	Search
Ctrl+M	Toggle compact deck mode
Esc	Exit fullscreen / close overlay

Architecture

newamp/
  electron/        Main process: IPC, protocols, library store (sql.js), scanner,
                   metadata, music-folder suggestions, ReplayGain, EQ, exports
  shared/          Types, Discover scoring, audio limiter math, keyboard shortcut tables
  src/             Renderer (React + Zustand)
    audio/         Web Audio chain: input → eq → replayGain → limiter → master → analyser
    components/
      decks/       Compact-window skin variants (record player, jukebox, cassette)
      views/       Home, Discover, Library, Albums, Artists, NowPlaying, Playlist, Settings, ...
    store/         Zustand state + engine bridge
    styles/        index.css — 13 skins + 4 shells + magazine Home + Liquid Glass etc.
    lib/           api wrapper, skins, format, mediaSession
  scripts/         96 smoke tests, packaging, release gate, security checks
  build/           App icon, logo, NSIS bits

Stack

• Electron 42 + Vite 6 + React 18 + Zustand 5
• sql.js 1.12 (SQLite compiled to WASM, no native deps)
• music-metadata for tag + ReplayGain extraction
• ffmpeg-static plus system ffmpeg fallback for WAV export and non-native formats
• butterchurn for MilkDrop-style fullscreen visualizer presets
• LRCLIB for synced lyrics (with custom-lyrics override)
• Last.fm (optional, fully offline-queueable)

Privacy

• No telemetry. No analytics. No crash reporters that phone home.
• Library, settings, ratings, bookmarks, and history live in your OS user profile under %APPDATA%/NewAmp on Windows or ~/.config/NewAmp on Linux.
• Last.fm scrobbling is opt-in and uses your own API credentials; tokens are stored hashed in the release proof manifest.
• Synced lyrics fetched from LRCLIB are anonymous lookups by artist + title + duration.

Contributing

Pull requests welcome. Before opening one:

1. npm run smoke:rating && npm run smoke:home && npm run smoke:skin && npm run smoke:audio-limiter && npm run smoke:audio-output — at minimum
2. npx tsc -p tsconfig.json --noEmit && npx tsc -p electron/tsconfig.json --noEmit
3. For UI work, run npm run package and try the produced Windows installer or Linux tarball end-to-end

License

MIT. The "NewAmp" name and logo artwork are project-specific; everything else is yours to fork.

Acknowledgements

NewAmp stands on the shoulders of Winamp (1997–2013), the open-source audio community, and decades of bedroom DJs who refused to give up local files.