One of the first truly amazing MP3 players has been brought to life outside the computer screen. The design of Linamp, a real-life incarnation of Winamp, combines the classic UI with even more nostalgia—it has the retro appearance of mini-rack home audio systems from the 1980s.
The Linamp system is powered by a Raspberry Pi 4B with a 32GB SD card. It utilizes a 7.9-inch extra-wide touchscreen to display the classic Winamp UI, including the spectrum analyzer visualization we loved so much and the scrolling artist and title information of the track playing. Rodmg, a software engineer by trade and maker by hobby, designed and built the whole project.
The display is driven by Dietpi, a Debian bookworm derivative, with a custom Qt 6 app written in C++ with Qt widgets. The maker said he chose to program it that way because he “wanted a challenge and to learn new things.” While developing the custom app, he had to re-implement deprecated functionality to run the audio visualization on the display.
Rodmg designed the case to be built in sheet metal to bring Winamp to life as a physical object. His inspiration was an Aiwa stereo he grew up with and still owned. Rodmg disassembled the Aiwa radio, took pictures and measurements, and then used those as inspiration for his design and dimensions.
Manufacturing with sheet metal isn’t exactly garage hobby work, so he sent his Onshape designs to PCBWay for production. At the suggestion of a PCBWay support engineer, he had the parts manufactured using 1mm anodized aluminum.
He also ordered a version of his front cover, 3D printed in nylon. At the time, he didn’t have a 3D printer good enough to print the part himself, but he wanted to experiment with the technology.
Ultimately, Rodmg redesigned the front bezel and used a Bambu Labs P1S to 3D print the piece in multiple colors. While he originally planned to incorporate physical buttons for playback control, the absence of any small, extra wide screens made this impractical. So, he incorporated the buttons in the custom UI and has them displayed on the 7.9-inch touchscreen.
As amazing as the front panel looks, Rodmg didn’t ignore the retro aesthetics on the rear of his custom “stereo.” He designed a back panel and 3D printed it in PETG. Here, he placed a very retro-looking metal power button along with the 3.5mm stereo jack, an Ethernet port, a USB-A port, and a USB-C port.
The Linamp music player can play music from its file system and from a connected external CD drive. It displays a real-time bar spectrum analyzer and track information. It even works for playing music from CDs, pulling the information from MusicBrainz.
In the future, Rodmg wants to add Bluetooth and Spotify playback to complement everything else his custom build can already do.
