Winamp 5.5 has all kinds of great new features, but one of my favorite things is the new Bento skin that it includes. It’s not only slick, but also very functional. Pieter over in our forum posted a cool Easter Egg that involves the Bento skin, and I think you’re going to like what you see.
The process of activating the Easter Egg isn’t new, but the result is different than it used to be. Here’s how you activate it:
- Give Winamp’s main window focus.
- Press the following keys: N, U, L, Escape, L, Escape, S, O, F, T.
Pressing the Escape key is necessary because the “Open File” dialog box pops up after pressing the “L” key. Here’s an alternate way to do it:
- Give Winamp’s main window focus.
- Press and hold the Shift and Control keys, then type : N, U, L, L, S, O, F, T.
In older versions of Winamp it would add “IT REALLY WHIPS THE LLAMA’S ASS!” to the title bar of the application (as seen in this screenshot), but if you’re using Winamp 5.5 with the Bento skin you’ll see something a little different. Whenever you play a song the transparency of the skin will “throb” in and out. Here’s what it looked like at one point while playing a song:
It can really make you go crazy after a little while, but it is cool nonetheless. The player will return to normal when you restart the program, so there is no need for you to frantically trying to disable the Easter Egg. 
I was also glad to see that one of my favorite Easter Egg’s still exists in the program. Pull up the Winamp Preferences and go to Input -> Nullsoft Vorbis Decoder and then press the About button at the bottom. Start clicking the little fish as fast as you can with your mouse and see how many RPM’s you can get:
You gotta love Easter Egg’s. 
Oh that was fun. I noticed that it works in other modern skins too. It looks like it throbs to the beat of the playing song. Probably like a visualizer. Cool nonetheless. Any way to make it permanent?
> so there is no need for you to frantically
> trying to disable the Easter Egg.
Just so you know: you can disable it by doing the Nullsoft thing over again.
Winamp 5.5 is great. Although, the interface is kind of sloppy. Not like WMP 11. Wish it could be like that…although, the Trob in and out is very nice!
I hope this program gets cleaned up in time when I get Vista with my new laptop.
One more thing…for my songs without album art cover. Winamp uses other songs’ album covers for the wrong song…for instance. My song “Dreams of an Absolution” dosen’t have an album cover. Winamp dosen’t use the “No Photo” like WMP 11 dose but it uses the “Thnks Fr Th Mmrs” cover.
I was kind of thinking the same thing, but I haven’t seen any mention of making it permanent.
I tried that and it didn’t work for me. Oh well, I think it’s just as easy to restart the player.
Microsoft did do a really nice job with Windows Media Player 11, but I also think Winamp’s new Bentoo skin is really nice.
I found something cool. Play a song. Go to the visualations tab. Then right click on the visual. Then selet “desktop mode”. This will have the visual right on your desktop. I think someone knew this already but thought I just might point that out.
That easter egg is ever since modern skins were introduced.
Wow, I love it ! ^^ (for now at least…)
Note that (on my computer) it only worked when the Winamp window was NOT maximized. If it was, the window simply disappeared (even if I maximized it after activating the easter egg) and I had to right click on the windows taskbar to close and restart Winamp.
I also like the new bento skin and I completely switched to it, but there one thing I don’t like about it. There’s no visual indication about where the focus is (main panel, media library, playlist… ?) and you can’t keep the focus always on the playlist. With previous skins, you could always use Ctrl-Tab to switch between the different parts of the window, which is useful because there are different shortcuts for each parts, and sometimes the same shortcut has different effects in different panels (e.g. Ctrl-A means “always on top” in the main panel, but it means “select all” in the playlist).
With the bento skin, there’s no shortcut (that I know of) to switch between the different panels, and if you switch to another window then come back to Winamp, the focus always returns to the main panel, which I find a bit annoying, since I mainly use shortcuts related to the playlist. So I have to click on the playlist to give it focus again and use these shortcuts (for instance : “Up/Down arrow” to navigate, “Del” to remove selected entry, “Ctrl-Shift-1/2/3″ to sort the playlist, “Shift-Del” to remove duplicates, “Space” to bring currently playing item into view, “Insert” to add a directory to the playlist, “Ctrl-A” to select all entries, and so on).
That bothered me at first as well, but I’ve grown accustomed to the way the new skin works. They should still add some sort of indication to the Bento skin that lets users know which panel is selected.