Howto create winamp skin

Don't use a 'skin tool' it will teach you nothing about skinning WinAMP.
All you need is an 'OK' painting proggy and notepad to edit a bit of text.
Use another's simple looking skin, open the bmps and 'play' with them, adding new colour parts and observe the results...that will show you exactly what bits do what.
This is the method most people use to get to grips with the skin system.

If you do one this way, be certain that you have altered all of the bmps so it no longer resembles the original skin you started with....if you wish to upload it for others...

And for heavens sake read some of the winamp skinning tutorials that are out there. Otherwise you'll be confused and ripping your hair out for days. It's got a couple of idiosyncrasies where sections are off by x pixels, share a pixel from another section, etc. If you're aware of that from the start, you'll save yourself a lot of time.

Xymantix: Could you please post a link to what *you* believe is the best tutorial? I've always been intimidated by the thought of skinning winamp, but I want to try it.

Thanks,
w

I don't know if I saved the link that I used the last time or not. At any rate, check out http://www.deviantart.com/deviation.php?id=552633. They put a lot of work into this as it's 61 pages long and even has templates. I usually see how they cover the shared line in the titlebar.bmp, the maximize/close buttons in the pledit, etc. in order to see if they've listed all of the gotchas.

Thank you for the link!! Will give it a try now.