The user picks a photograph from their own library and it becomes the interface. One image runs behind all three panels and the panels are cut-outs onto it — the structure a continuous-image Winamp skin uses. The rails stay; the picture ignores them. Every control carries its own legibility treatment rather than relying on a band behind the text — because the app cannot know what photograph is coming. That is the whole constraint: the interface has to stay readable over an image it has never seen.
Drag these and the phone above updates. ★ This is the product idea, not a mock of it — the user tunes their own photograph until the controls read.
Three functions, three plates, nothing hidden behind a menu. A reader who has never used Winamp should not have to infer them:
Playlist — what you could play. Scrolls, shows track, title and length, with the current row lit. ADD / REM / SEL ALL / MISC / LOAD manage the queue.
Player — what is playing. Title and track position, the seek bar, the transport, and the level meter beneath it. The only plate the photograph reaches, because it is the one about the music rather than about managing it.
Equalizer — how it sounds. Ten bands you drag, a preamp readout, ON / AUTO / PRESETS / RESET — and the lock.
The meter on the phone above is live — watch the white caps. Bars attack fast and release slow; each cap holds at the maximum, then falls. That hold is the whole reason a level meter reads as an instrument rather than as decoration, and it is the one thing a screenshot can never show.
⛔ Simulated. There is no audio on this
page. What is being proved is the behavior and the color ramp — lime through
yellow to red, pinned to the
meter’s height rather than to each bar, so a tall band reddens at its tip and a short one
never does. Respects prefers-reduced-motion.
Set once, then left alone. An EQ is a listening preference, not a control you ride — so it is disengaged by default and the panel will not respond to a drag until you say so. ★ It occupies the most reachable band on the screen precisely because of that: the strip your thumb crosses most often is the one that has to be inert.
Shown at actual size — 21 px. The frame is drawn and the ground is not: the photograph runs through the button, the same way it runs through the transport.
Chris's Behringer UMC404HD — filed at reference/umc404hd-edge-reference.jpg.
What makes it read as hardware is not a subtle bevel: it is a bright metal rail running
the whole way around the faceplate, continuous on all four sides, framing a dark recessed
panel. Proof 06 had a gradient. This has a rail. ★ And flint #D8E0DE was
already the palette's silver-gray, so the rail is the brand's own metal, not a new color.
Three functions, three plates, no sheets and nothing hidden. Each carries its own header strip with a title, an LED and a live readout — the same job Winamp's title bars do.
Zero border-radius anywhere in the interface. The plates meet on a 1px edge. The only curve is the phone's screen clipping the corners, which is the device's, not the design's.
Winamp runs player, EQ, playlist top to bottom. This runs playlist, player, EQ — inverted, because on a phone the lowest third is the reachable third. Browsing goes up top where a scroll gesture works from anywhere; the things you press go down.
Scrolling playlist with ADD / REM / SEL ALL / MISC / LOAD — the five buttons restored,
after proof 05 dropped two of them on my own judgment. Movable EQ with all ten bands, ON, AUTO,
PRESETS, RESET and a preamp readout. Transport with shuffle and repeat behind the
···, its dot showing a mode is live.
It reaches only the player plate — the one about what is playing. The playlist and equalizer are working surfaces and stay solid. The picture is not wallpaper; it is the now-playing ground, and it desaturates under the controls so white stays legible over any image.
.eq-act, which costs a fifth cell at ~76px — trading one small target for five slightly smaller ones. Unresolved.