Week 29

Another week, another slightly delayed posting (oh the joys of being family IT support) so without any more messing around, lets get on with this week’s update :)


As we saw last week, there were a few standalone plug-in updates released (Waveform Seeker, Big Clock, Not So YASAPI) which for the most part have worked as expected or achieved their aim to detect any issues as with the case of the beta release. So with the feedback received, I’ve either triaged the issue at the time or have queued up for later on looking into providing a fix.


One thing that I’ve not been as good at as I should be is related to the tracking of reported issues and being able to reply to all of them in a timely manner. Due to this I’ve been trying to work through and respond to anything that needed more technical investigation (which has now been done for the most part, with a few bits left to sort out in the coming week).

So as a result of this, I’m now trying to adjust how I do this and having had a generally pleasant experience with it before, I’m trying to use trello to see if that will help me out on this matter.


The next thing has been creating a new plug-in which is a combination of the existing global hotkey plug-ins I’ve previously provided which I’m calling ‘Global Hotkeys Extra’.

This stemmed from an email I’d received relating to mute functionality and it reminded me that I needed to resurrect the mute hotkey plug-in. In the process of doing that, I thought it’d just be simpler to rather than doing the same for the other global hotkey plug-ins I might as well look at combining them all into one as that makes for less code overall (not having to duplicate plug-in frameworks) and less overhead when loaded and running.

So the following is the list of global hotkeys which make up this plug-in:

  • EQ: Toggle equaliser on / off
  • EQ: Toggle equaliser auto-loading
  • EQ: Increase / Decrease Preamp
  • EQ: Increase / Decrease band 1
  • EQ: Increase / Decrease band 2
  • EQ: Increase / Decrease band 3
  • EQ: Increase / Decrease band 4
  • EQ: Increase / Decrease band 5
  • EQ: Increase / Decrease band 6
  • EQ: Increase / Decrease band 7
  • EQ: Increase / Decrease band 8
  • EQ: Increase / Decrease band 9
  • EQ: Increase / Decrease band 10
  • Playback: Clear current playlist
  • Playback: Lower volume to 10%%
  • Playback: Lower volume to custom level
  • Playback: Mute
  • Playback: Play random song
  • Playback: Play selected song
  • Playback: Randomise playlist

If there’s suggestions about other single action global hotkeys which should be considered (and which are not already provided natively or via any of my other plug-ins) then let me know and as long as it’s viable then I can look into adding it in.


On a more technical side, I’d mentioned last week about how I was adding in the ability to better deal with empty strings and trying to fix crash issues that could occur. There was a side-effect of this fix which took me a while to find and that caused the visualisation preferences page to not load.

After a bit of investigation into what was actually going on, it turns out there’s a bug in Winamp in how the visualisation preferences page looks for viable visualisation plug-ins which my changes managed to trigger.

With a bit more work I’ve now managed to fix the issue which allows for the empty string crash fix to remain whilst also fixing the Winamp visualisation preference page bug which based on the patch I’ve had to make for this, seems to indicate that this is in fact a long standing Winamp bug.


The final thing came about from trying to look into a weird crash issue related to GIF image files and which has led me to create my own gif.w5s component for GIF read / write handling which makes use of the current giflib to help fix the crash issue I was investigating.

Related to this and to help aid in testing that the GIF reading was correct, I’ve tweaked my internal build of the Album Art Viewer plug-in so that it will show images that are in the playlist editor instead of just working with the artwork from media files. For most this is not something that is going to make any difference to most people’s normal Winamp usage and is mainly to help me with debugging but it might help someone out there.

I am somewhat tempted to look into doing this as a standalone release of the plug-in, otherwise it’ll appear when WACUP arrives.


So that’s this update of what’s been going on over the last week which is not the most seemingly productive of weeks but it’s helped clear out some low hanging fruit that needed to be dealt with and hopefully makes things easier for me in the long run. Here’s a general summary of what was talked about:

  • Working on and improving issue tracking for the future
  • Resurrected and combined my global hotkey plug-ins into one plug-in
  • Added standalone image viewing support to the Album Art Viewer pug-in
  • Replaced gif.w5s to use latest giflib to help resolve a crash issue
  • Found and fixed a long standing Winamp visualisation preference page crash

-dro