WACUP (which can be pronounced as wakeup or wac-up or however you prefer it in your native tongue) is my vision of what a media player should be whilst still being compatible with the plug-ins for some of the most popular media players that you are used to. My plan is to include bug fixes, updates of existing features & most importantly new features with the goal to eventually become its own highly compatible media player.
WACUP is heavily based around a plug-in system making it simple to tailor you WACUP install to be what you want it to be. When its finally out of being a preview build an SDK will eventually be offered so new plug-ins can then be made to add additional features.
WACUP is still under development with a functioning preview build that can be downloaded here. As this is pre-release software there can be issues which can be reported in the preview discussion forum. We recommend installing this WACUP Preview build into it's own separate directory from your existing software install until it is feature complete.
The latest beta build which is limited access to only the registered beta testers is build #20202 (September 28 2024). This is not ready for a wider audience & is intentionally limited to avoid causing issues for those that just don't pay attention & support headaches for myself.
Yes WACUP is free to download & to use.
As an independent project & due to the amount of time & effort which is involved, I am accepting donations (and other means of support) to help cover my living costs whilst I'm working on getting this developed & released. As at this time, this is a full-time project for me whilst I see where the future will take me & this project.
There are additional methods for helping to support this project be it financially or otherwise.
It is however not being done as an open source project & there are other options out there if that's something you need your software to be. It does rely on open source libraries & a number of modified plug-ins for which their changes are being provided to comply with their code licensing requirements.
Ultimately I don't want to spend the time to run a properly done open source project when there's no guarantee of any assistance vs the overhead involved & my time management isn't great so spending more time on project management isn't imho a good use of my time.
I also hold to the view that source code without at least 1 developer is pointless & implies a dead / abandoned project. I do appreciate that it does allow for taking things on if it's then entered into such a state without any developer(s) attached as I've done with some of the plug-ins which has benefited WACUP. So whilst I'm in a position to keep making WACUP I don't intend on open sourcing all of it & view doing that as the end of my time developing it.
Note: Beta builds are intentionally not made publicly available to download & that's the purpose of providing a preview build which will often be an older beta build that is ok for a wider audience to use & where it's issues are known about unlike a new beta build which can be super buggy at times!
The intention of becoming a WACUP beta tester is to help ensure WACUP is ready for a wider audience as part of the preview & eventual non-preview releases. As such being accepted as a beta tester is not guaranteed due to being a single developer & needing to manage the size of the group so it's not too much.
Beta testing also means that you're going to be experiencing broken builds & other annoyances so only if you're ok with such things should you even consider making the request to be a beta tester. If this is just a case of FOMO or thinking it's something magical then being a WACUP beta tester is not for you.
To be considered for helping test the beta releases, please create an account on the community forum & send a PM to 'dro' along with any information you think is helpful.
Please Note: Requests to be a beta tester are not guaranteed to be accepted & not following instructions will very likely cause the request to be dismissed. If you can't follow instructions beforehand then how can you be expected to do so if given access & when being asked for information &/or to follow additional steps to resolve issues - it's all to help me & I've had too many waste my time already so I will be keeping things limited & is why the Preview build exists.
Development of WACUP can be followed via my (typically) weekly blog updates as well as with any other blog posts that are made.
There are also the build specific changelogs which are freely provided for all to see what has changed in the beta & public releases.
Additionally there is a development changelog that is being updated when features / fixes are completed & is provided as a means to see what is going to present in the next (or rather first) non-beta release.
It's not hard to get in contact in some form :)
There's email (for things that aren't needing a speedy reply). I'm also on Twitter along with the Facebook / Reddit pages & a Discord server for those into that sort of thing. You can also get involved at the forum or leave comments on the blog (as long as you're not a spammer!
So there's a plethora of ways to keep up-to-date on things from me as well as to get in contact if you want to :)
This is a sister site of winampplugins.co.uk (previously nunzioweb.com/daz / daz.ne1.net) which albeit a bit broken & needing some updating shows off a lot of the plug-ins that I created & worked on over the years going all the way back to 2003.
I have over 21 years experience making Winamp plug-ins as well as having worked on Winamp natively on / off since 2007 until the last AOL release. I'm now hoping to do some of the things I used to do for Winamp to try to get back the feeling of fun from getting new build updates that's sadly missing from a lot of software nowadays (aka coding without the corporate BS). I also worked on SHOUTcast from late 2010 until mid-September 2015.
The site icon & header logo you can see at the top of this page (along with others that will be used when WACUP is released) was very kindly made by Victhor. He's also made / updated a number of skins so please do check out his other work.