Had been aiming for something to be publicly released for WACUP in time to acknowledge Winamp’s 25th anniversary & my transition away from being a Winamp user but coding often doesn’t go to plan nor am I really feeling it considering what the new “winamp” now is representing.

The Winamp legacy is definitely a mixed bag from all of the creative people who ended up in jobs that otherwise wouldn’t have happened from their early steps in making skins (& yes they often were awful / awkwardly done) whilst becoming a nostalgic thing or even a joke for many.

There’s also all of the other media players that were influenced by what Winamp & the general mixing of ideas about software at the time including the countless XMMS based forks on linux as well as the actions that led to foobar2000 being created & similarly WACUP being created.

In a world that is now heavily based on streaming & ease of consumption of media its fair to say the Winamp way doesn’t make sense for the majority.
It had it’s time & for those still using it (or its clones) there’s a reason why they still do & that comes down to having choice.

Sadly the legacy of what Winamp now represents has been badly tarnished & the biggest issue from that imho is it destroys all the work & effort that so many of it’s community of users put in to making skins, plug-ins & other related content to make it more than it’s base program.

Whatever may happen & however you may now view Winamp, the old versions will keep going for however long to come, some of the community of Winamp users are still making & updating things & there’s numerous clones (yes including WACUP) to keep that classic Winamp experience alive.

Winamp has brought me a number of highs & lows over my ~23 years of using it, making plug-ins for it & when having gotten to work on it. I however count myself now as one of the many an ex-Winamp user as my needs change & #WACUP now fits those needs which new “winamp” will never.

So with that I’m now off back to my coding hole & acknowledge what one small(ish) piece of software came to represent for so many from both the good & the bad as well as what it ended up spawning in so many numerous ways that will always be much greater than the sum of its parts.

-dro

The tl;dr is it’s unhelpful & isn’t something that WACUP can make use of due to it having been leaked (even if it’s an older revision from the AOL era) & isn’t something I’m going to download & use as I’ll explain later.

The key part of the Winamp source code that I’ve always wanted to see officially released since starting WACUP was the modern skin engine (gen_ff.dll - which is Winamp3 in the form of a plug-in) & that seems to be in there. However due to the messiness of code ownership & my prior history with Winamp & the current owners (less about them the better), making a derivative from what’s leaked would open up myself to potential legal issues.

Now for the rambling thoughts & commentary about this happening…

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As some of you may have noticed at the start of this week the WACUP site was a bit more unstable than normal & then it changed to only showing ‘no input file specified’ when trying to access it. This failure happened around the time that the hosting provider that was being used was doing some maintenance work along with trying to resolve an ftp issue which I’d also been experiencing.

So after waiting for the maintenance window to close & assuming things might come back, nothing changed. Additionally there was nothing showing via the site FTP which is obviously a massive concern so a ticket gets raised & all I’ve had back to that ticket is “Within the next three days you can expect to be contacted by the developer assigned to your case. They will keep you informed of progress through updates to your ticket, which you can view via your Control Panel.”.

Not only is the wording odd (an assigned developer?) it’s just not an acceptable timescale especially if as it’s worded is just to get to the initial contact. As nothing had happened after a full days outage it was the final straw for me with fasthosts & I began the process of moving the site (honestly something I should’ve done 2 years ago but life & death got in the way & things had seemed to improve).

As of this update, everything obvious has been moved & is working. There’s a few small things that aren’t user facing which still need to resolved along with some of the cloudflare related handling I’d been using until now.

Overall it’s taken around 13 hours of work (there was a sleep break once the downloads were working) to move everything & so far it’s only 3 blog posts & their comments that I didn’t have working backups for (those posts have been restored using the internet archive copy).

On a more positive note, the past few months have been quite good for WACUP adoption & notice in the wider internet which has been nice to see :)

-dro

Thanks to the support I’ve gotten for doing WACUP, I finally entered the world of high-dpi monitors with a 27” 4K monitor (specifically the LG 27UL650). After feeling like I’d nearly blinded myself when I first turned it on this week (damn these things are bright & I don’t want to know what a higher spec HDR monitor is like) I loaded up WACUP to see how well it worked and …

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If you’ve only been following the blog updates then it looks like I’ve not done much since the last update in April 2019 but that’s not the case with 14 beta builds (some of which where quite substantial!) & half of those also being released as preview builds between late August & mid-October.

Things have slowed down a bit on builds since mid-October due to some of the work that’s been going on to replace more of Winamp for WACUP provided features which has been somewhat of a rabbit hole (e.g. file association & some video related aspects).

However the delay should be worth it plus it’s given me time to make more sense of the automatically uploaded crash reports that now get provided (which has been enabled since preview build 1.0.8.4312 & has slowed down development in monitoring & resolving them but it’s worth it for longer term stability improvements).

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As I’m currently doing a bit of site related maintenance which some might have already noticed from the slight colour scheme change last week, I’ve just updated the software used for the blog I thought it best to post something to help check it still works (you never know with updates ;) ). The community forum will also hopefully receive some updates before the end of the month along with a possible theme restyle to fit in with the newer colour scheme.

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