Week 5 has been (yet again) a continuation of what I’d been doing in the previous week and primarily looking at a replacement for the existing library database engine. Some of what I’ve been trying out hasn’t worked out as was hoped and there were some stability issues that took a lot longer than I’d have liked to get resolved.

So at the moment I’ve now gotten to a stage where my replacement library engine works (other than the library query editor is broken) and it’s performance isn’t as good as the native solution but it works (yay). And when I say performance isn’t as good, it’s around 10-20% on like for like views and comparisons to the original library engine which in reality isn’t all that noticeable in usage, being at most half a second in the worst case.

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Both excessive memory usage and feature bloat is something that has been attributed to Winamp a lot over the years from those that either prefer Winamp 2.x or prefer other players. It’s been more of an issue since Winamp 5.x came out such as due to the shift from the simple classic skin to the modern skins as the default skin on installation or from new features being added over the years (often from user requests I’ll note).

Due to both of these factors, Winamp has sadly lost in many people’s views the lightweight nature that was associated with it during it’s early days until the later 2.x releases. Though once the media library (which was often requested) appeared in v2.9x then things started to change in perceptions and is why it was started to be seen those who will never use anything beyond v2.81 and to an extent the v2.9x releases due to Winamp suddenly using a lot more memory and becoming bloated in their opinion.

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Week 4 has been a continuation of what I’d been doing in the previous week and primarily looking at a replacement for the existing library database engine. Well I’ve now got code running which can effectively act as a replacement (being based off a massively old copy of the NDE source code) and I’m now looking into some alternative options for how to get it to use less memory along with a few other changes to how it works whilst trying to keep it compatible.

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It’s always something that I’ve been dubious about in the over reliance upon the number of downloads of software as a way to say that that is the number of active users of that software. Sure an increased number of downloads of a specific version can imply a potential overall increased usage of the software but is it really going to a 1:1 mapping between downloads and active users….?

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It’s now the end of week 3 and despite doing a number of things I’ve probably not got as much to really show for it as I’d have liked. As research into doing a few things Winamp based that I’ve been approached about have taken up most of my time due to experimenting and figuring out how to possibly do things.

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It’s now the end of week 2 and it’s been both interesting and frustrating with what I’ve been working on. The main thing that has been achieved is the creation of a loader program. This will be loaded before Winamp itself and to begin with it allows for adding extra command-line functionality over what is already documented via winamp.exe /? e.g. being able to run a library query from the command-line and saving it directly to a file.

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