Some weeks you just cannot tell if you’ve been productive or not and as i’m starting to write this I have to say it doesn’t feel like I have but lets see how things fared.
One main theme has been helping out on additional testing for the Winamp Backup Tool (if you can spare the time to help out and test the beta releases then i’m sure that koopa will be most grateful) as well as sorting out an NSIS plug-in that helps to correctly identify true running Winamp instances (which is also helpful for fixing a few things with the WACUP loader program when needing to pass on requests to the currently running Winamp instance (so work on one is beneficial to the other).
Then there has also begun the work to resurrect two plug-ins to make them more compatible with the most recent Winamp release.
The first is ‘playlist file remover’ (aka plfr) which is one of my original ‘big’ plug-ins from my first few years of active Winamp plug-in development. This plug-in is a means to prevent duplicate playback of songs in the playlist by removing them from the main playlist once played amongst a whole range of other functionality that it offers (e.g. physically removing files once played, reloading a specific playlist once all items have been removed, etc).
This was a popular plug-in at the time but its been almost 10 years since the last official 2.2.2 release (as the 2.5 and 3.0 beta releases didn’t work too well it seems). So I’ve been going back over the last attempt I made to work on a new release for this plug-in (which dates to mid-2010) and am working through it to fix anything that I’m finding is broken with it as well as looking at tighter integration with newer Winamp features (like accessing the media library playlists) and updating to work with a newer shared code base.
The second is looking into updating the even older plug-in muchfx DSP stacker which allows for multiple DSP plug-ins to be used at the same time. This has come about from my Enhancer wrapper crashing when used with it which is due to muchfx not supporting the DSP api changes that were introduced almost 9 years ago with the Winamp 5.5 release as part of the localisation improvements.
Ironically this is something I found I’d also considered doing back in 2004 to update it to make it compatible with modern skins (as it is hard-coded to a Winamp 2.x style of window as shown below) but never did it for some reason.
So in the coming week I’m hoping to get that finished off to have a Winamp 5.666 compatible version that will work correctly work with modern skins and other classic skins that have been updated to support generic skinned windows (as the old version requires a re-compile and specific skin files to be created for it to be skinned like the current skin).
Another thing that I probably could have mentioned in last week’s update but didn’t as it was just on the cusp and I was waiting on some feedback, was the creation of the Ignorant Output plug-in (which is a play on words to create it’s name). I’ve still some more testing to do and feedback to obtain before I release this as a standalone plug-in but so far it’s looking like it behaves.
This acts as a null output by ignoring the audio data provided by Winamp to be sent to the output. This can be useful when used with headerless / streaming setups where the audio data does not need to be or cannot be heard (e.g. no soundcard).
I know there are ones that already exist (including an official Nullsoft one from the late 1990’s) out there but have heard reports of thsee older ones not working nicely in some cases which I’m hoping will not be the case with the option I’m going to provide.
The only other thing comes back to the work on the Winamp backup tool with the addition of a /FIND command-line action which equates to the functionality present in the NSIS plug-in to report the running Winamp instances.
So now I’ve written this, I think it was a reasonably productive week. Let’s see what the next week brings :o)
-dro