I’m hoping this being a day late in actual posting is ok based on the things that will be covered in this update. So without messing around and in no particular order lets get on with this week’s update :)

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The first thing was something that had been running around my head for a while due to Pete (from Winamp Enthusiasts) enthusing about the NxS Big Clock plug-in which he’s been using for quite some time. It’s a small plug-in which provides a time display window with a number of modes from the current elapsed time to the time of day in a large font which makes it easy to see (e.g. when DJing).

However the plug-in is quite old and it doesn’t work too well with most Winamp 5.x releases (*) or Windows (unless you’ve changed folder permissions on the Winamp program folder). To me this is the sort of thing that absolutely needs to be fixed (running Winamp as an administrator or disabling UAC or changing folder permissions is not an acceptable fix) and as the source code (GPLv2 licensed) was available (which I hadn’t realised despite remembering when the plug-in was first created) I thought it was time to fix it.

So I’m happy to announce the availability of an updated release of the Big Clock plug-in which is based on the v0.5 update by Sebastian Pipping which itself was a modified version of the original plug-in. If you’ve used the plug-in before, then the changelog might be off interest as even small plug-ins can end up needing a fair bit of work to update them.

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The next thing is something I’ve already talked about a few weeks ago and related to providing a WASAPI audio output plug-in which I had hoped to be able to make use of the existing YASAPI plug-in since I’d heard good things about it from those using it and with it being open source (GPLv3 licensed) I’d naively assumed that patches to help improve Winamp integration would be welcome (which turns out is not the case and which I’m still saddened by).

Having been contacted by a few users of the plug-in, I’ve since made a decision about what I want to do regarding the plug-in and so I’ve now made available a beta release of modified version of the plug-in as Not So YASAPI which is based on YASAPI v1.7.25 (at the time of posting).

I’ve marked it as a beta release as having made some changes as well as using a different compiler to what the official builds are built by, there might be some small issues that I’ve missed. So if you have any issues or suggestions with this modified beta release of the plug-in, do not make any attempt to report them to the original author (as per his very direct and clear instructions on the matter) and report them instead to me

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There was a small but of work done on the Waveform Seeker plug-in to look into an issue with it crashing if the playlist is empty on start-up (the fix is yet to be released) and an odd crash report that I’ve still to complete looking into.

With the crash on start-up issue, that turned out to be an issue in the native MP3 decoder plug-in (in_mp3.dll) not correctly handling an empty string which under normal behaviour isn’t an issue as parts of Winamp do the checking needed to prevent the cause of the crash issue.

But as this plug-in doesn’t follow that (it’s a bit like a mini-Winamp within Winamp) it meant the issue could be triggered. Now this is a simple fix within the plug-in itself but shouldn’t Winamp itself be better handling such problems I thought. Well yes and for the most a fair bit of work was done with the last AOL releases of Winamp to better prevent and fix such crash issues.

Thankfully the nature of the crash showed up exactly what was going on and even better is that it’s something which can be patched to include the extra validation check which is needed without having to touch Winamp’s own source code (who needs that anyway, heh). Additionally it’s something which can be applied to the native Winamp plug-ins so once again by breaking something, I’ve managed to add better handling to more globally fix an issue :)

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The next thing is a bit random and as of the time of posting will be left as a bit of a mini-research project. I’d received a question asking about stuttering issues with the main window visualisation display when playing FLAC audio files with the native FLAC input plug-in (which took me a while to finally be able to actually notice).

Knowing that the source code for it isn’t available but the predecessor of it (as from the original FLAC authors as well as a 5.x updated release to add library / metadata support) I thought I’d quickly try and get that working and see if that would also show the issue or not. It turns out it does and that’s about as far as I’ve gotten into looking into the issue.

One of the steps that was used to aid in seeing the issue was to play a 151Hz sine wave (as per screenshot above). Whilst doing this I thought it’d be helpful if I could have a quick way to generate a different tone and I’d remembered was an old SDK example which could do that.

But once I got that SDK example running and cleaned up a bit to be happier with 5.666, I then thought why not add some extra modes to it (as well as see if I could make sense off enough things to do actual audio generation which I’ve not done for a very very long time). So I got a little bit carried away and in a few other modes which are:

Tone generator: sine wave, square wave, sawtooth wave & triangle wave
Noise generator: white noise, brown noise, pink noise

What use this plug-in will have I don’t know (assuming I end up releasing it), but as a means to try to get my mind back around audio generation and a few other things when it comes to input plug-in and audio processing, it was handy to go down this rabbit hole for a bit.

If I do continue working on it to make it releasable, I’d need to finish off a sweep (or chirp) mode (so it changes the frequency from one value to another over a specified time as well as adding the means to control how long the output runs for (since it just keeps playing until manually stopped at the moment).

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Related to the tone aspect, one thing I do remember when I was involved with SHOUTcast was that some streaming systems introduce tones into their output, so maybe with the above possible work on this plug-in and better interaction with the normal playback, either a simple short tone in the playlist or a tone overlay could be accomplished.

As I know that there are other streaming solutions to using Winamp but there’s a lot of people who get on with it better than dedicated broadcasting / automation tools (e.g. those who cannot or are not able to deal with installing dedicated database solutions to get a program just running or who just run off a single randomised playlist and that’s all they need). But that’s a whole tangent that I doubt many are interested in if you’re here mainly for Winamp related updates :)

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The final notable thing is small follow-up on a point covered last week relating to HTTPS, podcasts and streams. From a bit more testing, it appears that some HTTPS urls will work but the majority of what I’ve been testing (e.g. this) don’t with it seemingly depending on the SSL implementation being interacted with.

This isn’t too much of a surprise as changes over the last few years have attempted to make SSL more secure and so not all implementations are equal or they silently fail and force you down to a non-SSL connection.

The end result of this is that for the podcasts handling, I’ve already got a work around (forcing it to use the non-SSL HTTP only url) and if I want to just allow HTTPS urls to work, I’ll be looking for my podcasts replacement to eventually use a libcurl based solution instead of relying on jnetlib. Though I won’t be doing this for the time being and will likely do a bit more research to come up with a solution that will allow HTTPS to work for anything that gets thrown at Winamp (which is better for the long-term).

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So that’s this update of what’s been going on over the last week which hopefully seems a bit more productive than some as there’s actual binaries to play with. Here’s a general summary of what was talked about:

• Modified Big Clock plug-in released
• Modified Not So YASAPI Output plug-in beta released
• Improving Winamp stability in-general via small patches
• Messing about with FLAC input plug-ins
• Some tone and noise generator research
• SSL support is hit and miss, more to do about it later

-dro

(*) But it works for me I hear. Yes for the most part it loads ok but weird menu issues depending on the skin being used, not following the Winamp settings folder, odd display glitches and so on once you start looking at things properly shows that it’s more limping along rather than it really working ok.