Anyone following me on social media today (afternoon of the 24th December as I started writing this post) will have seen that I’ve gone through and posted the weekly updates from the last 2 months which I’d not done at the time.

The lack of the weekly updates at the time was due to me being more focused on coding towards the next beta build (#1988 and what is to eventually come) than doing the other things that also have to be done like weekly updates (thankfully I keep my local notes as I go).

So without wasting anymore time and as we’re finally back on schedule for the posting, I wish you a happy holidays and onto the updates that you’re here for :)

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The following things were worked on (in no particular order as taken from my internal development progress changelog):

• Replaced all of the plug-in management preference pages with a WACUP managed version
  - Due to determining the memory locations and details of plug-in handling data structures, it’s now possible to not have to re-process those preference pages on loading to apply the origin icons and other aspects done to better understand the plug-ins being used
  - For pages with a config and about action, holding shift when double-clicking will now open the about dialog instead of the config dialog
  - Removed the ‘get plug-ins’ links on these preference pages as there’s not much point to them nowadays…

• Changed the visualisation preference page to only look for vis_*.dll instead of looking at every dll within the plug-ins folder (excluding the other known plug-in types)
  - This makes the loading of the preference page much faster and makes the plug-ins easier to manage (who even uses visualisation plug-ins that aren’t named as vis_*.dll ?)

• Begun expanding my ML Exporter plug-in to replace the native import / export plug-in (ml_impex.dll)
  - Started on exporting (as the plug-in already does that) with a JSON based library database file format instead of trying to re-create the iTunes library xml format
  - Importing when implemented will support the new JSON format as well as the iTunes library xml format (already used for playlist importing) for compatibility with what was already possible
  - There is an api that ml_impex provides for the local library plug-in (ml_local.dll) to use but it will not be re-implemented in ML Exporter as I plan on doing importing a bit differently when ml_local is eventually re-implemented

• Fixed ML Exporter sometimes incorrectly showing the local library export cannot be done in the menus
  

• Fixed a memory / string handling issue in ML Exporter that caused some CSV export actions to fail
  

• Removed the Gracenote related fields in the CSV reports from ML Exporter
  

• Updated opusfile and libnghttp2 to 0.10 (14 Nov 2017) and 1.29.0 (19 Nov 2017) respectively

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That’s it for this week’s update post which was aimed at trying to achieve something whilst trying to resolve some of the remaining issues from the prior week and the live vs installer patching changes. Additionally it can be seen that a new beta build didn’t arrive before the holidays and is now intended for early in the new year (as rushing to fix some of the issues somewhat made things worse & I need to finish migrating to the new development PC).

Until next week, happy Winamping and enjoy the holidays however you like to do so!

-dro