2.5 years was far far too long between preview builds & based on some of the more constructive feedback received from that time & with the build finally having gotten to generally good state, a “beta” preview build is now available before a proper preview build is made available next month (October 2023) when the more formal release will occur.

This is because I know there’s going to be issues that haven’t been caught during beta testing so it’s being treated as a beta preview as that’s what people were wanting to get the closed betas before a new preview build so that’s what we’ve got.

The cumulative changelog for everything between 1.0.21.7236 & 1.9.19.16956 (though it’s not everything as that doesn’t account for inter-build issues) can be found here.

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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

For anyone wondering why there’s not been a new WACUP build or updates since the end of January, a number of personal issues have arisen & it’s massively hindered development progress. Things however should return to normal in April (I hope) as there are a number of changes done already along with some waiting to be finished which should resolve some of the long standing complaints against Winamp/WACUP.

-dro

It finally happened and WACUP saw the release of its first public preview build to help start off 2019 to a hopefully brighter tone than 2018 had at times. The availability of the preview build comes almost 3 years since WACUP began and which has seen its ups and downs over that time (which I’ll probably document when the anniversary happens) along with some naysayers that it’d never actually appear but it did.
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Ever since a Winamp v5.8 beta build from October 2016 leaked in mid September 2018 (yes those dates are correct) I’ve kept meaning to do this post to put down my thoughts about it all. Since then, whether it was by an annoyed beta tester (fairly likely), a hacked account (side-effect of the official winamp twitter account being hacked) or as now seems more likely it was intentionally done by people still directly involved with Winamp to test the waters & build some hype (how sad if that was the case), we’ve gotten an announcement about the magical future the Winamp brand is going to have in 2019 along with a slightly newer version of what I kindly called “the leaky build” which is as taken from the “new” winamp,com site, “not an ongoing project” (that’s one way to keep showing contempt to the community).

In the meanwhile I’ve kept chugging along working on WACUP which despite what’s going on with Winamp ‘officially’, I’m not going to be stopping working on it. Some may not think that’s the right decision as we’ve got a bright new future of Winamp coming in 2019 & new ‘official’ beta builds but none of what’s been talked about (as I’ll cover below) is of interest to me nor is it what I want from my Winamp experience. Now I know WACUP is massively behind where I’ve planned for it to be (especially with intended release dates of non-beta builds) but as one person & having IRL stuff to deal with & changing plans based on actual user feedback, development has been taking a lot longer than I’d planned or liked but I’m still putting out beta builds to the registered beta testers & you can view the build changelogs if you’re not one but interested to see what’s been going on (especially after it took almost 10 months between one of the builds but the feedback was it was worth the wait & was progress).

So lets get onto what I want to cover in this blog post. For the tl;dr, as I’m likely going to ramble or you just want the highlights, WACUP development is going to continue whether you like it or not, Winamp v6 in 2019 is going to be a mess with their focus on mobile only (aka highly likely death of the ‘official’ desktop) & the v5.8 beta is not a lot to show for almost 5 years of fooling the community.

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Alas it’s been a while since my last past on here & I apologise but the time I’d otherwise put into doing the weekly blog updates (I’ve kept my development notes so may post them if there’s interest) has ended up going towards updating and answering things via the WACUP Discord server. Anyway, I thought it best to provide a quick update on what’s been going on as well as how may plans have slightly changed. So on with the likely rambling blog post that you expect from me…

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