Added to the Appearance preference page an option to control if the OS text scaling might be used for effectively padding the skinned buttons to reduce their size
Changed the NotSoDirect preference handling to try to resolve a crash seen due to a weirdness with the install trying to access the OSes copy of dsound.dll
Changed how the Streaming Source plug-in works to resolve compatibility problems seen where the rate of the data that different v2 DNAS can consume from it
Changed how artwork changes (mainly for manually setting one for streams) are reported to better ensure modern skins will live update (this is still not complete due to how gen_ff does it's fake asynchronous artwork handling which can still require the the Alt+3/File Info dialog to be fully closed before the update will then be triggered by the OS)
Changed how the process's skinned scrollbar hooking is done in an attempt to try to resolve an on-going issue with it vs opening the preference window (this has mainly been affecting the x64 build but it's not consistent as most will never see this problem so this change may still not resolve this problem but it's a best attempt until I can somehow replicate it)
Changed the Win7Shell configuration to now only be updated if there's an actual change which avoids some possible weirdness previously seen with it's settings
Changed the MP3 length reading to default to off for the exact length checking option recently added as it causes too many slow down issues (now it's opt-in if bad files are experienced with more research needing to be done later on to try to find a better solution that hopefully doesn't require having to spin over the whole file when that's often not needed vs slow it down especially over network shares)
Changed the MP3 length reading related to the above action to try a few different ways to get a more likely to be valid length without parsing the whole file whilst avoiding the potential of a full scan
Changed some of the internal look-ups of the appropriate input plug-in to use to better leverage the cached handle if it relates to the playing item along with caching other requests to reduce some of the overhead when trying to get multiple metadata values from the files & other things during playback / selection changes (this is in addition to the other fixes noted below)
Changed how the post-release toast notification is setup when some of the needed aspects still need to be configured which is required for the OS to show the action buttons (the normal toast handling doesn't need this but having a prompt toast that is missing the buttons isn't the intent despite the OS having weird requirements to allow those buttons to be displayed)
Changed some of the core handling to reduce the calling impact of some of the methods along with a bit of de-duplication or removing additional aspects that aren't appropriate to the build type compiled
Changed the handling around trying to hook & create a backup of the gen_ff settings file so it now will process it into a typically smaller but easier to read version of the XML based studio.xnf file (this shouldn't cause any problems & potentially will make modern skin loading be a bit quicker though gen_ff re-saving its configuration file when nothing has changed isn't ideal but that's just what it does)
Fixed a regression from the prior 234xx builds causing the settings cache to incorrectly behave which for some appeared as modern skins not maintaining their state as expected between instances (e.g. windowshaded mode) though for those affected by this it may require applying the skin specific state twice between instances to correct the wrong state that gen_ff has likely stored in its settings file
Fixed a many year bug which could inconistently cause some of the settings files to not be loaded as expected into the settings cache which would cause things to revert to defaults &/or just act weirdly
Fixed some of the encoder plug-ins not always being able to be loaded due to the fun of dll dependencies (e.g. this caused enc_mp3 to not load in recent builds)
Fixed some further issues with the playback of Bandcamp related links which wouldn't behave as expected when pausing them though pausing a stream is just weird
Fixed a crash seen when doing a drag + drop action on the media library playlist views due to not releasing an internal lock before triggering the view update
Fixed a crash when trying to use the WMP playlist import action due to plug-in compilation issue which meant the wrong string was being used for the messagebox
Fixed the not equals string comparison with the NDE queries causing the results to not be as expected (e.g. this caused the exclusion of results to be weird)
Fixed higher than wanted memory usage & initialisation logic with the Streaming Source plug-in if it had been loaded but wasn't being actively used to stream
Fixed some artwork requests when playing streams not getting back the user customised artwork due to the direct data api not handling non-local path requests
Fixed the classic skin preview action on the Skins preference page not working due to a regression introduced some time back whilst adding better checking of cPro modern skins which broke the preview logic
Fixed the probable cause of a deadlock seen when trying to access the Podcast view in the media library if the configured feeds are already being updated
Fixed the next / previous actions being slow or appearing to cause the ui to lock-up for potentially half a minute depending on the skin &/or plug-ins enabled due to a message processing issue introduced by changes to try to avoid a hung ui / deadlock when updating the taskbar / main window text related to slow to respond files especially during start-up on non-local devices (this took a while to resolve)
Fixed the loading of the media library core not always being triggered as expected from the main ui thread which could cause it to not load at all or just appear as an incomplete media library window
Fixed tabbing within the Jump to Time & Jump to Track dialogs not working due to the fun that's getting such actions working within dialogs at times
Fixed some configuration reading issues seen when the settings cache is disabled & strings that should be read as unicode or utf-8 weren't always being processed into the expected form (if they weren't modified during that instance then there shouldn't have been any problems when starting with this build or by re-enabling the now fixed settings cache)
Fixed the JTF window position not always being saved if the window was open when WACUP is closed (closing the window manually before that was behaving)
Fixed a number of issues when configured to use the process volume to control the output especially when changing the default output device & it not synchronising the volume to match that device's output
Fixed a crash due to the EZPlaylist plug-in & how it tries to hook the main right-click menu when WACUP is set to use skinned menus (this hooks the plug-in to disable it's attempt to add into the menu which avoids the crash & it seems the menu items it adds don't work anyway likely due to conflicting with reserved menu id ranges within WACUP - if there's a real demand a WACUPified version might be made)
Fixed a number of ui lockup seen when using the 3rd party lyricsplugin & gen_toaster which were repeatedly requesting the same metadata when the playing item hadn't changed due to the taskbar text updating issue during next / previous action which then caused excessive ui hangs since it also does it all on the main ui thread (aka a bad thing to do) which under a modern skin exacerbated the issue even further with a half minute wait happening as a worst case from testing
Other small changes as part of trying to determine why some of the on-going crashes are still happening or where it cannot be replicated but changes were made
Updated libcurl (libcurl.dll) to 8.18.0 (7 Jan 2026)
Updated Monkey's Audio (in_ape.dll) to 11.91 (7 Jan 2025)
Updated vgmstream (in_vgmstream.dll) to the latest Git commit from 10 Jan 2026