Added an option to the Advanced preferences (options page 2) to control whether playlists saved via the wacup's core (e.g. library playlists) use relative paths (default) behaviour) or will only use absolute file paths for the playlist entries which might be helpful for other programs that might be trying to make use of these playlists
Added an initial attempt at handling fragmented MP4 based files (e.g. those often coming from some nefarious sites) without having to use other tools to effectively re-build the MP4 container for it
Changed some network timeouts along with how the libcurl connection is established to try to better handle really slow connections (e.g. if Receive Window Auto-Tuning Level is set as disabled - not that such a setting should be set as it will badly affect the OS & programs running under it)
Changed the recently altered default atf string to better handle there being no metadata (e.g. with no artist it was still causing a dash to appear at the front insteasd of just the filename)
Changed the playback of FLAC streams to do more to now support the expected Ogg+FLAC encapsulated streams along with the odd streaming setups that are just streaming the raw FLAC content which wasn't being handled previously
Changed the lyrics sources attempted along with how metadata might be gained from un-tagged files to try to improve the chances of getting a valid response
Changed around some of the internal file api usage to try to avoid some of the OS api calls whilst attempting to better standardise the handling across where wacup may be run on
Changed how the stop with fadeout action is handled to try to avoid problems with the main playlist window drawing entering a weird corrupted state for some
Changed the dropdown on the visualisation & dsp plug-in preference pages to only be enabled if there is more than one module provided by the selected plug-in so it's more obvious what has multiple modules
Changed one of the apis that the big clock plug-in uses for getting the information to generate the playlist elapsed / remaining modes to now be much quicker since it can avoid getting the title which isn't needed (e.g. avoiding a potentially slow local library db load when the length information is already known & cached within the loaded playlist - this can drop from a few seconds to effectively instant)
Changed the big clock plug-in to support the dll being duplicated & named as gen_bigclock2.dll to allow for dual windows to be provided for those wanting to see more (e.g. elapsed & playlist remaining) along with the installer trying to keep the duplicated dll updated with future build updates (note: this may be re-worked in a later build to be able to support multiple windows from the same plug-in dll)
Changed the Appearance preference page to mention the Ctrl + NumPad Plus / NumPad Minus / Enter shortcuts for live changing the font size along with adding a check for a "reset_font=0" ini entry in the [winamp] section of the winamp.ini being used to disable the Ctrl+Enter handling for those finding it might be incorrectly hit which causes the font size to be reset back to the default
Changed a number of aspects with the nde backup file handling so it should now avoid updating the wrong file when a valid save occurred or that it could replacing the good backup which wasn't intended
Changed how the adlib based plug-in works to avoid some of the filepath converisons done especially when dealing with repeated metadata requests along with filtering out what it cannot support for a small performance improvement
Changed the in_usf2 plug-in to avoid some performance issues by now ensuring the metadata requests are cached instead of re-opening the file everytime (not a massive saving but helps with library scans)
Changed what the wacup core reports to the gen_ff plug-in to better account for the media library being enabled but there not being any ml_* or related plug-ins enabled to prevent it being seen as a tab or window when using compatible modern skins which are able to make use of what is being reported
Changed the installer error messages if the needed 5.666 redux installer cannot be obtained to no longer mention limited mp3 playback (hasn't been a thing since the x64 build got mp3 playback support) & instead clarify that it's mainly no modern / winamp3 / cPro skin support if using the ignore action to continue installing
Changed how the AVS plug-ins are handled in the core to remove some earlier handling along with now providing a copy of 2.83 which might work better for some (though it's AVS so it'll still end up crashing)
Fixed the batch metadata edit dialog crashing due to a bug with the local library plug-in from the prior build causing it to incorrectly match the request to what is no longer as expected
Fixed the jtfe search to behave like the build prior to the last one when it comes to spaces within the search field whilst still keeping the optimisations (which have been further refined)
Fixed the volume was changed message being shown on all track changes when using a classic skin if the notsowavey output plug-in was set to be used if the process volume monitor was enabled
Fixed some of the open file actions intermittently crashing (e.g. via the Autoplay preference page) due to an issue with generating the file extension list which also prevented the dropdown filter working
Fixed seeking in opus files (especially when part of restoring the playback position) not working correctly
Fixed the stopped text preview on the Now Playing tab of the Play Tracking preference page showing a preview when there's nothing set so it matches to what the text shows (this still doesn't change that if nothing is set that the contents of the file will remain set as the last playing file - to clear it on playback stopping you can use $char(32) or $crlf() as the formatting string since spaces are stripped)
Fixed some of the local library api queries allocating too much memory when it only needs to allocate enough for a single result
Fixed the classic skin visualisation refresh rate option incorrectly affecting the likes of big clock causing it to appear to lag updating the elapsed / remaining playback position when the core wasn't updating things in an appropriate manner causing it to only report the last cached value (more words to describe removing a status check)
Fixed a regression since the builds from late March 2026 which prevented some of the data provided to the visualisation plug-ins being wrong due to changes made to deal with multiple visualisation plug-ins running at the same time which were requesting different data per the plug-in api
Fixed some multiple visualisation setups not working correctly due to trying to apply the global sub-module instance to all of the plug-ins when most often only have a single reported module (this is a temporary solution before trying to track things better on a per visualisation plug-in instance but should also help better ensure that a visualisation will run if there's other configuration problems)
Fixed a potential crash when plug-in profiling is enabled & plug-in doesn't provide a valid description string along with reducing some of the processing to make the text to be generated into the files
Fixed the big clock playlist remaining mode showing the wrong time display along with it sitting on states like 0:00 when its still in the process of calculating the overall playlist length under playback
Fixed a performance issue related to larger MP3 files which could cause some ui hangs / unresponsiveness when attempting to inspect the file prior to generating a waveform seeker preview
Fixed changing the grouping of a library playlist not always maintaining the title of the playlist when it's moved & the option to show the library playlists as child nodes is enabled
Fixed some metadata reading performance issues where it was meant to be read from the local libary db (if available) which wasn't always happening causing the local file to instead be accessed
Fixed the backups for some of the nde based files not being loaded in all of the loading errors that might occur which could cause confusion or other unexpected problems
Fixed some issues related to using the minimise action on the preferences window
Fixed the dsp heard output when playing USF files not working correctly due to it mis-reporting the amount of audio data that's available
Fixed dsp_wc not completing the connection to Icecast 2.5.0 or newer servers due to not using the now required headers which were optional against the 2.4.x servers (a small change vs this description)
Fixed a number of issues when trying to process many milkdrop presets whilst trying to use the ui to interact with them which in some instances could trigger a crash (an old milkdrop codebase problem)
Fixed the possible reason for moving the jtfe window onto a different monitor with a different dpi which during initial loading could cause the search box & header text around it being incorrectly sized
Fixed the search / manage mode button on the jtfe window being incorrectly handled on window resizing which could appear as flickering or it showing briefly as an un-skinned from of the button text
Fixed the probable cause of some crashes related to the delay load handling changes from the prior build not correctly managing some multi-threaded attempts to trigger the loading of the supporting dlls
Fixed an issue with dsp_wc which could cause streaming to fail if the input was a short mono file with resampling required to get the wanted target output
Fixed some of the cause for hearing the start of a file when history playback resume is enabled (e.g. in a long podcast) before it jumps to the required playback position by moving the handling earlier so there's more time for the request to complete before the playback decoder has had a chance to start playback (this needs more re-working to properly resolve this which is needed for native cue support)
Fixed the alt+3 / file info dialog handling to better ensure that the forward / backward buttons will be enabled as expected if the main playlist window is the parent when using a modern skin
Fixed the probable cause behind some metadata cache related deadlocks due to not accounting for known plug-ins that support the reset action vs how legacy plug-in types are dealt with to avoid multi-threaded reading related crashes (blah blah blah trying to avoid things crashing)
Fixed another issue found when updating some much older installs which could potentially trigger a crash to occur
Fixed the Enhancer DSP wrapper not storing window position changes if the window destruction message didn't appear as expected before it was closed along with it not always restoring the window during loading
Fixed a regression (not looked into when it happened) with the skinned window frames of the AVS plug-in windows not having the scaled version applied to them as intended
Removed libexpat & replaced it with a wrapper around pugixml which does enough for what I need (am just tired of the constant libexpat has vulnerabilities & as I use pugixml for everything else having 2 xml parsers was a duplication that I honestly didn't want & is just how things were done early on to try to replace the xml service for the likes of gen_ff to use without breaking how it then worked...)
Other small changes attempting to resolve some of the inconclusive crash issues seen
Updated cppwinrt (gen_win10shell.dll) to 3.0.260818.1 (19 Aug 2026)
Updated LAME (lame_enc.dll) to 4.0 (11 Jul 2026)
Updated libfaad2 (libfaad2.dll) to 2.11.3 (19 Aug 2026)
Updated Monkey's Audio (in_ape.dll) to 13.25 (10 Aug 2026)
Updated mpg123 (mpg123.dll) to 1.33.7 (2 Aug 2026)
Updated OpenSSL (libcurl.dll) to 3.5.8 (25 Aug 2026)
Updated vgmstream (in_vgmstream.dll) to the latest Git commit from 28 Aug 2026