Latest restricted WACUP beta release is build #18654 (March 24th 2024) (x86 & x64 changelogs) | Latest WACUP public preview is build #17040 (September 30th 2023) (x86 only)


NOTE: Beta testers are added in a limited & subjective manner as I can only support so many people as part of the beta test program to keep it useful for my needs.

Unless I think you're going to be helpful, not all requests will be accepted but might still be later on. Remember that beta testing is to help me & the limitations currently works for my needs for this project.

Author Topic: Strange phenomenon - annihilated main and playlist windows  (Read 3915 times)

Mits

  • Sr. Member
  • ****
  • Posts: 43
    • View Profile
Strange phenomenon - annihilated main and playlist windows
« on: January 12, 2021, 08:43:11 PM »
Happy new year to all the Musiclovers out there and may 2022 bring us a working cue player, since 2021 is the Library year  ;D (yes, one feature each year is all we need)

I just tried to close Wacup, apparently when the disk containing the files in my playlist was asleep. The main window and the playlist closed, but the album-art window stayed open. I shut down all Wacup processes in task manager, and ever since reopening Wacup results in only the album-art window opening.

By pressing Alt-F while the album art is in focus, the main menu appears, but toggling on-off the shortcuts Alt-W and Alt-E has no effect. Neither Alt-G works. However, Alt-Y (EQ), Bigclock and Alt-L work.

To reiterate, after properly closing Wacup, and running it again, it displays only the album art window with no apparent way to make the other windows appear. Dragging a file on the Wacup shortcut results in normal playback, so it seems all other parts of it are working properly.

Running latest portable 6840 and using only the 3 windows of it (main, playlist, albumart) since Winamp v0.0.1beta

Is there perhaps any other non-documented shortcut to forcibly open all windows? or any procedure for a reset-to-default-conditions (clean start)?

I opted to report rather than delete, reinstall and forgetabouddit, because that's what a good tester does. So I'll be waiting indefinitely for any ideas.  That's the beauty of portable installs, you just make another one in a different folder and leave the problematic one intact for troubleshooting purposes :)

Aminifu

  • Beta Tester
  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 1096
    • View Profile
Re: Strange phenomenon - annihilated main and playlist windows
« Reply #1 on: January 13, 2021, 03:15:43 AM »
Happy New Year!

I assume you're using a classic skin. Shutdown WACUP and use the task manager to make sure all WACUP processes are closed. Then run "wacup.exe /resetclassicskinpos" from the Windows command line dialog. Restart WACUP and hopefully all your windows will be working again.
« Last Edit: January 13, 2021, 03:17:29 AM by Aminifu »
Windows 11 Home 64-bit v23H2
Logitech Z906 5.1 speaker system

Mits

  • Sr. Member
  • ****
  • Posts: 43
    • View Profile
Re: Strange phenomenon - annihilated main and playlist windows
« Reply #2 on: January 13, 2021, 03:59:43 AM »
And yes, that worked, and after that the shortcuts work too and everything else is in peace.

And Yes, classic skin (since v0.0.1beta too).

Thanks for the insight! It is one more item for my Wacup IRAQ (impossible and rarely asked questions).

Now I have more mysteries to solve: in which of the parallel universes of the maniifold did those windows go? Why didn't they want to come back? Were they not happy in my house? Why did they rebel and terrorized my music capitol?

Aminifu

  • Beta Tester
  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 1096
    • View Profile
Re: Strange phenomenon - annihilated main and playlist windows
« Reply #3 on: January 13, 2021, 04:23:18 AM »
It's great to have a good sense of humor about things. :)  I'm glad that command string worked for you.

I had a similar issue and dro suggested I try it. It didn't work for me. My main configuration file "winamp.ini" in my WACUP users data folder got corrupted somehow. Fortunately I had a recent backup which I used to solve my problem. I suggest you start keeping recent backups of your configuration files, if you don't already.
Windows 11 Home 64-bit v23H2
Logitech Z906 5.1 speaker system

dro

  • Admin / WACUP Developer
  • Administrator
  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 4428
    • View Profile
    • WACUP (Winamp Community Update Project)
Re: Strange phenomenon - annihilated main and playlist windows
« Reply #4 on: January 13, 2021, 02:09:25 PM »
If it's what I think it is, then I've already got checks in place for the next build that will apply a fix that was done with the generically skinned windows to now also be done on the native classic windows so they don't have their position stored as somewhere massively offscreen. So even if something does go wonky, restarting WACUP will at least get them to reappear on the main monitor.

-dro

Mits

  • Sr. Member
  • ****
  • Posts: 43
    • View Profile
Re: Strange phenomenon - annihilated main and playlist windows
« Reply #5 on: January 15, 2021, 08:42:02 PM »
Thank you both for the info. If winamp.ini is so critical to the Wacup operation, maybe in the far future you could implement a) creating restore points (winamp.001, 002 etc)  and/or b) a 'last good configuration' file that gets written upon winamp successful exit (winamp.good), and/or c) a winamp.bak every time winamp.ini gets altered. As you know, Microsoft takes this approach with the registry, which is also a critical file.

dro

  • Admin / WACUP Developer
  • Administrator
  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 4428
    • View Profile
    • WACUP (Winamp Community Update Project)
Re: Strange phenomenon - annihilated main and playlist windows
« Reply #6 on: January 15, 2021, 09:39:40 PM »
Minimising the edits done to the file is also a major help but unlike the registry, there's not a nice way to be certain of what is a 'good' configuration & what's not. That also doesn't necessarily help if something is causing an undesired yet technically correct value to be stored in the file as I suspect was happening in this instance & that's more down to being something that I need to change (the fun of replacing handling whilst still allowing things to mostly work).

Backing it up is something I've yet to do as I don't have a stable way to know if an actual change has been made vs due to the way the file is accessed by different plug-in & sometimes external tools it might have re-saved a value that then looks like a change but wasn't technically one. Now I do try to reduce some of that potential uncertainty with the settings cache that WACUP uses by default (primarily to reduce the slowness of reading in values from ini files via the Win3.x era API) but there's a number of cases that I can't hook into plug-ins to be able to leverage that handling. Due to that, even just doing a backup on exit leaves me a bit hesitant as again there's no guarantee it'll even be "valid" as noted above.

-dro

Mits

  • Sr. Member
  • ****
  • Posts: 43
    • View Profile
Re: Strange phenomenon - annihilated main and playlist windows
« Reply #7 on: January 16, 2021, 04:57:09 PM »
Well, Microsoft with billions of dollars invested and an army of devs didn't find an idiot-proof solution yet, so it would be preposterous to assume you could do it in a jiffy by yourself... The only realistic and sane advice is "everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler."