Portables Support

[EighthSageScarlet]

This has been touched upon in other forum posts (ie. https://getwacup.com/community/index.php?topic=703.0) but not (as far as I can see) in a request.

Winamp has a plugin that nicely cooperates with plug-and-play media such as a thumb drive. I've already tried to directly transplant this plugin and it appears to be incompatible with WACUP entirely. What I want is to be able to have a music library on a thumb drive that I can transfer between different devices without having to use each machine's space. This can be done in a somewhat ad-hoc way by adding the thumb drive's directory to the local library, but when I eject the drive the local library maintains references to all of the music without being able to access it, which clutters the library with songs I cannot play. In Winamp this is solved by a plug-and-play entry in the left hand side of the media library window, where you can access the thumb drive's "sub-library" of music, and that tab just disappears when the external drive is absent.

In the above forum post you mentioned this was low on your priorities list, so perhaps if you know of a better workaround, or some way to cannibalize the Winamp plugin to work with WACUP then advice would be greatly appreciated!

[dro]

The WACUP installer already tries to install a copy of the portables plug-in (ml_pmp, pmp_*) from 5.666 but it's not enabled by default to avoid some of the issues that the plug-in had even under a native 5.666 install which requires it being enabled via preferences -> plug-ins -> media library -> finding ml_pmp & checking the option to enable it. Using any copy of that plug-in which isn't from the specific 5.666 installer that WACUP is using to get winamp files from isn't going to work & will very likely induce more possible crashes than can already happen with that plug-in.

The problem with the portables plug-in has always been it can work for some but it won't work for others & is why it's not enabled by default. Also using any form of that plug-in especially from after 5.666 isn't supported nor meant to be allowed & if it crashes there's nothing I'm going to even consider to do about resolving those problems.

With the local library idea, if the drive is mapped to the same letter on all instances of trying to use it then it might work but like you note it's not great & is clunky even if making use of the manual option to remove missing files or by using the folder monitor feature to have it periodically scan for & hide the portable entries within the db instance via the soft delete that it uses for the handling of missing files. That's the only thing I can think off if the original 5.666 form of the plug-in can't be used per the start of the reply (that might require re-running the installer to ensure the expected versions of the plug-ins are present).

[EighthSageScarlet]

I was not able to find a copy of any pmp plugins in my install despite plugin_descriptions.ini listing them. I have messed around with the files so I will do a complete fresh reinstall to make sure I didn't somehow delete the native files accidentally, but I was pretty sure I looked at all of the plug-ins available when I installed the first time. It is completely possible that I missed it.

I will report back shortly.

[EighthSageScarlet]

I found the solution to why I did not have the portables plug-in, I was using the 64 bit version which you mention in the docs does not play well with Winamp plugins- presumably you removed it from the 64x installer but an artifact remains in the plugin description file. I apologize for not discovering this on my own sooner! Thank you for the help!

Edit:
So I checked the portables plugin in the installer, yet I cannot find the plugin in Media Library now either. I have looked where you directed, and have even searched the x86 install Plugins folder for files containing "pmp" to no avail. Is it possible you removed it from the most recent 32 bit distribution as well? Or am I just doing something wrong?

[EighthSageScarlet]

Further investigation has revealed that the 32 bit portable install does have the pmp plugins included.

[dro]

The portable install type limits what plug-ins are going to be loaded to only those known to the safe in that mode (unless prefs -> advanced -> portable mode -> use 3rd party plug-ins has been enabled) though I don't remember the ml_pmp plug-in being blocked from loading in that mode other than first having to got to prefs -> plug-ins -> media library to ensure it's been enabled from there. WACUP in its current state is likely not a viable option for you if portables support is something you really need to have working as I just don't have any eta on when I'll eventually get around to replacing the plug-in with my own.

[EighthSageScarlet]

Thank you for your help I have been able to get the portables plugin working (at least as well as it can), but have found that it has terrible support for parsing metadata from flac files for some reason. Since this plugin is outside the purview of WACUP support I'm just leaving information here in case anyone in the future runs into a similar problem. The flac files on my thumb drive (even when pmp_usb is given the added configuration to read flac files) are all given the WACUP metadata of a single flac file in the outermost directory of my music folder in the thumbdrive. Even when I delete said flac, the rest of the flacs that are further nested in the USB drive are left with their WACUP metadata blank. It's quite frustrating! I have tested the same plugin on Winamp however and it does properly read my flac metadata there (v 1.6 on Winamp, 1.61 on WACUP so I don't expect the version difference is to blame but maybe?)

Unless I can figure this out by fiddling with the plugin some more I will probably resort to using local storage for my music- I'd rather keep using WACUP then have portables support. I merely thought it would be a bit more convenient for my hard drive space.

As of this moment I don't believe there is anything further for me to say on this thread, though if I come up with a solution for the portables plugin I'd likely post it here in case someone else finds it of use.

Thank you dro for continuing this great project, and being a responsive developer!

P.S. My previous post stating that the 32 bit installation includes the portables plugin only on the portable installation seems to have been erroneous. I've reinstalled and it is now there on the main release. I swear it wasn't when I tried earlier but I couldn't tell you why. Perhaps when I looked I had accidentally opened the 64 bit release.

[dro]

Thank you for your help I have been able to get the portables plugin working (at least as well as it can), but have found that it has terrible support for parsing metadata from flac files for some reason. Since this plugin is outside the purview of WACUP support I'm just leaving information here in case anyone in the future runs into a similar problem. The flac files on my thumb drive (even when pmp_usb is given the added configuration to read flac files) are all given the WACUP metadata of a single flac file in the outermost directory of my music folder in the thumbdrive. Even when I delete said flac, the rest of the flacs that are further nested in the USB drive are left with their WACUP metadata blank. It's quite frustrating! I have tested the same plugin on Winamp however and it does properly read my flac metadata there (v 1.6 on Winamp, 1.61 on WACUP so I don't expect the version difference is to blame but maybe?)

I don't remember enough about the portables plug-in but it rings a vague bell with some of the files processed via it not being tagged correctly which afaict shouldn't be down to WACUP doing something wrong otherwise getting metadata from FLAC's into the local library, etc would always be wrong. It might even be something that's down to how the portables plug-in copies things over that's at fault but I really don't know & this just mounts up as another reason to ditch that whole set of plug-ins.

P.S. My previous post stating that the 32 bit installation includes the portables plugin only on the portable installation seems to have been erroneous. I've reinstalled and it is now there on the main release. I swear it wasn't when I tried earlier but I couldn't tell you why. Perhaps when I looked I had accidentally opened the 64 bit release.

That is likely because of trying with the newer WACUP build & it had some changes with how it tries to get some of the installer files to resolve issues where it wasn't able to download them previously. That's the only obvious thing that I can think of to explain them appearing.