Big Bento Modern v1.2

[Tom White]

I have just started (okay, maybe a week ago) using WACUP and really like it so far. I also like the looks of the Big Bento Modern skin, but have one problem. On my meager laptop it takes about 25 seconds or so to load the program when using this skin. Other skins (Big Bento regular, or Classic or Modern skin) might take about 9 seconds or so. Is there anything I can do to speed up the loading of this skin? I have tried disabling various plug-ins just in case they were contributing to this. Now granted, my laptop is not the speediest and has some age on it, but it is what I have. Would increasing the RAM help any? It only has 2gb but can be upgraded to 4gb if that helps.

[victhor]

@Tom White Hi, I'm glad you liked my skin too. Sadly, there's little I can do to ease the load. Before releasing the skin I've tested it on various PCs (some with similar specs) and load time seems generally ok but is quite heavy on others (a lot, for my taste). Never managed to find out what's causing it exactly.
I wouldn't recommend you to upgrade your memory just for this skin, but 2gb is quite too low for most apps nowadays (9 seconds for the other skins is also a lot!). If you find another reason to upgrade it and the money is there, then go ahead.

In the meantime, you can send me a Private Message and maybe we can work out a quick solution based on the stuff you use/need mostly so I can disable the rest and see if that works, or guide you to know what would be what's taking so much resources of your laptop.

[dro]

I wouldn't be surprised if it's hitting the swap file on loading if it's taking that long. Am going to guess there's also a standard hard drive in the machine (aka spinning rust) ? Laptop hard drives are notoriously slow which isn't going to help when they're getting thrashed due to the expected memory swapping (ironically I was seeing such things when trying to clean up an ~5 year old laptop yesterday though that was for any software & I'd not given WACUP a go on it due to time pressure).

WACUP does try to change a few things which can help reduce the loading time but a lot of the slowness of modern skins are just down to the inherent design of the modern skin engine & there's a lot to do before I've got something basic that will be able to try to load them that itself doesn't suck. Maybe Vic can come up with something that at least helps out a bit but without lobotomising the skin, I'm not sure there's much that can otherwise be done sadly in your current position.

-dro

p.s. How long does it take for it to load with a classic skin ?

[Tom White]

Thanks to both of you for your responses. A bit more information about the laptop - It has a 1.6ghz intel celeron processor and , the drive is not a "spinner", but rather one of the small drives that most laptops come with these days. Can't think of exactly what they call them these days but I think SSD comes to mind?

Anyway, with the Classic skin, it loads in about 4 seconds. When playing music, task manager shows WACUP barely using any CPU or memory resources. With that in mind, I have to think it is not "stressing" the CPU or RAM but rather is taxing the machines graphics capabilities? I guess another thing to consider is my music (a bit more than 5000 songs, split between FLAC and MP3) is stored on a USB 3 thumb drive. Once loaded the music is accessed very quickly so I don't think the program is waiting on that.

Anyway, thanks again for the work you guys do on all of this.

[dro]

Ok well if it is an SSD then I'd have expected the classic skin to load quicker than that. Can I ask what age the machine is as SSDs in laptops still aren't a common thing (at least not for what I was looking at over the past year especially when you drop down to the Celeron ranges unless it's been an option &/or changed later on).

There's so many variabes as to what could be going on from A/V software being slow to scan & allow things to go to just something about the machine really not liking things (it happens) through to the network connection being slow for the initial update check (though I've tried to mitigate against that due to delaying when it's done by default so that's probably less likely to be it).

Bit of a head scratcher though not helped that the modern skin engine has always liked fast speedy setups as it does a lot of things in order instead of asynchronously which if there are slowness can make the skin take a lot longer to load than would be liked.

-dro

[Tom White]

I may have been wrong about the type of drive in the laptop. Instead of SSD does MMC make more sense? Either way, it is one of the small ones they put in these things. Like 32gb small.

[Juanus]

I'm curious as to what model of laptop you have there. I'm confused as to the specs you are listing. Would you giving us the make and model? Maybe a link to it's website?
Thanks

[Tom White]

Sure. It is a Dell Inspiron 14 Model 3452.

[Juanus]

Thanks. That helps!

[scr1m3]

Had a quick look online, it seems that your laptops has 32GB of eMMC storage. It has 1 SODIMM slot that takes up to 4GB DDR3L.

I would strongly recommend upgrading the RAM to the 4GB.

You could also look into ways of disabling unnecessary Windows features. You can look here for some tips. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nVy4GAtkh7Q

The issue as other have mentioned is that Windows will be swapping memory to disk, which will hurt performance. It doesn't have sufficient memory to store the OS as well as the applications you might want to run such as WACUP or a web browser.

[Tom White]

Had a quick look online, it seems that your laptops has 32GB of eMMC storage. It has 1 SODIMM slot that takes up to 4GB DDR3L.

I would strongly recommend upgrading the RAM to the 4GB.

You could also look into ways of disabling unnecessary Windows features. You can look here for some tips. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nVy4GAtkh7Q

The issue as other have mentioned is that Windows will be swapping memory to disk, which will hurt performance. It doesn't have sufficient memory to store the OS as well as the applications you might want to run such as WACUP or a web browser.

Thanks for your reply. This laptop may be a bit under powered, but no other program I use operates as slowly as Winamp/Wacup using the modern Bento skin. The regular skins do fine, browsers are quick as are programs like LibreOffice, so I don't know what to say.

In the end it is all OK. I have no problems with using the classic or Big Bento or older Winamp Modern skins. Not losing any sleep over it.

Thanks again.

[WorseDoughnut]

Sorry if this is the wrong place to ask, but I love the skin with one simple caveat:
I really wish the "Collapse Window" toggle was a lot wider and a little thinner, something like 80% of the width of the window at any given time. I'm trying to avoid having to move my mouse all the way to a very specific, pretty small, location on my monitor when i want to toggle

From what I can gather by looking at the skin files, it's all loading from the various xml files, so I was wondering if someone could point me to correct file/location (or even the variable / element / etc. name) that I should be looking for to go about making this change. I would very much appreciate any help.

I attached a mock-up of what I'm trying to achieve.

[WorseDoughnut]

Okay, so update:
I've found that it's a matter of editing the width (w) value of the button element at the bottom of player-normal.xml.

The only issues are:
 - no idea how to make it relative / scale in real time w/ the window width
 - it seems the arrow image is not independent from the width of the button. so it's scaling with my edit and looks about as awful as you'd expect.

I'll keep experimenting.

----

Okay, scratch that. I'm apparently only scaling the visual portion. The clickable element is staying the same size. Hmmm...

[Juanus]

I have a question...  you want to make that one button bigger so you can hit it.
Why don't you change the setting so that the WHOLE title bar becomes the button and you can doubleclick on the title bar to make it collapse?
see screenshot.

[WorseDoughnut]

Why don't you change the setting so that the WHOLE title bar becomes the button and you can doubleclick on the title bar to make it collapse?

Because that's not the same functionality at all. That toggles the "shade", not the "collapsed window".