WACUP Development Update January 2022 (Patreon)

Another month & another year of WACUP & it's fair to say it's not where I'd have expected things to be when I started on this 6 years ago with a plug-in pack that's now evolved into the potential of it's own player. So to those who've stuck around all of this time & who are helping to allow me to keep doing this, what are you thinking & of course thank you :)

-

So what's been going on is for the most part boring & probably not what should have been the focus which is the continuation on getting something that resembles a working "WACUP64" build running.

What I've got at the moment does actually play things & isn't a crash-fest as I thought it might be but it does come with a number of limitations due to re-use of some of the codec libraries from 5.666 or just not having my own plug-ins available to replace them (e.g. in_mp3).

As such the first 64-bit test build(s) are going to be more of a novelty just to see if it'll install & do the basics of playback against VGM & more OSS like formats (e.g. Opus & FLAC). Over the coming year the plan has to be to end up with a viable in_mp3 replacement along with a few other key aspects so that it's possible to just use a WACUP64 build for those not needing modern skin &/or 3rd party Winamp plug-in support.

-

My intention is for that first test build to be made available to beta testers this coming week (along with a new normal beta build) - hopefully before this post goes from being patron only to public access. I'm also going to be getting a new beta build out since it's been a few weeks longer than I'd have liked since the last beta build but that's also the fun that comes from the holiday period & making things.

-

Other things that have been going on alongside the 64-bit testing relates to a use case that I know quite a few make use of is using WACUP with media on NAS / network shares. So one important change is that I've found a seemingly good way of determining if a file is accessible or not without it having to wait for the long timeout that has otherwise been causing issues.

There's likely still some more changes that need to be done but it's a step in the right direction compared to how a plain Winamp works which should make it a nicer experience as I can understand waiting up to a minute (assuming the crash reporter doesn't kick in due to it seeming to have hung) is not fun.

-

Another important one that only got finished this weekend past is going to hopefully make some of the beta testers happier as it's the official support of command-line handling (which has been broken since the June 2021 beta when I really started to de-couple WACUP from the Winamp core).

This is something that's needed otherwise things like external interaction of WACUP with Explorer (e.g. double-click) won't work. There's still more that needs to be done to get file association handling finally implemented (not helped that it seems Windows 11 has changed things - that'll be "fun" to find out when I eventually make a Windows 11 test install).

-

The last notable change is the inclusion of an updated version of in_vgm/libvgm which expands the out of the box VGM/chiptune support with WACUP which is something that's been a gradual goal to expand on. The ideal goal is to have the equivalent of a Chipamp solution as part of WACUP though whether I end up providing split builds as I suspect some won't need these VGM/chiptune plug-ins (not that it's hard to not install &/or disable plug-ins with WACUP compared to Winamp).

-

Otherwise it's the normal set of changes, improvements, fixes, cursing at why it's taking so long & everything else that comes with WACUP's development including what should be a fix for the WACUP loader process hanging around running at 100% as has been plaguing some installs for far far far too long.

So with that I need to get on with starting year 7 of WACUP development & the continuing road to making WACUP become free from Winamp which is scary to think I'm getting closer to achieving & the time I can be classed as an ex-Winamp user :)

-dro