WACUP Development Update February 2022 (Patreon)

With having done the new beta builds in the first half of the month & it being a short month, it doesn't seem like it should be time for me to do another monthly update but it is so here's your on going ramblings from me :)

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The big aspect was the 'fun' that came from the first testable x64 builds being available to use & the repeated reports of issues with MP3s & a few other things not working when the build thread had detailed it.

That did taint my initial view of doing x64 builds (some of which was down to me not updating the beta page & just assuming that most were using the forum) & it's fair to say a few almost got removed as beta testers but I've learnt from it & made changes rather than booting people :)

As a usable build it's still not ready & won't be for some time to come as I'd tried to convey but it didn't fail to install or run as I thought it was possibly going to do & in that respect there were only a few x64 specific issues & it's generally behaved ok. So as a test that it works it's more than exceeded it's goal.

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From the overall testing & changes done for the 2 beta builds, it's mostly gotten into the world of weirder crashes & that's what's taken a chunk of the 2 & a bit weeks since up to this update. It's nice to see that some of the changes I'd not been certain about have worked so that's win-win for everyone :)

For example I spent over 2 days just trying to track down a view related issue with the local library plug-in that was causing some setups to hard crash on view switching or just from trying to load WACUP so getting that resolved is welcome as it's now explained a few of the odder crashes from the last 6 or so months.

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Since doing the new beta builds & some site related changes to make the x86 vs x64 aspects a bit more obvious, it's mostly been looking at the odder issues & trying to refine things whilst also doing some more work towards improving the WINE experience as that seems to be a growing use case over the past few months.

Another thing that may not be fully completed before the next beta build is adding another input plug-in that will provide 'native' NSF & NSFE support with a heavily modified plug-in based on the nsfplay/nsfplug library & plug-in. This is one that's been on my list for too many years now & I guess I got a bee in my bonnet to get it done at last though I've yet to sort out the format conversion / waveform seeker support for those actions & a few other things. The main thing was getting a 2.4MB plug-in dll down to ~0.2MB without dropping too much & some of the things I've removed for now will re-appear later on.

It now means there's a much larger out of the box support for video game type audio formats & is something that still needs more to be done to ideally have a WACUP build that acts like the old Winamp + Chipamp plug-in pack but without using old versions & all of that.

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One hopefully useful thing which tied into the NSF/NSFE additions is expanding how I deal with such files that support multiple tracks within them so they will now be treated as mini playlists.

This makes them generally nicer to use & is something that I've also applied to the openmpt based module player where the default behaviour for them will be to treat them as mini playlists but I've kept the option to treat them as one big file as that might be useful for some. Now if only I was in a position with some of the needed input plug-ins to get cue support sorted since they're just a glorified playlist :)

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One other notable thing came from this weekend just gone & is how to know if the volume level that WACUP is set to be is correct or not. Since Windows Vista its been possible for the per-process volume to be changed which depending on the output plug-in being used can either mean you control that or when you're changing the WACUP volume, it's actually scaled within the process volume level. This can lead to you having WACUP at 100% but it might effectively be heard as though it's only 25% of the possible volume range.

So what I've done is add a new tab to the Playback preferences page for Volume where it'll show the current internal WACUP volume as well as the process volume (i.e. what you'd see on the Windows volume mixer dialog) & it then giving the effective volume that equates to. I've also done it so you can then attempt to change either of those volume levels from within that preference tab so it should be simpler to correct things & this is based on a recent forum thread where the process volume level was somehow set really low.

For most this shouldn't ever be needed but it's probably better to make it easier to access & also helps as a way to quickly check if it's a volume level issue or if it might be something else.

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I think that's the most obvious things to note for this update. It might be a few days or it might be up to 2 weeks before I do a new beta build as I'm still working my way through some of the older issues whilst trying to get things prepared to sort out the bits that need to be resolved before a new public preview build is made (I've a rough date in my mind for that to happen but as we know I seem to miss those all too often so I'm not going to say it for now).

What is scary is that it's gone well past 500 lines for it's changelog which is going to be hard to summarise when I need to do it but better that than the old "fixes & performance improvements" that seems to be the norm from most nowadays. So that's something for those wanting a new preview build can look forward to :)

-dro