Software » Audio Players » WACUP 1.0.20.7170 Preview

Preview Version: 1.0.20.7170
Released: 22 February 2021

Added the ability to determine if WACUP only shows in the System Media Transport Control (SMTC) integration on appropriate Windows 10 installs when it's not the active program (this is also now the default behaviour due to feedback related to the OS provided action overlapping too much of the WACUP instance when working with it at the time)
Added a 'Windows 10' preferences page so it's easier to disable the options related to the Windows 10 Integration plug-in if appropriate (this also adds an option to disable the SMTC feature in the plug-in though completely disabling the plug-in is the preferred option via the General Purpose plug-in preferences page)
Adding the currently stored skin into the crash report log file so it's easier for me to see if it's using an obviously known 'bad' skin (e.g. a modern skin that keeps throwing divide by zero errors)
Added an option on the 'General' preferences page to control how the main right-click bookmark menus are handled when clicked with respect to playing, enqueuing or enqueue & playing as you may need
Added support for the 'browser next / previous' actions (e.g. those found on a mouse with additional buttons) to be handled by the hotkeys plug-ins which can be useful for moving forward / backwards in the main playlist or controlling the volume or any other available hotkey actions (note: this may not work consistently as a global hotkey depending on what other programs are possibly handling these actions)
Added an option on the new 'Shuffle' preferences page for controlling restoring the shuffle table between sessions for those not happy with this deviation from what Winamp did (it is enabled by default as minimising repeating plays of playlist items until the playlist has completed naturally is better & resolves a long standing complaint that Winamp would repeat files since there was no cross-session info)
Added initial support for natural sorting of string values (which relates to numbers within a string being interpreted as a sequence rather than their character value) such as within playlist titles or local library results to better match user expectations & the supported versions of Windows (if none of that makes sense, it should make values with both text + numbers in them sort in an expected manner)
Added additional hooking of the last.fm AudioScrobbler plug-in to minimise the potential for it sending messages to the main WACUP window for information to cause a deadlock / crash as seems to occur for some
Added a $StrBetween(,,) ATF method so it's a bit simpler to extract parts from a string if there's known start & end characters (e.g. $StrBetween('title [other info]','[',']') would provide 'other info' otherwise it'll return that there's no string)
Added compatibility improvements for the Volume Logic output plug-in so it should now be usable with WACUP (this involved making sure it's own loading of the other output plug-ins allowed them to be initialised correctly, by re-mapping the read / write of its settings out of the program folder & into the settings folder making it portable compatible, overriding the preferences handling so that the output plug-ins offering unicode descriptions now show as expected instead of just the first letter & a filename)
Added initial support for the Streaming Source plug-in to connect 'natively' as a Icecast source (this will need some testing & is only aimed at Icecast v2.4+ servers)
Added initial support for the Streaming Source plug-in to connect 'natively' as a SHOUTcast 2/Ultravox 2.1 source (this will need some testing & doesn't currently support sending in-stream artwork)

Changed some of the plug-in initialisation handling to better contend with (mostly older) plug-ins having issues & failing on loading which then causes WACUP to crash on loading
Changed the crash reporter to better report .NET runtime crashes (e.g. win10shell)
Changed some of the error handling in the Not So Asio output plug-in to try to minimise the crashes which keep occuring with it (am not expecting this to help but it's an attempt)
Changed how the older IPC_FORMAT_TITLE API is handled in relation to older plug-ins trying to use it to try to reduce the crashes seen related due to them passing incomplete data
Changed to not send 'ispodcast' to the input plug-ins as this is causing issues for some of the input plug-ins in relation to how it first accesses the file & cause a crash (this value is only meant to be sent to the local library plug-in & this change should resolve some of the odd crashes being experienced)
Changed how the shared metadata service treats 'streammetadata' in relation to how the input plug-ins are then directly queried
Changed how the internal ATF processing is done to reduce duplicate metadata queries being made to the shared metadata service &/or the input plug-ins depending on what is supported (this is primarily to reduce the amount of additional processing done as well as reducing the calls to the input plug-ins on fallback which for some can be slow to respond &/or cause stability issues based on some crash reports)
Changed the Audio CD, Archive Playback & Playlist Seperator input plug-ins to no longer rely upon subclassing the main WACUP window to do some of their integration (e.g. live menu updating)
Changed the Global Hotkeys & Taskbar Integration (Win7shell) plug-in to now no longer rely upon subclassing the main WACUP window due to the WACUP core calling it as needed for some of the required messages
Changed the Repeater & Undo plug-ins to lower the number of specific messages it's attempting to handle when subclassing the main WACUP window (still a bit more to do to be able to remove the subclass)
Changed the Format Converter plug-in to now no longer rely upon subclassing the main WACUP window for the handling of the API messages it implements
Changed the Bookmarks, Exporter & History, replacement Local Library & Playlists library plug-ins to no longer rely upon subclassing the main WACUP window to do some of their integration (e.g. detecting file changes)
Changed the default classic skin window positions with a new install to better show off some of the WACUP additions whilst reducing initial positioning overlaps based on recent feedback
Changed the /RESETCLASSICSKINPOS command-line option to also reset the double-size option to off
Changed the /RESETCLASSICSKINPOS & /REPAIR command-line options to then restart WACUP once the action has been completed (based on feedback received restarting is expected)
Changed the installer to better handle scenarios when the WACUP core dll cannot be updated (still not determine why this is happening for some) so it will fail gracefully sooner in the update process
Changed the IPC_GET_HMENU api to now also provide the menus for the main player button context menus (i.e. right-click menu on the play button)
Changed the majority of the WM_WA_IPC API messages that the Modern Skin engine (gen_ff.dll) sends to now be processed directly without going to the main window handler to see if it'll help resolve some of the weirder ui interaction issues (e.g. accessing menus triggering stack overflow crashes & possibly the embedding of the generically skinned windows causing random crashes for some setups more than others)
Changed the installer to check for ReactOS to prevent those inquisitive enough to try to do it from hitting the issues that are present (mostly due to it supporting a Windows XP level of API but WACUP relies upon a number of required Vista & newer APIs)
Changed more of the WACUP specific plug-ins & also parts of the core to move away from SendMessage(..) based API calls for direct usage where possible whilst still offering support for the SendMessage APIs
Changed the installer checks to better handle updating from an old 2019 era WACUP preview build to the current late 2020 / early 2021 builds so it's not re-extracting the Winamp installer when not required
Changed how the main right-click & windows (modern skin specific) menus are handled with the 'media library' entry to hopefully avoid some reported instances of the menu item appearing at the top of the menu (this should also gracefully get out of the way if the legacy media library plug-in is being used to avoid duplicate menu items)
Changed how the artwork cache is handled between sessions to now attempt to maintain it which depending on the usage can improve the initial loading experience to reduce some artwork related aspects being slow to initially render
Changed the podcast plug-in to automatically hide the info are with in the podcast library view & the the view layout options on it's related preferences page when running under WINE (this is to help avoid some stability issues seen with this feature on WINE related to the embedded browser mode used for the info pane)
Changed the handling of crash reports from WINE installs to make them easier to detect from those from Windows installs
Changed the shuffle related options on the 'Playlist' preferences page to now be on their own preferences page as a child of the 'Playlist' node
Changed the installer to help complete the transition away from using the Nullsoft DirectSound & WaveOut output plug-ins over to the WACUP equivalents of Not So Direct & Not So Wavey (the prior 68x0 builds only removed the Nullsoft plug-ins if they were not found to be the currently used output plug-in whereas this change will remove them & set the active output plug-in to the appropriate equivalent)
Changed the initialisation order of the Taskbar Integration (Win7shell) plug-in to minimise a tangible delay experienced when the plug-in is enabled (nothing revolutionary on the time saved but the delay was enough to be noticeable when looking for it at around 20-30ms on my development install)
Changed how visualisation plug-ins are handled to better ensure that high resolution timers (needed to ...