Hi thinktink,
First of all, thank you for taking the time to work on this so quickly. It appears that we live in close to the same time zone, but I work midnight to 8 am, so half the time when you're normally awake, I'm probably sleeping.
Version 2.1.2.13 is working for me!
I have seen momentary spikes following song transitions using Windows Task Manager to monitor Winamp's CPU usage. A few of them have been quite large (up to 70%), but they have not caused any problems on my system. It depends on the songs and the DSP plug-in I'm using (SA Stereo Tool) normally adds up to an additional 20% itself.
But (there's always a but
), this version exposes a problem with the crossfade blocking feature. The song immediately before the songs selected to be blocked also does not crossfade. It seems like your plug-in does not 'see' it. There is no spike in CPU usage following the transition of the song prior to the first one that is selected for blocking.
I would only want to block a group of consecutive songs, so the work-around for this issue (if it can't be fixed) is obvious (just start the blocking with the second song in the group), so it's no big deal. It is a little inconvenient that Winamp must be restarted before the blocking is activated or removed. However, this is better than having to disable/enable the plug-in for various groups of songs.
As to the crashes I was having, I never run Winamp continuously for over 2 weeks at a time (I'm still not broadcasting). If the crashes were related to your plug-in, it probably was the metadata handling issues. If the crashes return, I'll use what you suggested in post #8 above.