Fixing old freeform skins

[ariszlo]

This thread is collecting fixes for issues that arise when old freeform skins are used in recent Winamp.

[ariszlo]

Dominator is a Winamp 3 skin with interesting animations. When you try to use it in recent versions of Winamp, Winamp will throw up the following error message and then crash:

asynchronous entity at line 344

How to fix it?

Asynchronous entity errors occur when a tag is not closed in an xml file. Line 344 tells us that Winamp tried to find the closing tag until line 344 and then gave it up. So we should look for an xml file with 344 lines.

Dominator's studio-elements.xml has exactly 344 lines so the unclosed tag should be in that file.

Short explanation. With respect to how you close them, there are two types of tags. Enclosing tags have an opening tag and a closing tag. An opening tag looks like this:

PHP Code:

<elements> 


and a closing tag looks like this:

PHP Code:

</elements> 


The other type of tags is self-closing tags. Self-closing tags have a slash before the final greater-than sign. "Include" tags are self-closing:

PHP Code:

<include file="whatever.xml"/> 


The unclosed tag will be easy to find in Dominator's studio-xml because its very first line contains an include tag that does not have a slash before the greater-than sign. So all you need to do is add the missing slash like this:

PHP Code:

<include file="tooltips.xml"/> 


Adding the missing slash will fix the asynchronous entity error and there will be no more crashes.

Check out this topic for another skin in which the closing member was missing of an enclosing tag.

[ariszlo]

Once you have fixed the asynchronous entity error for Dominator, you will run into another bug: the Play/Pause button will not start playback at startup.

Background info: Skins that have a single Play/Pause button (rather than two separate buttons) toggle Play and Pause with the help of a maki script. The problem is that the old play2pause.maki, which used to work well with Winamp 3, does not work well with recent versions of Winamp.

How to fix it?

Copy pjn123's sc_PlayPause.maki into the skin's scripts directory and replace this line in the xml file that contains it (player-normal-group.xml in Dominator):

PHP Code:

<script id="play2pause" file="scripts/play2pause.maki"/> 


with this one:

PHP Code:

<script file="scripts/sc_PlayPause.maki" param="Play;Pause"/> 


You should also put sc_PlayPause.m into the skin's script directory to

• help others learn how the script was written and
• give credit to pjn123

[Victhor]

Good call, I wish I have more free time.. Will be watching on this though.

Ps: Why "freeform" and not "modern"?

[ariszlo]

Originally Posted by Victhor

Ps: Why "freeform" and not "modern"?

I find "old modern" a bit odd. Originally, I was thinking on a longer title: "Fixing old freeform skins (WA3 and WA5 Modern)". But then decided on this shorter one.

[ariszlo]

After I had posted the Play/Pause fix using pjn123's sc_PlayPause.maki, I found a faster fix.

All you need to do is overwrite the skin's original play2pause.maki file with the one in the attached zip archive. You do not need to replace any line in any xml file.

The source of the attached play2pause.maki is FrisbeeMonkey's Play-to-Pause script to which I applied SLoB's fix.

[ariszlo]

When you load a Winamp 3 skin into current Winamp then the original scrollbars will be replaced with scrollbars generated from the generic button and other elements.

To restore the original scrollbars, change the version number of WinampAbstractionLayer to 1.3 in skin.xml like this:

PHP Code:

<WinampAbstractionLayer version="1.3"> 


[ariszlo]

Winamp 5 displays TrueType fonts smaller than Winamp 3. So if you want to preserve the original look of a Winamp 3 skin when updating it for Winamp 5, you need to multiply the fontsize value of TrueType fonts by 1.3.

Dominator, whose startup crashes were fixed in comment #2, uses a TrueType font in the title bars of Playlist Editor, Media Library, etc.

The size of the title bar font of these windows is defined in standardframe.xml. Open the file, find the groupdef of wasabi.titlebar and increase the fontsize from 13 to 17.