5.6 still crashes when generating a playlist

[M3wThr33]

As long as it has had it, the playlist generator has never worked for me. Somewhere in my library of music, it crashes on the 4th and final step, parsing the data.
I've done it on Windows 7 32/64 and XP 32.

I thought the redesign in 5.6 would have solved it, but alas, it still happened. Is there a debug version I can download to output the results as it tries to make the database?
(There's around 10-18k songs, so I can't really narrow it down in a simple fashion)

Edit:
Wrong forum. Any chance we can move this to bug reports? I wish I could write reproducible steps, but you'd need to figure out which mp3 is doing it, first.

[DJ Egg]

Hmm, strange....

I guess it could be down to some corrupt file in your media library....

With Winamp closed, have you tried deleting: %AppData%\WInamp\Plugins\Gracenote cddbplm.gcf/idx/pdb & elists.db?
(cddb.db should be safe to keep)

[stopasking]

It's the same for me... before I upgraded I posted this thread: http://forums.winamp.com/showthread.php?t=324407 and was told to upgrade. I did a complete fresh install, removing all traces on winamp first. Installed 5.6 and made my settings. Installed ONLY one plugin, and that is the official last.fm plugin. Imported music, then scanned, whilst computer completely idle (my library takes forever to scan, so I just leave it)

And bang it crashed again. Exactly the same fashion as my first post, albeit with some details changed.

For a reminder of my report (becouse it is still valid) and some explanation of the changes (see the bold parts), I quote my post from there instead of bumping that thread:

- My library is ~38000 songs. I keep them "clean" and well-tagged. All files are mp3.

- Winamp has internet access

- It crashes only at the stage 4/4, at seemingly random location, and if "more info" is clicked it mentions nde.dll <----- on 5.6 it mentions instead "msvcr90.dll"

- I delete the 3 files it creates (cddbplm.pdb, cddbplm.idx, cddbplm.gcf) between each try, as instructed, (or it fails to initialize).

This happens:
It gets flawlessly to step 4/4 every time, then sometime in the scan comes the windows error that winamp crashed. After it first happened, I went over my library to make sure nothing had strange characters in filenames etc. Even ran that nifty little tool "mp3val" on my library. Scanned again. Crashed again.

Then I checked how far it came. it was 12000 something (don't remember now) and I looked in another tool, which can follow the path structures, what album song lied there. Turns out, it was the first song of an album. I removed this album from my library - scanned again. Crashed again. This time on 14000 something. I looked what song would be in this position and once again, it was the first song of an album. I figured the scan choked on theese albums, so for test I cleared my winamp, and put only theese two albums in, and scanned. Sad thing is that the scan actually passed when only thoose two albums were in. So it never were problems with files - it is a problem with Winamp.
[On 5.6 the scan went to ~28000 scanned tracks - I have not yet checked on what file it broke]

So now I come here. I really want to use this feature can someone shed some light on this? At a glance, it would seem like Winamp "gets tired" after lots of songs have been scanned at once, and then crash, but I don't know how viable accusation that is :P

Except for the parts in bold, the problem stays the same. Now what?

[DrO]

Installed ONLY one plugin, and that is the official last.fm plugin.

that isn't a valid clean install if that plug-in is present (though i wouldn't have expected it to affect things but you never know).

as for why it's crashing on the first item on a new album i've really no idea, am sure it'll be pointed out the relevant people to have a look at it though.

might also be an idea to provide some of the filepaths (or the structure of them) to get an idea of how your library + files are configured (may help, may not).

-daz

[stopasking]

that isn't a valid clean install if that plug-in is present (though i wouldn't have expected it to affect things but you never know).

I guess you're right... I will remember this in upcoming tests

might also be an idea to provide some of the filepaths (or the structure of them) to get an idea of how your library + files are configured (may help, may not).

Right. It is a simple structure which I try keep free from strange symbols etc. It goes like this:

F:\Music\mp3s\<Genre>\<Artist>\<Year> - <Album>\<Track#> - <Songtitle>.mp3

And if there is unorthodox symbols in filenames/path, I edit them away and keep them only in the tag. I got extra picky with this after this winamp problem. The only "unorthodox" filenames I currently leave unchanged is japanese titles. In japanese characters and such. This can't be a problem, can it? I mean, Winamp indexes/plays stuff with japanese characters just fine. With the time it takes to scan with this thing, combined with the annoying job of editing filenames, I would not want to test such a thing.

[EDIT]
Just throwing ideas around. Can this be a memory issue? It would explain plenty of things. Like the fact that it seems to give in (both on 5.56 and 5.6) of some kind of exhaustion. It could also explain why people seem to get it only after a fair bit of scanning. And why some have no problems at all with bigger libraries (different memory/os perhaps).

I don't know how winamp is built, so I don't know if this is likely or not, but I can mention that my winamp 5.6 is on average at 40mb of memory or so, but I have seen it on more or less idle states at well over 100mb. And I also noticed during the problematic scan (I got a chance to look at it briefly - it was on stage 4, ~20000 files scanned) that the ram usage was well over 500mb at this point. Which is fine, i'm not complaining or anything, but it might be worth mentioning, in case this is not normal behaviour.

I have windows xp sp3 32-bit, 3gb memory

[stopasking]

couldnt some winamp dev respond about this? I would really hate having to start looking for alternatives to this great software

[DrO]

i'm sure this will be passed onto the dev responsible for the playlist generator stuff (if it hasn't been already) but it is the weekend and some sensible people have breaks from doing any development (need to remember that is a good idea for myself to do as well at some point).

-daz

[M3wThr33]

My best solution so far is to make the playlist using Genius in iTunes and then drag it over to Winamp.

[M3wThr33]

Now it looks like the Playlist Generator doesn't even appear in 5.601. Did a fresh re-install.

[DJ Egg]

@M3wThr33

With Wnamp closed, unzip ml_plg.dll (from the attachment) to the %ProgramFiles%\Winamp\Plugins folder

Should fix the problem with plg not appearing under Win2k/XP

Note, this isn't a fix for any crash you might be experiencing.
We could probably do with a crash report from 5.59 beta first....

_________________________________________

[stopasking]

Right, so I'm gonna reinstall Winamp again just to get it to save a simple freaking log?

As funny as that sounds, but no thanks. Looking back at some older threads around here this feature seems to have been broken for several years anyway so I wonder if such efforts would really go anywhere.

And there are plenty of other music players with this kind of functionality, that works perfectly. I recently tried Winamp for the first time in like 10 years or so, thinking that it would be something special, considering it used to be so cutting egde back in the days. But it wasn't really "all that" anyway, to say the least, even if one ignores this problem.

Seems like time really stood still here. Shame too - this thing was a big part of my childhood!

Anyway off to something else. This is a "bugmenot" account btw.

[DrO]

you don't have to re-install it, just extract a copy of winamp.exe and gen_crasher.dll from the beta installer (say using 7-zip) into your current folder (backing up winamp.exe as applicable) and then send / attach the crash report generated.

if no one on the team can reproduce the crash and most people have had a similar attitude then how can it be fixed? seeing as the plug-in is being worked on currently as the general improvements have shown then this is the best chance to have it fixed.

but if you're not bothered then so be it (will have to remember that in future). Egg and I are only trying to do what can be done to get the right information for the people working on this so it can be fixed once and for all.

-daz

[M3wThr33]

Yeah, I appreciate the attention and I know what it takes. (I'm a developer, too)
I'll see what I can get with the debug version.

[stopasking]

(will have to remember that in future)

No please do not. As I said (and this is why I said it), this is a "bugmenot" account, meaning someone shared this account on bugmenot.com for users to be able to skip registration. As it happens, I have not posted any of theese 300+ posts this account has, so the person you may or may not know is not me so please hold no grudges

Also, I did not intend to be rude in my post or anything, but "Egg" couldn't even bother to answer my memory report (a music player using like 500mb of ram? that's rather strange in my mind) and instead answer with a seemingly generic reply, which, yes, seems bothersome for me becouse 1) I'm no longer intending to use Winamp. 2) This scan takes forever (12 hours+) and it's annoying letting it chew away on my disk like that. 3) I assumed Id even have to reinstall to lower version (thanks for correction). 4) One would imagine from all the threads around here about this problem, that someone would already have sent a crashlog about it right. Making it a useless effort, unless it's a local mp3 file being the culprit (which, by now, I seriously doubt).

But if you actually have no such logs (I didn't know), then obviously I shall try to provide one, seeing as it would be a good opportunity if anything for you guys to fix it.

For what it's worth, thanks daz for the instructions for how to put the beta version in I will try it as soon as i'm able.

[DJ Egg]

@stopasking

DrO was answering your posts, I was replying to the OP (M3wThr33).
I read your posts, but didn't (intentionally) ignore you.

We just need some way to reproduce the problem, or at least have a proper crash report.

PLG hasn't ever crashed for me, so I can only assume that it's some filename/metadata issue or file corruption issue or similar.
Hopefully the crash log from 5.59 beta will reveal more....

Winamp\winamp.exe
Winamp\Plugins\reporter.exe
Winamp\Plugins\gen_crasher.dll

The scan could be quite cpu/memory intensive, especially on older systems, although it hardly uses anything on mine (i7 920 / 6GB DDR3).
Whatever the case, it'll be a fraction of what the old Predixis/MusicIP plugin used (90%+ cpu, full scan took days).

Hopefully we can work out any last few niggling issues.
Though it looks more likely to be a Gracenote SDK/Library or NDE (database) issue rather than a plg one....
we shall see.

Sidenote1:
Re: bugmenot
Ahh, that may explain why one of your registered IP#s is on the known/blocked spammers list....

Sidenote2:
The 5.601 installers have been silently updated with ml_plg load fix for Win2k/XP.