test some new shit

[peter]

[UPDATE]
Steve rules.
thread continued here.
[/UPDATE]

i've written a replacement for standard Winamp2's waveOut plugin, you can get it here. it will be probably bundled with the next Winamp2 setup (v2.79, v2.8, whatever); i'd like as many people as possible to run it on their computers to verify if it doesn't do anything stupid (but it really shouldn't). as far as i know, it fixes freeze while seeking on WinXP. it has been tested on win2k/sblive, win2k/ac97 and win98se/sblive (worked perfectly, except for some stupid behaviors specific to lame win2k's waveOut implementation).
ah yeah, sourcecode is included; if you find any probs, feel free to fix them yourself :P

[edit] TADA, my evil DirectSound goes to Winamp setup too, please test it . (WA3 version will be used as default output plugin in final WA3).

[edit2] i've packed most of new stuff into one setup file.

note: useless replies will be deleted, you have been warned.

[Somebody]

I've been using your Winamp2 waveOut plugin since yesterday and everything is running fine.

Just updated to your latest beta (6 at the time of htis post) and it is great.

Uh yeah, system being win98se/sblive.

[SNYder]

Re: test some new shit

Originally posted by peter
as far as i know, it fixes freeze while seeking on WinXP.

AH KICK ASS! I didn't know this was a wave out bug! Hell I thought I was the only one suffering from it YES!

It happened whenever I would seek over and over again really fast. I'll test this new one out. Thanks!

[edit]at first inspection... both Winamp2&3 seem to be compleately cured of that nasty freezing bug!!! YESSS!!! now i can seek like crazy again!jrsagosa lgjugbugndsn YAYAYbsghbas;gj WOOO!!!

[krsna77]

The new plugins work just fine, except that the new Waveout plugin breaks my Gapless Output plugin.

Nitpicky, I know, but how am I supposed to listen to full albums in Ogg Vorbis with these stinking gaps? Arg!

BTW, when is Winamp gonna include gapless output by _default_? (XMMS does this already). I'm aware that MP3 is crippled in this area, but other formats can handle it!

Just my $0.02. Good job.

[Sawg]

Use DirectSound, it has crossfade built in.

[Wheeljack]

I get illegal operation errors exitting Winamp using either output plugin playing standard wave files. Seems to play ok tho'.

edit: Oops, I was using Winamp 2.76. I threw in 2.78 and no such errors occur anymore. My bad. {/action: smack own head}

[krsna77]

sawg:
Use DirectSound, it has crossfade built in.

Thanks for the tip.

Anyway, this is now a bit off-topic, but I will state that crossfading, and gapless playback, are two completely separate things.

The former blends two songs together during transition, which is great for random playback and mixes. The latter can play the songs of any album in order, without sacrificing integrity, exactly as the album was meant to be enjoyed, by simply removing the gaps between songs completely.

Try listening to "The Wall" w/ crossfading - totally ruins the experience.

Gapless playback capability is one (of many) reasons that I now encode w/ Ogg Vorbis as opposed to MP3. And gapless playback capability is one advantage of XMMS over Winamp. But that's neither here nor there.

In anycase, to get back on topic, the new waveout plugin works just fine for me (Win2k), and seems to be quite good, despite breaking the beloved Gapless Output plugin.

Take care.

[randum]

while on the gapless topic

While on the crossfade/gapless topic, let me quote you a post I recently made on another forum, that I unfortunately did not get any useful responses to. Hopefully someone in here has some suggestions:

Lame has had preliminary --nogap support for some time now, but I have not yet figured out a way to successfully play back resulting files totally gaplessly - has anyone else yet figured out how to do this? When I encode with --nogap, the resulting files can be combined to a single file, which does play back gaplessly, proving that the encoding does successfully achieve gaplessness, however all current playback solutions seem to insert some blank frames between tracks at some point in the playback process.

I've tried all the winamp gapless output plugins, which work by leaving the wave device open between tracks and not inserting any silence - using these, uncompressed wav files, as well as ogg files, do playback gaplessly, implying that the output plugin is functioning as advertised. When playing back --nogap mp3s however, there is a small audible gap. Since the only thing that has changed between these scenarios is the input format, my conclusion is that the silence must be being introduced in the input plugin. I have tried Winamp's stock nitrane decoder, as well as the MAD decoder, and another mpg123 based decoder plugin, all with the same results. Does anyone know of another mp3 decoder winamp input plugin which does not introduce any silent samples? Or is there another explanation for this behavior I haven't thought of?

[Sawg]

I believe Peter mentioned somewhere before that the gap come form Winamp closes and re-opens the output plug-in between tracks, this causes a gap no matter the input plug-in. I believe his new waveOut and DirectSound plug-ins no longer do this.

[randum]

Hmmmm... if that were what was causing this, then why would wav's and ogg's still play gaplessly? They still go through the output plugin, so if thats where the gap was being introduced, they should exhibit it as well, yet they don't seem to. Regardless, I will try these updated output plugs and see what effect they have - hopefully I'm misunderstanding something, and this will fix it

[peter]

about gapless playback - my out_ds2 does that very well (but gapless stuff is considered a really rough hack and it will be probably never bundled with Winamp).

[randum]

As I suspected, these plugins did not solve the problem - there is still a minisule gap in playback, even with gapless mode enabled in out_ds2. This isn't a flaw in the output plugin though - just like the previously existing gapless output plugins, this one doesn't introduce any gap of its own, but it doesn't do anything to compensate for the gap added by other phases of the playback process (i.e. the input plugin). Now I suppose it would be theoretically possible to write an output plugin which was aware of the input plugin being used, and how many silent samples that plugin adds, and slice them out of the stream... although the superior way to do this would just be to write input plugins which don't suffer from this bug. Hmmmm.......

[peter]

my out_wave is opensourced, feel free to haxor it the way you like it.
i might make (and release with source) gapless variation of it if i get that bored so you can do your evil experiments on it. if you really need gapless playback, i suggest that you use WA3 instead.

[randum]

well unfortunately my evil experiments will have to wait until I have a chunk of spare time to familiarize myself with the winamp plugin API.

As to WA3... it is able to successfully do gapless output? I never thought to try it.

/me heads to the download page to see for himself

[peter]

wa3 is gapless by design (input plugins no longer control output plugins, no more reopening output between tracks).