in_vgm Replay Gain beta

[Maxim]

It looks like you have some old pre-Unicode Media Library data and the setting to bypass that data is turned off. Either:
- go to the ML, find the files with ??? on them, right-click -> read metadata and try again, or
- look in the options (I think it's in Local Media) for something about using ML tag data for the playlist, turn that off

I'm assuming you have the current version of Winamp (5.34) and you haven't disabled the Media Library. Those are things I don't normally test against.

[Dark Pulse]

Nope, I just play straight from the playlists.

Putting a track in the Media Library caused the Japanese stuff to show up, but in Winamp, still Question Marks.

[Maxim]

Well, I dunno. I just installed Winamp (full) to a computer that's never had it installed, and the only settings I had to change were to tell in_vgm I prefer Japanese tags, and to turn off FreeType rendering in the Modern Skins -> Font Rendering section*. This system has all the fonts but nothing else set differently from a regular XP box in English.

I also hacked it back to just the minimum plugins (in_vgm and gen_ff, enough to load files with fancy skinning but not even play anything) and it still worked. So maybe you have some screwy settings I can't figure out. Try backing up your Winamp settings dir (might be application data\winamp, might be program files\winamp) and doing a fresh install (ie. nuke it first) with whatever flavour of 5.34 takes your fancy, and see if it works then. If so, it was a setting somewhere in Winamp; if not, it's a setting somewhere in Windows.

Part of the reason MP3s work and VGMs don't is that I'm trying to be backwards compatible with old versions of Winamp which don't understand Unicode. in_mp3 doesn't since it is always matching the version of Winamp it shipped with. Something's making Winamp query the non-Unicode interface in in_vgm when it should be using the Unicode one.l


* Alternative: leave FreeType on and use the font mapper to make it use some fonts that actually have Japanese characters in them where needed. The playlist ought to work no matter what, since it doesn't use FreeType.

[Dark Pulse]

A nuke and reinstall fixed it... but I found out what it was. Advanced Title Formatting was off.

Problem solved then, but at least you gave me the right pointers.

Now if only my mIRC Winamp script supported Unicode... I'd be fucking happy, since I got Unicode to display fine in that as well, except from Winamp, due to the plugin being pre-Unicode for both mIRC and Winamp. Any chance you feel like making one or hacking the source of it?

[Maxim]

I'm glad that's cleared up. I didn't work on the non-ATF stuff for years, it's fairly rubbish anyway.

[Dark Pulse]

I'm glad that's cleared up. I didn't work on the non-ATF stuff for years, it's fairly rubbish anyway.

All good and dandy, but one thing I remembered once I noticed it with ATF on... if a field is empty (As it is for many an Author Tag on our sets - check out the pirate games for example) it just uses the trackname - perhaps make it substitute something if there's a blank, like it does with ATF off? (Which defaults to "Unknown author")

[Maxim]

That's your Winamp settings. There's a setting somewhere in there that makes it try to guess the metadata when the tag's lacking, by looking at the filename, and of course most of the time it gets it wrong. The solution is to find the setting that tells it to only guess if there's no metadata at all rather than a few fields missing.

At some point I want to try to implement some more advanced title formatting in in_vgm which might enable some more advanced stuff like custom "no artist" text. Personally, I have a custom ATF string that works fine.