skin trouble

[muslimfaithboo]

Ok I have to admit I didnt install the program. I like to try and use programs in a portable way. I just unzipped it(unpacked it) to a folder and just about everything works well.
There is just one thing and I am not sure if its because I didnt install it normally.
When I put a new skin (made for passap) in the skins folder it shows up in passap but when I select it I cant get it to install. The old passap dissappears off the screen for a second and then comes back the same with no change.
This also happend with ver. 2.5 I never got it to change a skin from default.

[George Boudouris]

If when you select the new skin it doesn't load and instead it loads the default skin it means that some problem happened with the skin loading and so it loads the default skin again.
I have programmed it to do that, so the only thing we need to find out is with which skin you have the problem and

Can you tell me with which skin you have problem and which version of passap do you use?

Also tell me which operating system you use

[muslimfaithboo]

ok passap version is the latest but it was the same problem with 2.5 (which I still have)
the skins I tried were:
brushedrockskin
waterskin
wmp11skin
all were the psk type
using windows xp sp2

[George Boudouris]

These skins work fine on my PC and netbook.

The only problem i can imagine is the following:

If you have extracted the program to a folder that it's name uses non english characters then it's possible the program not to be able to load the skins since the delphi version i have doesn't support unicode so far

In order to check if this is the problem you must copy the program to a folder like this :

"C:\Temp\Passion Audio Player" or even better in

"C:\Program Files\Passion Audio Player"

This is the only problem i can think since it's the first time in all these years that someone reports a problem with loading skins.

Also try downloading the skins again in case the skin files are corrupted.

I hope i helped

Tell me if it worked please.

[muslimfaithboo]

sorry stilll not working.
the folder was this path:
D:\PROGRAM FILES\PORTABLE APPS IN HERE\AUDIO\Players only\passaps\Passion Audio Player

however as that is a long path I tried moving it to
C:\Program Files\Passion Audio Player
but it still didnt work
I tried using the "load skin" button and just double clicking the skin name in the list.
I also tried downloading the skins again and tried another skin called Blueskin.
I remember now I couldnt get a skin to load with version 2.5 and so I installed it normally (not portable) but it still didnt work.

[George Boudouris]

I just downloaded the BLUE skin and the WMP 11 skin and they worked fine on my PC.

Can you please zip the folder "passaps\Passion Audio Player" to a zip file preserving the directory structure and email it to me at [e-mail] so that i check all the files of Passion Audio Player on my PC?

[JM-DG]

When using passap skins you need to unzip them into the skins folder if not (if you keep them zipped) passap will load them as winamp skins and it will fail.

(I know this happened to me while designing skins )

So the extension of the file must be .psk and not .zip.
Cheerz!

[muslimfaithboo]

I have sent the folder in zip form
@ JM the skins were put in the correct folder with .psk extension
when they didnt work I also tried putting a winamp skin in to see if that would load. It didnt

[George Boudouris]

Ok here is the solution.

In your Passion Audio Player installation some directories are missing and they are critical.

So here is what you have to do.
1. Go to the directory "Passion Audio Player" and create the directory :

"tempunzipped"

2. Then go to the directory "tempunzipped" and create the directories:

"info"
and
"skins"

3. After that you will have for example these directories:

"Passion Audio Player\skins"
"Passion Audio Player\tempunzipped"
"Passion Audio Player\tempunzipped\info"
"Passion Audio Player\tempunzipped\skins"

and of course all skins will work fine.

The "tempunzipped" and it's subdirectories are critical because they are used to unzip temporary all zip files and psk files.

There are also some other directories missing from your installation and maybe some other functions will have problem to work properly such as the recording and these directories are important too.

So i would suggest to download passap26.exe from www.passionplayer.com site and run it and let the installer do all the installing and the creation of all directories.

Thanks for posting

[JM-DG]

Hey George! A good thing to do would be to check if the temp folder exists and create them if they are missing. (Just use the DirectoryExists mkdir functions of Delphi) This will prevent these type of errors

[George Boudouris]

I know mate but i didn't do it because i didn't want to slowdown the program.
I use this function very much in my code

However i didn't want to slowdown the unzip procedure.

Maybe a good idea would be to do this check on program start up

[JM-DG]

Of course I meant at the beginning of the program
There's always a limit to abuse... I guess

[George Boudouris]

Yea there is