Support

Headphones on, then Start.

1. Go through the three welcome screens — what you hear, what the map shows, and headphones — and tap Listen to a disk.
2. On the Disks tab, tap Start on one of the two demos at the top. The sound begins within a few seconds.
3. The Pass tab shows the cluster map and the transport controls. Instruments measures what the disk is doing; Settings holds the sound mix.

The welcome screens can be shown again from Settings → See the welcome again.

I hear nothing, or almost nothing.

Check these in order:

1. Is a pass playing? Nothing sounds until you tap Start on a demo or pick one of a disk’s actions. A phone call, or headphones pulled out, pauses the pass on purpose: the Pass tab then says Pass interrupted at… with the cause, and Resume carries on where it stopped.
2. The volume. Turn it up with the side buttons while the pass plays. The Ring/Silent switch does not mute Winchester — like a music player, it plays in silent mode — so the switch is not the cause.
3. Where the audio goes. If Bluetooth headphones or a speaker are connected, the sound goes there. Control Center shows the current output.
4. The mix. In Settings → Sound and haptics, Haptics only turns the sound off by design, and the levels may have been lowered. Back to the original mix restores them.

Why does something take a few seconds?

Nothing in Winchester is downloaded or pre-recorded, so everything is made on the device the first time it is needed.

• Opening a period disk. Its volume is generated when you open its page — years of simulated use replayed through the file system’s allocator. The largest ones take a second or two.
• Starting a pass. The simulation runs a few seconds ahead of what you hear, so the sound begins a few seconds after Start.

A pass has been running for an hour. Is that right?

Very likely. The simulated disk sets the pace — each seek, rotational latency and transfer takes the time it would have taken — so a pass lasts from a few seconds to several hours, depending on the disk and the tool. The With which tool? screen shows the durations measured on the gallery disks; they are an order of magnitude, not a countdown.

• It keeps playing with the screen locked, and play and pause are in Control Center and on the lock screen. That is why the app runs audio in the background: only while a pass is playing, and it stops with it.
• To fall asleep to it, open Ambient mode from the Pass tab and set a Sleep timer; the pass fades out and stops at the time you chose.
• Starting another pass replaces the current one. There is one engine; the app asks before it replaces a pass in progress.
• Restarting from the beginning means starting the pass again: there is no rewind.

What is the difference between the defragmenters?

They do not do the same job. Each disk gets the tool of its era by default: on FAT, MS-DOS 6 DEFRAG for a 1993 disk and the Windows 95/98 Defragmenter after that — the same engine; on NTFS, the Windows XP Defragmenter for 2003, the Windows Vista Defragmenter for 2007 and the Windows 7 Defragmenter for 2012 — the XP engine, which leaves fragments of 64 MB and more where they are. The others are there to compare on exactly the same volume.

• Windows 95/98 Defragmenter packs everything to the start of the disk, in tree order, evicting whatever is in the way. Constant back-and-forth, and a “clack” at the edge of the platter for every file.
• Windows XP Defragmenter repairs files in pieces, smallest first, into the smallest hole that fits; empties a region when none does; then packs everything towards the start. Bursts of small 64 KB copies, a quiet stretch, then the long sweep of the packing.
• JkDefrag 3.36 tidies by zones and fills the holes without evicting; its seven other modes — sorts by name, size or date, packing to the start or the end — are under Advanced options.
• UltraDefrag 7.1.1 merges the small splinters without moving the big blocks.
• Frontier compaction (FAT), Thrifty merge (NTFS) and Smart tidying (both) were written for Winchester; Smart tidying aims at what is measured after the pass — the boot, the pieces, the holes.

The tools that only work on one format are marked FAT only or NTFS only on a volume of the other kind. Once a pass has finished, its Report lets you try another tool on the same starting volume and compare the two.

How do I build a disk of my own?

On the Disks tab, tap Build a used disk. Six steps: the hardware (year bought, capacity, spindle speed — the geometry is deduced), the format, the system and the software installed at the start, the period of use, the habits, and the seed. Then Build the disk.

There is no fragmentation slider, on purpose: you describe what the person did with the disk, and the fragmentation is what that history leaves behind. Another seed keeps the history and changes the exact order of the writes. Save to My disks keeps it; a saved disk can be deleted from the Disks tab.

English or French.

The app is in English and French and follows your device’s language. To use one without changing the other, open the iOS Settings app, find Winchester (under Apps on recent versions of iOS), and choose its Language.

Reporting something.

For a bug, include what you expected, what happened, your iOS version and device model, the disk and the tool, and roughly how far into the pass it happened. If the pass finished, the text from Share the report is worth more than any description.

Issue tracker

github.com/glandais/winchester/issues

Email

gabriel.landais@gmail.com

Source code

github.com/glandais/winchester