beaTunes News

Just for the record: beaTunes 3.5.5 is out! This is mainly a maintenance release fixing a couple of minor issues and improving some other things. Enjoy!

Labels: Release

Just a quick note, to let you know, that beaTunes is on sale today for 43% off at MuPromo. Please share!

Labels: Sale

After a couple of months of Early Access releases, I'm happy to announce that beaTunes 3.5 has finally been released today. You can download it here.

For those of you who haven't been following Early Access release notes, here's the short summary of what has changed:

• Lower memory consumption
• Faster audio processing
• Faster startup
• Faster bulk fetching from internal DB
• Faster color calculation
• New color algorithm
• Audio processing pipeline now completely Jipes-based
• Parallelized online resource processing and local analysis
• Faster song deletion in big libraries
• Several inspection improvements
• Improved context shop performance
• Fixed several chart related issues
• Improved Windows installer
• Windows version now uses Java 7

Many of these changes are pretty self-explanatory - most of them have to do with performance, which has been the declared goal of this update. If you'd like to read more about performance improvements, I suggest going back to earlier EA posts, starting with EA1.

Additionally, I'd like to single out two aspects of this release: Color and Memory.

Color

beaTunes 3.5 features a new color algorithm. This means that color computed with earlier versions of beaTunes have a different meaning. Red computed with beaTunes 3 does not mean the same thing as Red computed with beaTunes 3.5. If you are using the color feature, you should re-analyze color for all songs in your collection to get coherent values.

Memory

I made an effort to change beaTunes and its architecture in a way that keeps memory usage low. This allowed me to change the default max heap setting to a much lower value than 3.0 used to have. This is advantageous, because it lowers the overall stress on your system. Especially users of old computers and those with little physical RAM (~2GB) will benefit. However, if you have a big library (>10,000 songs), at some point you may run into memory issues. Should that happen, a little message box will pop up, pointing you to this page. The problem is usually easy to fix and the mentioned page will tell you how. Of course you can also always contact me at http://help.beatunes.com/.

Thanks

Last but not least, I would like to thank those of you who contributed with valuable feedback to this release. Without you, it wouldn't have been possible.

Thank you.

Labels: Release

So, I hope this is the last non-final version I'm posting. As you might have noticed, it's not labeled Early Access anymore, but rather Release Candidate. As such, it does not automatically expire, but behaves like the real thing.

As always, there is some more info in the NOTES.txt file.

And here are the download links:

• beaTunes-3-5-0-RC1 (OS X 10.5.8 or later)
• beaTunes-3-5-0-RC1 (Windows XP or later)

Important

For those still using beaTunes 2: beaTunes 3.x changes beaTunes' internal database layout quite a bit, which takes a while. Do not interrupt this process, even if it takes very long! beaTunes 2.x will not be able to use the database anymore, after you ran beaTunes 3.x. If you intend to try 3.x and then go back to 2.x, make sure you back up the database before you try 3.x (depending on your OS it's in ~/Library/Application Support/beaTunes/Database, C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Local\tagtraum industries\beaTunes\database or C:\Documents and Settings\<username>\Local Settings\Application Data\tagtraum industries\beaTunes\database)! You also might want to check out this article about exporting beaTunes data.

Feedback

Please provide feedback! Let me know what does not work. Especially audio decoding problems, OutOfMemoryErrors and UI hangs and hiccups.

Thanks.

PS: The update from 3.0 to 3.5 will be free.

Labels: Early Access

We're having a sale! Get the current version of beaTunes at a greatly reduced price over at Bits Du Jour!

(offer only valid on 2/1/2011)

Labels: Sale

Mostly, to bridge the gap until 3.5 is actually released, here's EA6. Hardly any changes - so not much to write about.

As always, there is some more info in the NOTES.txt file.

Alright, here's the obligatory warning: Before downloading and installing this, please make sure you understand what Early Access means:

• Absolutely no warranty for whatever
• Features may or may not work, appear, and disappear
• It may not be possible to migrate data to future or previous versions (even though I make a reasonable effort)
• This version will cease to function one week after its release
• You cannot buy this version

And here are the download links:

• beaTunes-3-5-0-EA6 (OS X 10.5.8 or later)
• beaTunes-3-5-0-EA6 (Windows XP or later)

Important

For those still using beaTunes 2: beaTunes 3.x changes beaTunes' internal database layout quite a bit, which takes a while. Do not interrupt this process, even if it takes very long! beaTunes 2.x will not be able to use the database anymore, after you ran beaTunes 3.x. If you intend to try 3.x and then go back to 2.x, make sure you back up the database before you try 3.x (depending on your OS it's in ~/Library/Application Support/beaTunes/Database, C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Local\tagtraum industries\beaTunes\database or C:\Documents and Settings\<username>\Local Settings\Application Data\tagtraum industries\beaTunes\database)! You also might want to check out this article about exporting beaTunes data.

Feedback

Please provide feedback! Let me know what does not work. Especially audio decoding problems, OutOfMemoryErrors and UI hangs and hiccups.

Thanks.

PS: The update from 3.0 to 3.5 will be free.

Labels: Early Access

Testing pays off. Always. Latest proof of this truism is a subtle but nasty bug I found in one of beaTunes' BPM algorithms. It's fixed as of EA5, but earlier 3.5-EA releases definitely produced bad results. Other changes in this release are some small inspection improvements, but not much else on the beaTunes side of things.

That said, the Windows version now comes with a bundled Java 7 runtime.

As always, there is some more info in the NOTES.txt file.

Alright, here's the obligatory warning: Before downloading and installing this, please make sure you understand what Early Access means:

• Absolutely no warranty for whatever
• Features may or may not work, appear, and disappear
• It may not be possible to migrate data to future or previous versions (even though I make a reasonable effort)
• This version will cease to function one week after its release
• You cannot buy this version

And here are the download links:

• beaTunes-3-5-0-EA5 (OS X 10.5.8 or later)
• beaTunes-3-5-0-EA5 (Windows XP or later)

Important

For those still using beaTunes 2: beaTunes 3.x changes beaTunes' internal database layout quite a bit, which takes a while. Do not interrupt this process, even if it takes very long! beaTunes 2.x will not be able to use the database anymore, after you ran beaTunes 3.x. If you intend to try 3.x and then go back to 2.x, make sure you back up the database before you try 3.x (depending on your OS it's in ~/Library/Application Support/beaTunes/Database, C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Local\tagtraum industries\beaTunes\database or C:\Documents and Settings\<username>\Local Settings\Application Data\tagtraum industries\beaTunes\database)! You also might want to check out this article about exporting beaTunes data.

Feedback

Please provide feedback! Let me know what does not work. Especially audio decoding problems, OutOfMemoryErrors and UI hangs and hiccups.

Thanks.

PS: The update from 3.0 to 3.5 will be free.

Labels: BPM, Early Access, Windows