beaTunes News

Wednesday, January 17, 2007

beaTunes 1.1.2 is out

beaTunes LogoWe just did a minor update - mainly for the OS X version of beaTunes. Some of you were annoyed by the strange Command-Click behavior beaTunes exposed on OS X, when working with song tables. It took us some time, but we finally realized that this is a(nother) bug in Apple's Swing look and feel. So we filed a bug report and hacked a workaround. And since this bug is really annoying, we decided to quickly push the fix out as an update - even though this update hardly contains any other changes.

For Windows users this means, that you can pretty much skip this release, since it does not contain relevant fixes for you.

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posted at 09:36 0 comments

Friday, January 5, 2007

Using Rulesets

Song Matching PreferencesThose of you who played around with beaTunes some more know, that it is quite easy to manipulate the rules for song matching in the Song Matching Preferences pane. We have been asked a couple of times, why beaTunes offers this feature. The answer is simple: The best match really depends on what kind of playlist you're building. Are you trying to create an 80s mix or is the BPM all that counts? Does tempo matter at all?

To accomodate these different situations, beaTunes always allowed you to change the parameters of the matching algorithm - making it possible to assign greater (or even negative) strength to certain matching rules. With beaTunes 1.1 we went one step further by introducing the concept of rulesets. They basically allow you to save sets of rule settings, so that you can easily switch back and forth between predefined rulesets.

To create a new ruleset, just click on the plus symbol on the right of the drop down list. beaTunes will prompt you for a name and when you click OK, the new ruleset is created. Simply adjust the sliders to your liking and you are done.

We hope you enjoy this new feature!

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posted at 11:16 1 comments

Wednesday, January 3, 2007

Create compelling Playlists incrementally

Many of you use beaTunes for analyzing BPM and color in order to use the Matchlist feature. But that's certainly not the only way to take advantage of beaTunes' unique song matching capabilities.

Another way to create cool sounding playlists is to take advantage of the Matching Songs window.

To do so, we first search for a particular song to start the playlist with (Monika Tanzband by Anajo) and create a New Playlist from Selection. Then we rename the playlist, select the one and only song, and open the Matching Songs window.

The Matching Song window shows songs that match the selected song in the main view according to the configured song matching preferences. To check, whether one of the shown songs is really a match, we play it in iTunes - then we drag it to the position in the playlist where we want to insert it and drop it.

Since the newly added song does not match the search filter, the song isn't shown until we remove the filter.

The video shows how we procede with this approach for 4 songs.

Not shown in the video is that the songs in the Matching Songs window are updated in real time when you change your song matching preferences. Give it a shot!

We hope you enjoy this powerful new way of building playlists.

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posted at 16:45 1 comments

Tuesday, January 2, 2007

New Year's Update: beaTunes 1.1.1

beaTunes LogoStart the New Year with updating to the just released beaTunes 1.1.1! We have fixed a number of smaller issues and improved some features (for details see release notes). Just as an example: When dragging songs on OS X a translucent representation of the songs is now displayed.

Get your free 7 day trial copy from:

http://www.beatunes.com/

And let us know, what you think!

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posted at 14:39 0 comments