beaTunes News

Today's Early Access release 3 almost didn't happen. First, the Security Update 2008-004/Safari 3.1.2 wrecked our Subversion server, then our hosting service had a power outage (which wouldn't have been all that bad) combined with a backup power failure (which turned out to be pretty bad). So with most of our infrastructure down the drain, things looked pretty bleak as of this morning.

Fortunately, since then, thing's have improved. Our Subversion server is back online (even our continuous integration system Continuum is running) and since you can read this blog entry, our hosting provider managed to get things going again.

But let's talk about more pleasant things. EA3 is out and it should be a blast for Windows users. Yep, that's right, we finally got to do something Big for You! The major improvement in EA3 is analysis speed. We changed our Windows decoding/decompression code to mirror what we have done a while ago on OS X using CoreAudio. This should lead to much quicker analysis (BPM and color) and an overall much more responsive system during analysis. And we'd love to get feedback about this! Let us know, whether the speedup is as great as we think it is... Also, let us know, if any files bomb, i.e. lead to crashes. Changing the decoder is always a tricky thing and in the past we have run into a number of issues with people's audio files. There is definitely some obscure stuff out there...

The other thing we got to improve is the typo inspector. Simply put: Expect fewer false positives.

So - 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 versions
• This version will cease to function 2 weeks after its release
• You cannot buy this version

Just so that there is no doubt about it: EA3 isn't even a beta version.

And here are the download links:

• beaTunes-2-0-0-EA3 (OS X)
• beaTunes-2-0-0-EA3 (Windows)

Note for EA2 users

EA3 does not change the database schema introduced in EA2. So if you had EA2 running successfully, EA3 will not try to migrate any data. If you never got EA2 to work, because of database issues, you are probably best of simply renaming or deleting the database folder (see EA2 post for exact names) and the file beaTunes2 Music Library.xml before running EA3. This will recreate the database and import old color/BPM etc. data.

Labels: Early Access, Windows