beaTunes News

For quite a while now, I have been working on beaTunes 2.1 - and no - it's not done, yet. But I'm making some progress. Enough to post an Early Access release to get some feedback from you.

So what's the idea behind 2.1?

Obviously it's not supposed to reinvent the whole app - otherwise I would have called it beaTunes 3. But nevertheless, it introduces some bigger changes under the hood. These two are the most important ones:

• Java 6 support for OS X
• 64 Bit support for OS X

Both of these are supposed to be completely invisible to you, but will still make a difference in the long run, as Apple moves more and more towards 64 Bit (Snow Leopard being a big step into that direction) and discontinues QuickTime as we knew it.
A side-effect of these changes will be a change in system requirements. Because of its lack of certain 64 Bit APIs, OS X 10.4 is not supported anymore.

Additionally there are going to be small improvements, e.g. the duplicate detection now differentiates between songs that merely have the same title and those that also have the same album name. It also offers better solutions - e.g. keep the mp3 song with the highest bit-rate.

Another improvement will be a feature that lets you take advantage of additional online resources. This feature is not enabled yet and will lead to an error message (connection refused).

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 we make a reasonable effort)
• This version will cease to function 2 weeks after its release
• You cannot buy this version

And here are the download links:

• beaTunes-2-1-0-EA1 (OS X 10.5.8 or later)
• beaTunes-2-1-0-EA1 (Windows XP or later)

Important

This EA version changes beaTunes' internal database layout quite a bit, which takes a while. Do not interrupt this process, even when it takes very long! On OS X, beaTunes 2.0 will not be able to use the database anymore, after you ran beaTunes 2.1. If you intend to try 2.1 and then go back to 2.0, make sure you back up the database (it's in ~/Library/Application Support/beaTunes/Database)! You also might want to check out this article about exporting beaTunes data.

Please provide feedback!

Labels: Early Access, Release