beaTunes News

Admittedly, it's been taking forever. For quite a while I have been only talking about beaTunes 3. Well, today there is finally something to show.

For those of you not familiar with my typical release procedure, in the next couple of weeks there will be a series of releases I like to call Early Access (EA) . In quality they typically range between what is commonly referred to as alpha and beta versions. Their purpose is to provide me with valuable user feedback. In other words, I'm curious how well my creation fares in the real world.

So what's new in beaTunes 3?

A ton of things! To list just a few:

• Complete rewrite of the Inspection UI
• Replay Gain analysis task
• Support for non-iTunes libraries, i.e. music files residing in the filesystem

That last change - non-iTunes libraries - is what I'm most interested in getting feedback about. You can create non-iTunes libraries from the beaTunes general preferences. Note that while iTunes is no longer a requirement, QuickTime still is. If you don't already have QuickTime installed (e.g. as part of iTunes), you can get it here.

As always, there is some more info in the NOTES.txt file. Actually - since this is the first EA release for v3 - there is a lot more info in that 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 2 weeks after its release
• You cannot buy this version

And here are the download links:

• beaTunes-3-0-0-EA1 (OS X 10.5.8 or later)
• beaTunes-3-0-0-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! beaTunes 2.x will not be able to use the database anymore, after you ran beaTunes 3.0. If you intend to try 3.0 and then go back to 2.x, make sure you back up the database before you try 3.0 (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.

Please provide feedback!

Thanks.

Labels: Early Access