beaTunes News

Friday, January 27, 2012

beaTunes 3.5 Early Access 6: Close to Release

beaTunes2 logoMostly, 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:

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:

posted at 07:24 0 comments

Thursday, January 19, 2012

beaTunes 3.5 Early Access 5: small and BIG Fixes

beaTunes2 logoTesting 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:

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: , ,

posted at 08:53 0 comments

Thursday, January 12, 2012

beaTunes 3.5 Early Access 4: Improved Inspections, Faster Contextshop

beaTunes2 logoPretty much all prio1 3.5 todos are addressed. That means, we are getting closer to the final 3.5 release. Today's EA4 release features a couple of bug fixes as well as some performance improvements for the context shop code. The Order by action should work again, (Album Version) issues can now be ignored, and the different rating inspection is somewhat improved to take track ids into account.

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:

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: ,

posted at 08:56 0 comments

Tuesday, January 10, 2012

Increasing General Lookup Performance

beaTunes2 logoYou might remember my post back from October, in which I promised to keep working on server-side performance. Well, as you might have noticed, upgrading the master server didn't happen in November... However, I didn't drop the ball and in the past couple of weeks finally found the time to actually get this done. Today the new master processing server went live. And so far the numbers look promising.

For those of you who care about technical details: The load on the server is disk-bound. That means, that neither the main memory, nor the CPU are the bottleneck, but rather the speed of input/output operations to disk (as opposed to the network). How do I know this? Simple. Just run the Unix tool top and check the I/O wait load (wa), i.e. the amount of time the CPU waits for I/O operations to complete. If that number is substantially higher than user CPU time (us) and system CPU time (sy), you just know that disk I/O is the limiting factor. Of course there are multiple approaches one can take to increase throughput. E.g. split up the load onto multiple servers, don't write as much or defer writing, attempt to cache smarter, decrease I/O wait, ... For now, I chose the last option, i.e. decrease I/O wait by adding more hardware. What used to be a RAID1 with two disks, is now a RAID0 with seven disks. You might correctly observe that this kind of system is prone to disk failures, as the failure rate for RAID0 with seven disks is something to take seriously... And yes. It's true. But for now I'm willing to take the risk, because the MySQL replication slave I'm running, is hosted on a RAID1 system and its backup is kept somewhere completely different. So even when the master system goes belly up, I can restore the system quickly based on the slower but way more reliable backup server. Plus, there is always the option to create a hot standby for the master, running the same setup.

I'll know in a couple of days, if the system is up for the load. But as I said, things look very promising so far.

Labels:

posted at 10:57 3 comments