beaTunes News

After a couple of months of Early Access releases, I'm happy to announce that beaTunes 3.5 has finally been released today. You can download it here.

For those of you who haven't been following Early Access release notes, here's the short summary of what has changed:

• Lower memory consumption
• Faster audio processing
• Faster startup
• Faster bulk fetching from internal DB
• Faster color calculation
• New color algorithm
• Audio processing pipeline now completely Jipes-based
• Parallelized online resource processing and local analysis
• Faster song deletion in big libraries
• Several inspection improvements
• Improved context shop performance
• Fixed several chart related issues
• Improved Windows installer
• Windows version now uses Java 7

Many of these changes are pretty self-explanatory - most of them have to do with performance, which has been the declared goal of this update. If you'd like to read more about performance improvements, I suggest going back to earlier EA posts, starting with EA1.

Additionally, I'd like to single out two aspects of this release: Color and Memory.

Color

beaTunes 3.5 features a new color algorithm. This means that color computed with earlier versions of beaTunes have a different meaning. Red computed with beaTunes 3 does not mean the same thing as Red computed with beaTunes 3.5. If you are using the color feature, you should re-analyze color for all songs in your collection to get coherent values.

Memory

I made an effort to change beaTunes and its architecture in a way that keeps memory usage low. This allowed me to change the default max heap setting to a much lower value than 3.0 used to have. This is advantageous, because it lowers the overall stress on your system. Especially users of old computers and those with little physical RAM (~2GB) will benefit. However, if you have a big library (>10,000 songs), at some point you may run into memory issues. Should that happen, a little message box will pop up, pointing you to this page. The problem is usually easy to fix and the mentioned page will tell you how. Of course you can also always contact me at http://help.beatunes.com/.

Thanks

Last but not least, I would like to thank those of you who contributed with valuable feedback to this release. Without you, it wouldn't have been possible.

Thank you.

Labels: Release