beaTunes News

As it turns out, Traktor Pro 2 unfortunately does not understand the M3U8 playlists exported by beaTunes (right-click on playlist, export), but only the less capable, bare-bones M3U format. Since Traktor is the software of choice for many, I naturally want beaTunes to play nicely with it. Therefore today's update contains two new playlist exporters: M3U and PLS. The M3U implementation makes sure to not include any comments or such and encodes its content as required by the "spec" with the ISO-8859-1/Latin 1 character set. This implies, that any non-Western characters not representable in this character set, must not be used in filenames. M3U8 on the other hand, uses Unicode and does not have this shortcoming. Just as a reminder: If you ever want to write your own exporter, you can.

Also, if you intend to use analysis results like BPM and key in third party apps like Traktor, please make sure to embed your results in the audio files. Otherwise Traktor won't be able to see them. To read more about where beaTunes stores its data, please read this article.

The second feature addition in 4.0.5 will hopefully make some people with lots of audiobooks happy. As requested, beaTunes now allows you to exclude audiobooks and iTunes U files from inspection and bulk analysis. To enable this, you have to check the appropriate boxes in both the analysis and inspection preferences (see screenshot).

As always, you can download the software from the download section of the website.

Most important changes in 4.0.5

• Fixed Discogs search URL.
• Fixed memory allocation issues in playlist sync.
• Added M3U playlist exporter.
• Added PLS playlist exporter.
• Added code to attempt import of mood tags on library creation.
• Added ability to ignore audiobooks and iTunes U files in inspection and analysis.
• Update of playlist sort order during analysis.
• Updated bundled JRE.
• Show OutOfMemory dialog at most once.
• Switched to G1 garbage collector.
• Updated Yosemite support.

Labels: Release, Traktor, Yosemite

Today I want to tell you about two new beaTunes 4 features I have not mentioned extensively yet. Both have to do with Last.fm.

Let's start with scrobbling. That's what Last.fm calls the process of logging the music you play in your Last.fm account. The data is used by Last.fm to recommend songs and artists to you. But more interestingly, it builds a listening history you can check out later. To configure beaTunes to scrobble to your Last.fm account, open the Preferences, then the Playback tab, and click on the Authorize button. This will open a Last.fm webpage in your default browser that lets you authorize beaTunes to send scrobbles to your account.

On Last.fm you can contribute by tagging songs, i.e. assigning keywords like "sad" or "danceable" to individual songs. And this brings us to the other Last.fm-related feature. Previously only available as plugin for beaTunes 3.5, version 4 allows you to import exactly those tags into beaTunes, which in turn helps you find songs and determine similarities. But that's not all. A number of commonly used tags have clear mood-related meanings. Good examples are "sad", "happy", or "depressing". beaTunes can take these tags and infer a mood value. Currently, this is the best way to automatically fill beaTunes' mood field. Which naturally can help you to build better playlists or find a certain kind of song.

Labels: Last.fm, Mood

It's been requested many times, but so far there just wasn't time. Now it's finally built-in: Configurable key formats. This means, that beaTunes can now display the tonal key in several different formats (traditional, OK-Notation, Wall Clock, etc). And for those, who are still unhappy with the built-in formats, there is an API that allows you to create custom renderers.

For those of you, who use the KeyToComment-plugin, please note that there is an update available via the beaTunes plugins preference pane. The plugin now features the ability to choose a key format.

To avoid misunderstandings: beaTunes still writes the same standard information to Id3 tags—exactly as it is defined in the specification. But it is now capable of displaying this information in multiple different ways. In other words, the Id3 TKEY frame will not suddenly contain information formatted in OK-Notation, just because it is rendered as such in the beaTunes user interface. This is to ensure interoperability between different applications.

Besides this addition, v4.0.4 contains some important bug fixes for Windows users who keep their music on network shares. Interesting for everybody is a fix for a bug that led to missing BPM values in iTunes when analyzing with Use online resources turned on.

As always, you can download the software from the download section of the website.

Most important changes in 4.0.4

• Fixed use online resources for BPM (0 values).
• Fixed ignore solution for acoustic. duplicates.
• Fixed UNC path support.
• Moved to FFSampledSP 0.9.7.
• Moved to MFSampledSP 0.9.4.
• Added interface for custom key text renderers.
• Segment analysis of songs longer than 30min now skipped.

Labels: FFmpeg, Harmonic Mixing, Key, MediaFoundation, OK-Notation, Plugin, Release, TipsAndTricks

It's been a turbulent couple of weeks since the original release of beaTunes 4. I have received lots of praise for the new UI and the new features—existing customers seem to love it and they do let me know. Thank you! I really appreciate it. Without this kind of feedback, I'd probably soon go and get myself a cushy job at some insurance company.

But admittedly not everything has been great. A couple of nasty bugs have forced me to push bug fix releases. While these releases fix problems and make things better, they also annoy everyone. They cause work for me and I simply cannot imagine re-downloading the same piece of software every week is fun for users. And while I'm glad that my little one-man-show is actually capable of releasing maintenance updates quickly, I'd rather ship the perfect product right away. So please accept my apologies for this not quite so smooth launch.

Today's release first and foremost fixes one big issue: user interface responsiveness.

In particular, a bunch of people complained that search is way too slow, especially in large lists like the main Music list. I'm happy to say that this should now be fixed and results should appear pretty instantaneously, unless your computer is busy with something else e.g. analysis. A welcome side-effect of the corresponding fixes are other performance improvements throughout the application.

Another important fix in this release deals with the duplicates finder. 4.0.2 introduced a possible hang. This is also now fixed.

As always, you can download the software from the download section of the website.

Most important changes in 4.0.3

• Fixed slow search in libraries with > 10k items.
• Fixed hang in duplicates introduced in 4.0.2.
• Fixed application names in OS X application menu.
• Fixed non-detection in duplicates caused by empty fingerprints.
• Fixed external change detection for folder-based libraries.
• Fixed validity test for audio identifiers.
• Improved audio device recognition robustness.
• Improved normalization of ISRC codes.

Labels: Release

I'm happy to announce that I just released beaTunes 4.0.2. Like 4.0.1, this is a maintenance release, aimed at fixing the kind of little bugs that pop up right after a major release. For details, please see the list below or the release notes.

As always, you can download the software from the download section of the website.

Most important changes in 4.0.2

• Fixed sync failure of songs with fingerprints.
• Fixed diacritic-related unicode file name problem on Windows.
• Fixed AIFF decoding failure.
• Fixed playback start on Enter in textfields.
• Fixed excessive file attribute reads.
• Fixed potential analysis deadlock.
• Fixed database access in EDT during analysis.
• Improved formatting of AppleScript errors.
• Improved Schema Evolution resumability.
• Improved genre list loading.
• Improved TitleStartsWithTrackNumber inspection to remove repeated track numbers.
• Improved segmentation performance.
• Added ability to repair or rebuild database via the Tools menu.

Labels: Release