beaTunes News

In the last couple of months I've been working on switching some things under beaTunes' hood as well as in its user interface. Today, I'm happy to release the first Early Access version of this effort.

So what has changed?

Under the hood, many third party libraries beaTunes depends upon were updated. Probably the biggest step was from Hibernate 3.4 to 4.3. But other libs like Jython, Groovy, and JRuby were updated as well. Additionally, some of the database caching code has been streamlined for greater efficiency.

On the surface, beaTunes 4.5 features a fresh new look—much more in line with Yosemite and the upcoming El Captain. Library, Analysis, Inspection, and Charts are now accessible via a vertical mode button panel, removing some visual clutter. With the same idea in mind, both the sidebar (what used to be the playlist tree) and the status bar can now be hidden via the View menu. Also, the Matching Songs and Album Info buttons are now only visible when the main song table is visible as well.

The goal of this update is not to add a lot of new features. However, some of you will be very pleased to see that it has gotten much easier to write computed keys to the comment field (simply check a box in the analysis options). Also, alternatively to valid ID3 TKey values, one can now embed Open Key values as key names (box in the general preferences). Furthermore, there is a new inspector and a bunch of other little improvements. One of them being a dedicated button in the matching songs panel, that allows adding the selected song to the current playlist with a simple click or press of a button (keyboard shortcut), instead of having to drag it.

Because I didn't try to go overboard with new stuff, this Early Access release is close to production quality. However, it still needs some testing. Please download it and try it out. As always with Early Access versions—the software will expire, in this case in a week. If the real thing isn't released by then, I will post another EA release in time.

I'm looking forward to your feedback.

Downloads

• beaTunes 4.5 EA1 for OS X
• beaTunes 4.5 EA1 for 64 Bit Windows
• beaTunes 4.5 EA1 for 32 Bit Windows (requires QuickTime)

Update

Please do not download EA1 anymore. You can find EA2 here.

Labels: Early Access