beaTunes News

As you probably know, beaTunes plays really well with iTunes. Not that it needs iTunes, there is the folder-based mode, but it's just really comfy with iTunes. Like a good buddy. beaTunes also assumes that it's the only game in town when it comes to Key detection. Why should you trust anybody else to write those to your precious files? Oh—you do? Well...

Here's the problem. When using an iTunes-based library, beaTunes only reads your files once: When you create the library. Once that is done, it does never again try to read the files' Key field. And why should it? To this date, iTunes hasn't even acknowledged that there is such a thing, much less allowed you to edit it. All information coming from iTunes is contained in the iTunes Library.xml file.

But what if there is some third player, that allows Key editing and you want to see those edits in beaTunes?

You basically have two options:

1. Use a folder-based library.
2. Force beaTunes somehow to re-read your files.

Option 1 is pretty straight forward and works well, if your third party editor updates the last-modified timestamp. But what if you don't want to loose the tight iTunes integration? Then you might want to use the little beaTlet RefreshFromFileAction.groovy. Just install the file RefreshFromFileAction.groovy into your plugin folder and restart beaTunes. After the restart, you will find a new menu item under File called Refresh from File. To use it, select a couple of files and click it. Things like Key will be imported from the file. Note that existing values will be overwritten without warning. So be careful!

Curious? Want to find out more about writing plugins/beaTlets for beaTunes? Then check out the plugin intro page. There are also a bunch of examples on GitHub.

Oh and by the way, I've released a minor update yesterday. Most prominently, I have finally found a way to get rid of that ugly bold font, some of you may have seen on Windows. The (to me very unexpected) solution was to set the system property -Dfile.encoding=UTF-8. After all these years, programming is still full of surprises...

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

Changes in 4.6.14

• Fixed bold default font issue on Windows.
• Fixed permission issue in Windows installer.
• Fixed NPE caused by artwork inspector.
• Enforce uppercase ReplayGain tags when writing.
• Fallback to lowercase ReplayGain tags when reading.

Labels: iTunes, Key, Plugin, Release, TipsAndTricks