beaTunes News

I'm very happy to finally release beaTunes 5 today. It's been more than a year of work—and I think it was worth it. beaTunes 5 is smarter, looks better, and is easier to use.

Upgrading

You can download beaTunes 5 from the download section of the website. Note that this is not a free update for beaTunes 4 users (though some of you may have received an email and steeply discounted upgrade licenses are available). But should you upgrade from version 4, please be patient when beaTunes updates its database. It's quite the re-organization and takes a while. Also, should you want to downgrade back to version 4, please read this article. It's important, because the downgrade is possible, but not automatic.

Getting Started

To get started with beaTunes 5, I recommend to re-run the color analysis along with the new update popularity data task for all songs. In this run, you might want to disable all other tasks to get results quickly. In beaTunes 5 the color concept has changed and what used to be called color is now called timbre. But trust me, you'll want to use color. The are a bunch of other new columns. You might want to check the View -> View Options dialog to see them all.

If you're into electronic music and like Beatport, I recommend to connect beaTunes to the Beatport API. You can do that in the beaTunes general preferences. This will allow you to see Beatport charts and also use Beatport as a source for the matching songs table (no, there are no kickbacks or affiliate programs with Beatport).

And then... well, just play around! For example, after analysis finished, try out the new Play similar songs control that sits right in the context menu.

Enjoy!

Changes in 5.0.0

These are the most important changes in no particular order:

• Added ruleset chooser to matching songs table.
• Added ability to edit ruleset names.
• Added support for embedding ID3 tags in WAV and AIFF files.
• Added support for embedding acoustic fingerprints.
• Added option to force overwrite fields.
• Added support for ITU-R BS.1770 (EBU R128, ATSC A/85, ReplayGain2).
• Added configurable artwork size in tables.
• Added ability to show partial artwork in table.
• Added popularity rule.
• Added similar artist rule.
• Added similar key rule for synced BPM (matches keys after playback tempo change).
• Added ability to display keys for synced BPM (key after playback tempo change).
• Added DBpedia/Wikipedia-based tooltips to genres (if available).
• Added display of a known root genre to the genre field.
• Added solution to remove identical ids from tracks that aren't duplicates.
• Added automatic fetching of (missing) inactivity artwork.
• Added media kind inspector (iTunes+macOS or folder-based).
• Added support for field danceability.
• Added support for field instrumentation (acoustic/electronic).
• Added acoustic/electronic classifier based on lowlevel AcousticBrainz data.
• Added support for fields loved, disliked, movement and work.
• Added support for Media Monkey custom fields.
• Added ability to show standard columns in table view.
• Added additional online resources for key and tempo.
• Added dedicated mood estimation task.
• Added easy navigation from analysis error message to song.
• Added offer to download matched iCloud songs when needed (macOS-only).
• Added ability to show OS level file info dialog.
• Added Open in AcousticBrainz, YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter action.
• Added support for special library lists (podcasts, audiobooks, ...) to folder-based collections.
• Added ability to read and display folder.jpg images.
• Added forced database repair after crash occurred.
• Added playback repeat.
• Added playlist scan with different modi (beginning, third, prominent).
• Added additional secondary sort orders for columns mood, key, and BPM.
• Added display of synchronization results in status bar.
• Added ability to abort synchronization.
• Added ability to refresh metadata from files for iTunes-based library.
• Added ability to export playlists containing relative filenames.
• Added CSV playlist exporter.
• Added WPL playlist exporter.
• Added an easy way to create playlist builder plugins.
• Added an easy way to create playlist sorter plugins.
• Added ability to easily re-order a playlist by a chosen property.
• Added ability to edit the field year in table view.
• Added quick edit dialog for all songs in one album/by one artist/...
• Added dark user interface theme.
• Added context menu for playlist panel (delete, analyze, etc.).
• Added Wikidata as metadata source.
• Added social media links to Get Info pane.
• Added gzip content encoding support for most web service calls.
• Added new album/artist info context component.
• Added rename playlist context menu entry.
• Added support for media keys (macOS only, Windows will follow).
• Added ability to exclude remote songs from inspection and analysis.
• Added play similar songs.
• Fixed change detection box for genres in multi item info dialog.
• Switched Windows launcher for better UX.
• Switched silence detector user interface from percent to decibel.
• Improved song import via drag and drop.
• Improved tempo/BPM estimator (rewrite).
• Improved key estimator (rewrite).
• Improved resilience against (external) file renaming in folder-based collections.
• Improved similar genre rule.
• Improved View Options dialog.
• Improved rarely used genre inspector to suggest similar genres.
• Improved typo inspectors to take advantage of built-in database.
• Improved analysis error reporting by avoiding duplicate messages.
• Improved missing/read-only file inspectors by reducing network traffic.
• Improved correction hints in Get Info pane.
• Improved lyrics web search in Get Info pane.
• Improved performance of initial library synchronization.
• Improved matching performance for BPM and mood.
• Ignore obviously bad BPM from online sources.
• Removed tile-based user interface themes.
• Removed explicit Analyze New menu item.
• Removed iTunes playback controls.
• Updated most APIs to use java.nio.file.Path.
• Updated to jipes 0.9.14.
• Updated to H2 1.4.195.
• Updated to JRuby 9.1.10.0.
• Updated to Groovy 2.4.11-indy.
• Updated to FFSampledSP 0.9.19.

Labels: Beatport, Release