beaTunes News

Sunday, March 29, 2020

Update: beaTunes 5.2.7

This update improves overall performance of audio analysis, i.e., any analysis task that relies on reading audio data from files. Informal tests on a system with an SSD showed a roughly 50% performance improvement for audio normalization tasks (e.g., ReplayGain), which typically require reading through the entire file. Obviously, depending on where your files are stored, your mileage will vary. That said, reading audio in general should be somewhat faster, unless your HDD or (W)LAN is the bottleneck. This is the result of some tuning in the jipes library, which beaTunes uses for audio analysis, allowing the Java JIT compiler to better optimize the code.

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

Changes in 5.2.7

  • Improved analysis performance.
  • Moved to jipes 0.9.17.
  • Moved to CASampledSP 0.9.22.

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posted at 09:27 4 comments

Tuesday, March 10, 2020

Did the Amazon Integration Stop Working?

Just a quick reminder that Amazon has turned off version 4 of its PA application programming interface (API). That's the interface that lets third party apps like beaTunes retrieve Amazon content. This does not mean that beaTunes users cannot benefit from Amazon data anymore. However, you have to update to the latest version (version 5.2.6 or later). If you are still using beaTunes 4 or earlier, you may purchase a discounted upgrade license to use beaTunes 5.

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posted at 03:51 0 comments

Friday, March 6, 2020

Update: beaTunes 5.2.6

As already mentioned yesterday, this minor update removes some of the Amazon-related functionality and ensures that other Amazon-related functions will continue to work.

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

Changes in 5.2.6

  • Fixed synchronization timeout when encountering many orphaned playlists.
  • Fixed invalidation of artwork cache upon synchronization.
  • Removed Amazon panel, because of changes in Amazon's API.
  • Discourage use of Amazon similarity rule (will be removed).
  • Updated JDK to version 11.0.6+10.

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posted at 05:49 0 comments

Thursday, March 5, 2020

Amazon PA API 5.0: The End of the Amazon Context Panel

Practically forever, beaTunes has made use of Amazon's Product Advertisement API, to display charts, product information, and similar albums. Unfortunately, Amazon has decided to "improve" the API and beginning March 9th, use of the new version 5 is mandatory. Part of the "improvement" is to get rid of most music related information like tracks belonging to an album or the duration of a track. Similar items or informative product descriptions are not available anymore, either. This makes the API much less useful for an app like beaTunes. As a result, I have decided to remove the Amazon context panel (optional, lower right panel) in beaTunes' next update, because there is no way to show meaningful information from Amazon anymore. Luckily, the Album Info panel with content sourced from WikiData and Wikipedia still works and provides high quality content without commercial interests.

For the time being, I will keep the Amazon charts in beaTunes operational. However, if Amazon further insists on significant conversion rates, it looks like its days are numbered, too.

Note, that fetching cover artwork is completely unaffected by this, as beaTunes does not use Amazon as source.

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posted at 06:25 0 comments