beaTunes News

Saturday, November 28, 2020

beaTunes 5.12.15: Solid Gray Window

A couple of people have reported that when starting beaTunes 5.2.15 on macOS 10.15, they are faced with a solid gray window, showing only the title and the traffic light buttons (close, minimize, maximize). The actual UI shows up when clicking on the green button (maximize/full screen) and then switching back to the regular window.

This is a pretty annoying issue and a hard one to fix, as I cannot reproduce it, which makes me wonder how often this actually happens. Do many people see this? What do they have in common?

What's clear is that it apparently happens on a range of hardware models and that it is caused by a design change in beaTunes 5.2.15. To improve repainting and general appearance, beaTunes 5.2.15 takes advantage of a recent enhancement in the Java platform, namely the support for both transparent titlebars (apple.awt.transparentTitleBar) and windows using all available space (incl. the titlebar) (apple.awt.fullWindowContent). Of these two settings, the latter, i.e. full window content, apparently causes the glitch. One guess is that it has to do with the painting z-order, as described in this old Mozialla issue, but unfortunately that still does not give me a solution.

So for the moment, maximizing and then resizing seems to be the only remedy for v5.2.15. Alternatively, you can of course also downgrade to v5.2.14, available here, which does not use the two special settings.

If you have any insights into this issue or want to follow the discussion, please watch this thread.

Update

The issue has been addressed in v5.2.16.

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Tuesday, November 17, 2020

Update: beaTunes 5.2.15

This update fixes a couple of issues connected to muting. Additionally, I have adjusted the color scheme slightly to fit Apple's new operating system macOS 11, a.k.a. Big Sur, a little better. Note that there are still unresolved issues—upgrading to Big Sur is therefore not recommended.

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

Changes in 5.2.15

  • Fixed showing tooltip popups even though beaTunes is not frontmost window (macOS).
  • Fixed mute keyboard shortcut on macOS.
  • Fixed unintentional unmute on next track.
  • Added visual mute indicator in table view.
  • Added Big Sur color scheme.

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Friday, November 6, 2020

beaTunes 5.2.14: Much Improved Beatport Integration

As pointed out recently, Beatport has updated their application programming interface (API), which meant that the part of beaTunes that "talks" with Beatport had to be updated as well. This update is the most important "new" feature in beaTunes v5.2.14. The integration code had to be more or less rewritten from scratch. As a result, I was able to add some goodies. Most importantly, you don't have to manually connect to Beatport anymore. It just works out of the box (provided you have a suitable Internet connection). Secondly, you cannot just look at the Beatport charts, but play the previews like a playlist, which makes for pretty nice experience. Overall, this API update has led to some neat improvements.

Other changes in this update have to do with fixing little things here and there, typically with the goal of making the app more stable and responsive.

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

Changes in 5.2.14

  • Improved error reporting when initializing itlibrary.
  • Improved stability for Music.app-based libraries.
  • Improved database stability/integrity.
  • Updated built-in Discogs database.
  • Updated to Java 11.0.9.1+1.
  • Skip certain folders during synchronization of folder-based libraries.
  • Re-implemented Beatport integration.
  • Added Artwork not embedded inspection for Music.app-based libraries.
  • Fixed potential OutOfMemoryError caused by too many threads.

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