beaTunes News

Monday, June 24, 2019

Avoiding Amazon Integration Failures

As already mentioned in Dec 2018, Amazon has decided to cut off access to its advertising API for associates who do not drive enough revenue. This has now happened for the German Amazon integration in beaTunes, which is why charts, Amazon info and Amazon recommendations currently aren't shown anymore (the error message is misleading, it's indicating a network problem).

If you are interested in a working Amazon integration in beaTunes, you can help fix this: The next time you want to buy something on the German Amazon website, click on this link and then continue shopping. Any sale within 24h of clicking that link will cause Amazon to allow API requests again, which in turn re-enables the Amazon integration in beaTunes. Obviously, this will also generate referral fees for me. But we are talking about cents, perhaps dollars per month—no large sums. Trust me, this won't make me rich.

The link above only works for the German integration. Please use the following links for French, English and Japanese:

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posted at 03:59 0 comments

Thursday, January 11, 2018

Update: beaTunes 5.1

Thanks to the help of some very engaged users I was able to figure out a couple of performance issues with humongous libraries. For those libraries, both startup performance and general usage should be much improved. Furthermore, I have updated a number of built-in databases to improve similar genre and artist matching. And of course, as part of the general, ongoing maintenance, I've fixed some bugs I had become aware of.

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

Changes in 5.1.0

  • Re-organized index structure for better performance.
  • Improved opening time for Get Info dialog.
  • Improved view caching for large collections.
  • Improved docs for estimate mood task.
  • Improved efficiency when removing tracks from playlist.
  • Improved notification behavior.
  • Improved table rendering performance.
  • Added smooth table/tree scrolling (Mac only).
  • Adjusted Home/End key behavior in playlists.
  • Fixed issue with disabled context menu actions.
  • Fixed hang at initial song selection in very large playlist.
  • Fixed delay when switching to very large playlist.
  • Fixed potential NPE during synchronization of mp3s.
  • Fixed drag-import of folders.
  • Fixed potential NPE in synched key/tempo matching.
  • Fixed move to trash on Windows.
  • Fixed chart cover images aliasing.
  • Fixed Beatport previews (403 error).
  • Updated built-in Discogs database.
  • Updated Wikidata-based genre ontology.
  • Updated DBpedia-based genre ontology.
  • Updated to JRuby 9.1.13.0.
  • Updated to Groovy 2.4.13-indy.

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posted at 03:49 0 comments

Thursday, August 9, 2007

Fullscreen Charts

Fullscreen album chartsFor quite some time beaTunes had the album charts feature - basically displaying the album covers of the 70 albums with the highest Amazon salesrank. Of course you could choose a specific genre and the displayed genres and charts depended on the Amazon store you configured in beaTunes' general preferences. Something many people might have never noticed - the charts also automatically update themselves every hour.

So, what's so great about this? - you might ask. Well, we think it looks plain cool. And to make it look even better we added the fullscreen mode in beaTunes 1.2. By hitting that little button in the upper right corner, you can see the charts in their full beauty on your whole screen.

To make things even better, we also improved the mouse-over popups. They now feature the star ratings and if available the whole Amazon review.

Fullscreen album charts with review popupClick on the images to see larger screenshots (800x600). Like it?

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posted at 16:21 0 comments