beaTunes News

Saturday, August 14, 2021

Update: beaTunes 5.2.24

This maintenance release mainly contains an updated Discogs database and adjustments to changes that happened over at Wikidata (differentiation between recording and song).

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

Changes in 5.2.24

  • Allow playback of up to 90s during scan.
  • Modified AVPlayer to restart tracks more conservatively.
  • Fixed synchronization of "checked" ("enabled") field with Music.app.
  • Improved tolerance towards malformed embedded fingerprints.
  • Updated built-in Discogs database.
  • Updated Wikidata logic to reflect changes from the website.

Labels: , , ,

posted at 14:06 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.

Labels: , , ,

posted at 06:25 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.

Labels: , , , , ,

posted at 03:49 0 comments