beaTunes News

Here we go again: the newest EA version of beaTunes 6. The biggest news is the brandnew Windows version. So finally you can try v6 on a Windows box. The UI is not great yet, but most important parts are running smoothly. Both Windows and macOS got a new mechanism to view help files, retiring the old proprietary help viewers that have stopped working well a long time ago. Note that the Help itself is not pretty yet. It definitely still needs a bot of love and polishing. A couple of bugs were fixed and the import metadata task has been renovated.

When you start beaTunes 6, and have used beaTunes 5 before, beaTunes will create a backup of your existing database folder and then go on to convert your databases to the new SQLite format. This process cannot be reversed, i.e. you will not be able to migrate data back to beaTunes 5. You can however, delete the new database folder and rename the copy to its former name. In any case, you might want to create a backup before starting beaTunes 6.

Alright, here's the obligatory warning: Before downloading and installing this, please make sure you understand what Early Access means:

• Absolutely no warranty for whatever
• Features may or may not work, appear, and disappear
• It may not be possible to migrate data to future or previous versions (even though I make a reasonable effort)
• You will not be able to migrate data created by this version back to beaTunes 5
• This version will cease to function 4 week after its release. A new version or a final product will be made available when this version becomes dysfunctional.
• You cannot buy this version

Here are the macOS download links: beaTunes-6-0-0-EA7-arm64.dmg (Apple Silicon), beaTunes-6-0-0-EA7-x86_64.dmg (Intel)

And here is the Windows one: beaTunes-6-0-0-EA7-x64.exe

Changes in 6.0.0 EA7

• Fixed a long freeze and a failing "New Playlist from Selection" when many songs were selected.
• Fixed cover art that had disappeared online being kept and re-submitted to the online database.
• Added a check that keeps dead cover art addresses out of the library on import.
• Reorganized the "Import metadata from online resources" options into three clearer groups.
• Added an option to import external ids and cover art addresses.
• Updated the info window for one or several songs to match the look of the other views.
• Updated Windows UI (incomplete).
• Replaced the help with a searchable HTML version.
• Fixed the Help menu on macOS, which had stopped opening the help entirely.
• Fixed songs renamed or moved outside beaTunes not being recognized as already in the library.
• Replaced the Windows Start Menu folder with a single "beaTunes" shortcut.

Feedback is very welcome!

Labels: Early Access, Windows

This maintenance update fixes just one thing: keeping track of file/folder renames in a folder-based library—specifically one that lives in an NTFS file system. In plain English this means, that if you are using NTFS for your music files and a beaTunes folder-based collections, beaTunes should not loose track of your files, even when you rename them or move them to another folder, if that folder is still within the collection's root folder. beaTunes may indicate that files are missing (404 in the location column), but a simple synchronization (File -> Synchronize) should solve the issue.

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

Changes in 5.2.22

• Fixed file id tracking for NTFS on Windows.

Labels: NTFS, Release, Windows

This maintenance update fixes a couple of minor issues. The most notable of which is probably beaTunes' capability to automatically find and reassociate renamed files with the correct metadata in the database, if there is a valid file id available and if the file is still in the same folder (applies only to folder-based libraries). File ids are typically available for NTFS or APFS, but not networks drives, like Samba (SMB) mounts. This re-association happens on-the-fly and does not require a fill synchronization. That said, it also happens during synchronization, but in that case is not limited to the same folder. For details regarding the other fixes, please see the list below.

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

Changes in 5.2.21

• Fixed appearance of progressbars for Windows.
• Fixed inappropriate default editor for uneditable fields.
• Fixed automatic renamed file search for folder-based libraries.
• Ignore illegal ratings during synchronization.
• Avoid render/EDT hangs when noticing bad track location data.

Labels: Release, Windows

iTunes had the ability to organize your media files into broad categories (music, movies, podcasts, audiobooks, ...) for a long time. This is especially significant for people who store audiobooks in iTunes and expect to listen to them on their iPhone using the iBooks app. That's only possible when the files are correctly categorized as "audiobook". Unfortunately, adjusting the media kind (that's what iTunes calls those categories) was only possible manually through the user interface. With version 12.4 Apple finally remedied this for macOS and the property was exposed via AppleScript. This means that software like beaTunes can manipulate it and move files into the correct category. A task made for a beaTunes inspection.

Now how would one know, whether a file is in the wrong category? The route I took for beaTunes 5 is to simply look at the genre label. If it says podcast in that label, chances are it's not a TV show. The same is true for audiobooks. The corresponding inspection is therefore aptly named "Genre does not match media kind". It lets you easily fix miscategorizations and thus makes it much easier to listen to your favorite audiobook while on the road. By the way, proper tracknumbers and identical album/artist values make it possible to group chapters into a book. Obviously, beaTunes can help here, too.

As mentioned above, programmatically manipulating the media kind on macOS happens via AppleScript. The Windows equivalent for this used to be the iTunes COM API. Unfortunately, Apple has abandoned it years ago. This is why beaTunes for Windows cannot offer the same functionality as beaTunes for macOS. On Windows, beaTunes offers proper media kind support only for folder-based libraries, where iTunes does not matter. It sure is disappointing, but it seems that Apple views iTunes for Windows as a legacy system, that's dragged along, because it cannot let it die for fear of public outcry. Which is ironic, given that so many people have a love/hate relationship with iTunes.

Labels: AppleScript, Audiobooks, COM, iBooks, Inspection, iTunes, Media Kind, TipsAndTricks, Windows

Did you ever notice that the British pop band "Oasis" is named "Oasis (2)" on Discogs? Because there are a number of different bands with the same name, Discogs simply appends "(N)" for disambiguation. I'm not sure this is documented somewhere, but it makes matching songs from your library to Discogs tracks slightly more difficult—especially, when you're not aware of this quirk. Today's update works around the issue and thus improves lookup results for artists with not so unique names. Most of the other changes in this release are fixes to small problems I discovered while working on beaTunes 5.

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

Most important changes in 4.6.10

• Added signature to Windows executable.
• Moved to FFSampledSP 0.9.17.
• Consolidated multiple mood keywords into one ID3 tag (requires ID3v2.4).
• Fixed possible UI freeze when creating matchlists.
• Fixed lyrics translate function.
• Fixed sorting by compilation.
• Fixed does-not-contain matchlist filter.
• Fixed crash when searching for regex ().
• Fixed handling of Discogs artist disambiguation.

Labels: Discogs, FFmpeg, Mood, Windows

At the end of the last post, there was a little note saying something about Apple's QuickTime. Even though it was stuck to the end of the post, it was important. Important enough to justify these extra lines. The gist of it is: If you are using the 32-bit version of beaTunes 4.x, you should update to beaTunes 4.6 and uninstall QuickTime. Why? QuickTime for Windows has known security issues that Apple will not fix. And beaTunes 4.6 does not require QuickTime anymore.

Why is this only important for the 32-bit version of beaTunes? Apple has never ported QuickTime into the 64-bit world, which is why the 64-bit version of beaTunes has never been able to use it. Instead, beaTunes uses the operating system's media libraries combined with FFsampledSP (a library based on FFmpeg).

Labels: 64bit, QuickTime, Windows

I'm proud to write that today beaTunes 4.6 will be available for download as a free update for existing beaTunes 4 customers. Probably the most important new feature is the much improved high-resolution display support for Windows (sometimes referred to as HD or 4k). Yay! No more squinting to read an artist's name! As Windows hardware has slowly caught up with Apple's early Retina offensive and the Windows OS has started to support HiDPI displays much better, it was definitely time for this step. What was holding me back, was Java 8's lack of HiDPI support for Windows. To this day, there is still plenty wrong with it, so I had to build a few workarounds. Still, if you're using Windows with a high-resolution display, you will eventually notice some left-over rough edges, e.g. slightly odd-looking file dialogs. Those are presented by the Java Runtime Environment and pretty impossible to fix without patching the runtime itself. Luckily, the Oracle Java team is working hard to bring better HiDPI support to Java 9 and hopefully backports some fixes in the process. It may just be a matter of time, until all the little things are resolved.

You may ask, why ship something that's not perfect? Well, in my humble opinion, before today's update beaTunes was mostly broken on Windows HiDPI displays. With today's release it's 99% fixed—offering 100% of its functionality. If you ask me, that's a much better state of affairs.

Besides the obvious user interface changes, a bunch of things under the hood were improved. Writes to the internal database are now coalesced. In essence that means that a song property change is not persisted right away, but with a short delay. If other properties of the same song are also changed during this delay, these multiple write operations are combined into a single one. Especially during analysis of many different properties (e.g. key, BPM, ...) this behavior helps to avoid unnecessary database operations and thus reduces overall analysis time.

JavaScript Support

As we're already talking technical stuff—there's good news for JavaScript hackers! beaTunes now officially supports JavaScript as plugin scripting language. You may remember that Groovy, Jython, and JRuby are already supported. JavaScript is now the fourth language. Because JavaScript uses prototypical and not class-based inheritance, plugins are created in a slightly different way. But thanks to the Nashorn extensions, it's relatively easy for your JavaScript code to interact with beaTunes. Examples can be found in the beaTlet tutorial as well as on GitHub. BTW: the shipped implementations for Groovy and JRuby have been updated.

Pretty much with every minor (not micro) beaTunes update, an inspector gets a little makeover. For beaTunes 4.6, the English capitalization rules received some well-deserved love. For those of you, who've never noticed its existence, this inspector only shows problems, if the song language is known (different language, different rules). Prior to inspection, you can let beaTunes determine song languages automatically via the corresponding analysis task. Results are more accurate, if the lyrics are available. To make a long story short—the inspector has been rewritten and the results are much better now.

Other Little Fixes

A couple of other minor things have been fixed or improved. E.g. the Get Info dialog now shows a little icon to indicate whether a song has already been fingerprinted. And the visible column dialog finally contains proper descriptions for the columns Issue, DRM, and Enabled.

Specifically for Windows, there are two other important items:

1. The Windows installer is now properly signed (I know, this should have happened a long time ago).
2. The 32-bit version does not depend on Apple's QuickTime anymore, which turned out to be a serious security risk.

I hope you enjoy this free update. As always, you can download it from the download section of the website.

Thank you.

Most important changes in 4.6.0

• Fixed relative salience error on 0 BPM.
• Fixed some English capitalization rules.
• Fixed missing artist in Album Info pane.
• Fixed writing of last played date on Windows.
• Fixed sorting by Album Replay Gain.
• Fixed DNS lookup during database ops (caused by URL.equals()).
• Improved performance, via coalesced database writes (reduced disk IO).
• Improved some analysis error messages.
• Improved "Analyze New"-behavior: Use last sync as reference point.
• Improved "Album Info" to more often show actually useful info.
• Improved HiDPI support for Windows.
• Added fingerprint icon to Get Info pane.
• Added support for JavaScript beaTlets.
• Added signature to Windows installer.
• Added index column to visible columns popup.
• Removed QuickTime for Windows dependency (32bit).
• Updated to JRuby 9.0.5.0.
• Updated to Groovy 2.4.6.
• Updated to Hibernate 5.1.0.
• Updated to japlscript 3.1.3.
• Updated to jipes 0.9.12.
• Updated to slf4j 1.7.21.

Labels: HiDPI, Java8, QuickTime, Release, Retina, Windows

Just like the last beaTunes release, I would like to offer a 64 bit version of beaTunes 3.5.16 as well. As already pointed out recently, there are a bunch of good reasons for a 64 bit version—future versions may not even be offered in 32 bit anymore. Until then though, there is still a lot of testing needed. The last release still had a bunch of 64 bit related bugs—most prominently, AAC/M4A files weren't decoded correctly and analyzed files stayed locked, making it impossible to edit them in other programs while beaTunes was running. Both these bugs are fixed in beaTunes 3.5.16 (and MFSampledSP 0.9.3, the culprit).

You can get the 64 bit version here: beaTunes-3-5-16-x86_64-win.exe

Please let me know, how this version works for you!

Thanks!

Labels: 64bit, Release, Windows

Testing pays off. Always. Latest proof of this truism is a subtle but nasty bug I found in one of beaTunes' BPM algorithms. It's fixed as of EA5, but earlier 3.5-EA releases definitely produced bad results. Other changes in this release are some small inspection improvements, but not much else on the beaTunes side of things.

That said, the Windows version now comes with a bundled Java 7 runtime.

As always, there is some more info in the NOTES.txt file.

Alright, here's the obligatory warning: Before downloading and installing this, please make sure you understand what Early Access means:

• Absolutely no warranty for whatever
• Features may or may not work, appear, and disappear
• It may not be possible to migrate data to future or previous versions (even though I make a reasonable effort)
• This version will cease to function one week after its release
• You cannot buy this version

And here are the download links:

• beaTunes-3-5-0-EA5 (OS X 10.5.8 or later)
• beaTunes-3-5-0-EA5 (Windows XP or later)

Important

For those still using beaTunes 2: beaTunes 3.x changes beaTunes' internal database layout quite a bit, which takes a while. Do not interrupt this process, even if it takes very long! beaTunes 2.x will not be able to use the database anymore, after you ran beaTunes 3.x. If you intend to try 3.x and then go back to 2.x, make sure you back up the database before you try 3.x (depending on your OS it's in ~/Library/Application Support/beaTunes/Database, C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Local\tagtraum industries\beaTunes\database or C:\Documents and Settings\<username>\Local Settings\Application Data\tagtraum industries\beaTunes\database)! You also might want to check out this article about exporting beaTunes data.

Feedback

Please provide feedback! Let me know what does not work. Especially audio decoding problems, OutOfMemoryErrors and UI hangs and hiccups.

Thanks.

PS: The update from 3.0 to 3.5 will be free.

Labels: BPM, Early Access, Windows

Since we're having the beaTunes for Windows sale (41% off) over at Bits Du Jour tomorrow (7/27/2011), I'd like to take the opportunity to remind the Mac folks, that the OS X version is still available at reduced price (22% off) over at MacUpdate Promo. Also, and this should be interesting to all those eager early adopters out there, so far I don't know of any OS X 10.7 Lion specific bugs in beaTunes 3.

Labels: Lion, OS X, Sale, Windows

As promised, beaTunes 3 for Windows (review) will be on sale soon. To be precise on 7/27/2011 (Wed) over at Bits Du Jour. Why not try out beaTunes today and purchase on Wed?

Please share this information with your friends!

Labels: Sale, Windows

For a little while now, I've been receiving problem reports describing beaTunes crashes on Windows (beaTunes claims there was a 'corrupt file'). Apparently, this is due to a bug in some of Apple's QuickTime for Windows code and only happens when executing the Detect Silence task. Be assured that I'm investigating the matter and filed a bug report. Unfortunately, there is not a quick solution to the problem. So if you are experiencing this (Windows only), for now, please stop using the Detect Silence task and things should be fine.

Thank you for your patience.

Update

As of beaTunes 2.1.9 I believe I have found a workaround for this issue.

Labels: Crash, QuickTime, Windows

EA18 provides some fixes for things that went wrong in EA17 - mainly localization issues, better database lock management, a fixed Vista uninstaller and a couple of other things. Not really much that's new...

And here's the obligatory warning: Before downloading and installing this, please make sure you understand what Early Access means:

• Absolutely no warranty for whatever
• Features may or may not work, appear, and disappear
• It may not be possible to migrate data to future versions (even though I make a reasonable effort)
• This version will cease to function 2 weeks after its release
• You cannot buy this version

Just so that there is no doubt about it: EA18 isn't even a beta version (actually, we are getting really damn close to that, though).

And here are the download links:

• beaTunes-2-0-0-EA18 (OS X)
• beaTunes-2-0-0-EA18 (Windows)

Note for EA17 users

The first time you start beaTunes 2 EA18, a message might pop up, saying that the database appears to be locked. It's safe to not unlock it.

Labels: Early Access, Windows

Today's Early Access release 3 almost didn't happen. First, the Security Update 2008-004/Safari 3.1.2 wrecked our Subversion server, then our hosting service had a power outage (which wouldn't have been all that bad) combined with a backup power failure (which turned out to be pretty bad). So with most of our infrastructure down the drain, things looked pretty bleak as of this morning.

Fortunately, since then, thing's have improved. Our Subversion server is back online (even our continuous integration system Continuum is running) and since you can read this blog entry, our hosting provider managed to get things going again.

But let's talk about more pleasant things. EA3 is out and it should be a blast for Windows users. Yep, that's right, we finally got to do something Big for You! The major improvement in EA3 is analysis speed. We changed our Windows decoding/decompression code to mirror what we have done a while ago on OS X using CoreAudio. This should lead to much quicker analysis (BPM and color) and an overall much more responsive system during analysis. And we'd love to get feedback about this! Let us know, whether the speedup is as great as we think it is... Also, let us know, if any files bomb, i.e. lead to crashes. Changing the decoder is always a tricky thing and in the past we have run into a number of issues with people's audio files. There is definitely some obscure stuff out there...

The other thing we got to improve is the typo inspector. Simply put: Expect fewer false positives.

So - here's the obligatory warning: Before downloading and installing this, please make sure you understand what Early Access means:

• Absolutely no warranty for whatever
• Features may or may not work, appear, and disappear
• It may not be possible to migrate data to future versions
• This version will cease to function 2 weeks after its release
• You cannot buy this version

Just so that there is no doubt about it: EA3 isn't even a beta version.

And here are the download links:

• beaTunes-2-0-0-EA3 (OS X)
• beaTunes-2-0-0-EA3 (Windows)

Note for EA2 users

EA3 does not change the database schema introduced in EA2. So if you had EA2 running successfully, EA3 will not try to migrate any data. If you never got EA2 to work, because of database issues, you are probably best of simply renaming or deleting the database folder (see EA2 post for exact names) and the file beaTunes2 Music Library.xml before running EA3. This will recreate the database and import old color/BPM etc. data.

Labels: Early Access, Windows

We hope you all made it safely into the new year and wish you all the best for 2008. Fresh from the bits'n'bytes press we just uploaded a new release of beaTunes to our servers. It addresses some minor usability issues, problems with empty blog labels/terms and problems with private blogger.com blogs. It also finally provides Windows folks - who don't have Windows Scripting Host (WSH) installed - with a better error message.

Enjoy!

Labels: Blogging, Release, Windows

Right when we thought, that we had fixed all the issues caused by Leopard, it turns out that Leopard's version of CoreAudio tends to crash on files it decoded just fine in its Tiger incarnation. So this is why we just released beaTunes 1.2.6. It works around all the known CoreAudio issues and features an improved Windows uninstaller. We also did some additional cosmetic fixes specifically for Leopard.

Enjoy!

Labels: CoreAudio, Leopard, Release, Windows

We have just released beaTunes 1.2.4. This release is a minor update that addresses an issue on Windows. Sometimes beaTunes wouldn't analyze songs with cyrillic letters in their names. This issue has been fixed.

If you are running beaTunes on OS X, you can probably skip this update.

Labels: Release, Windows

Since beaTunes 1.1.3 had a couple of issues, especially on Windows, we decided to quickly address them. Additionally, version 1.1.4 brings a couple of other improvements. Here's the short list:

• Re-added artist typo inspection
• Added song matching preferences button to matching songs table
• Switched OS X distribution format to DMG
• Fixed issue with files wrongly reported as missing on OS X, when running inspection multiple times
• Switched to universal 1.5 R5 JavaApplicationStub

So finally beaTunes is distributed in a disk image and not the clumsy zip file anymore. Also, for those people who thought beaTunes was a PowerPC application, Finder now shows correctly that beaTunes is a universal binary. Last but not least - in 1.1.3 the misspelled artist inspection was left out accidently - it's now back in.

As always, you can get the new release from our download page.

Labels: Release, Windows

We just became aware of an issue in the latest Windows release of your favourite BPM software for iTunes. Large music collections will cause beaTunes to terminate with an OutOfMemoryError. The issue is caused by a name change of a configuration file and can easily be fixed.

Typically, beaTunes is installed at c:\Program Files\tagtraum industries\beaTunes 1.1.3. There should be a file called beaTunes.ini in that directory. Just rename that file to beaTunes.l4j.ini and the issue should be solved.

We apologize for the inconvenience this may have caused. Of course we will fix this issue in the next update.

Labels: Windows