beaTunes News

Recently Apple has released Mojave, version 10.14 of its desktop operating system macOS. With respect to beaTunes this had three effects:

1. The much touted dark mode was not automatically supported.
2. Mojave asked for user permission, before it let beaTunes talk to iTunes.
3. Due to a bug in Mojave, oftentimes beaTunes was unable to display the remaining time in its player.

With today's update, all three issues were addressed to various degrees.

Automatic Dark Mode

beaTunes 5 has supported a dark theme for a long time now. With v5.1.10, it will automatically honor the system setting at startup time (switching to or from dark mode while beaTunes is running is still not possible). This applies to both macOS 10.14 and Windows 10. Note that this implies, that you cannot select the theme from within beaTunes anymore. Instead you have to use the operating system's dialogs.
To enable the dark mode under Mojave, open the System Preferences under , then select General and then Dark. If beaTunes was already running, please restart it, so it can pick up the changed setting.

To enable the dark mode under Windows 10, open the system Settings (the cog wheel in the Windows menu), then select Personalization and Colors. Scroll down to Choose your default app mode and select Dark. More detailed guides can be found all over the web, e.g. here. Again, you might want to restart beaTunes after the change.

AEpocalypse :: Averted

With Mojave Apple introduced AppleScript Sandboxing. In essence that is a mechanism that prompts the user for permission before one application can control another, i.e. can send Apple Events to it. Let me be clear about this: It's a good thing. But, as pointed out before, Apple could have made more of an effort to ship a quality implementation earlier. That said, the final result does not seem to be all that bad. I have made an effort to provide decent explanatory messages in case something goes wrong. The important thing to remember is that you can turn automation (AppleEvent) permissions on and off in your System Preferences under Security & Privacy.

And should nothing work anymore, you can reset the authorization mechanism for all apps using the following line from the Terminal command line:

tccutil reset AppleEvents

For more info, please see Daniel Jalkut's blog post.

Player Issues Workaround

A couple of words about the beaTunes audio player. Because Apple broke one of their APIs, the player did not correctly show the remaining time, a playhead or segments. Luckily, I've found a workaround, so this is fixed in v5.1.10.

What else?

Additionally to the mentioned changes forced by external events, I have found some time to change/fix some other things. Fans of classical music will probably like that if a tonal key can be found in a track title, it will be used instead of content-based estimates. And I'm sure macOS users will appreciate that the playing-track system notification now shows album art.

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

Changes in 5.1.10

• Fixed non-committing genre changes in info panel.
• Fixed possible application hang during recovery.
• Added automatic support for Mojave and Windows 10 dark modes.
• Added workaround for Mojave AVPlayer bug (remaining time).
• Added support for album art in macOS system notifications.
• Enabled compression when communicating with AcousticBrainz.
• Improved key import from textual metadata for classical music.
• Improved export of m3u playlists with non-ISO-8859-1 chars.

Labels: AppleScript, Key, macOS, Mojave, Release, Windows 10

Apparently the latest Java 8 update (Java8_131) crashes on Windows 10 Creators Update, when opening a file dialog. This is rather inconvenient, as beaTunes 4.6.14 happens to use that version.

If you're on Windows 10 Creators, you seem to have two options:

1. Keep on using 4.6.13 or earlier.
2. Update to the latest snapshot.

The macOS version is not affected by this problem. So if you aren't using Windows 10 Creators Update or haven't updated to beaTunes 4.6.14 yet, please just ignore this.

Labels: Java8, Windows 10

Triggered by some custom beaTlet work, I finally got around creating slightly better error messages for compilation failures in the logs. And with better I mean: regardless of the scripting language, all compilation failures are reported with ScriptExceptions and—if available—file name and line number. One would think that the scripting engines themselves did that already, but... oh well. Other issues addressed in this maintenance update are related to missing/wrong fonts on Windows (cyrillic was a problem on some Windows 10 installations) and problems when creating a very large folder-based library.

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

Most important changes in 4.5.7

• Improved beaTlet instantiation error reporting.
• Fixed Windows font problem.
• Fixed missing master playlist in large folder-based collections.
• Attempt to write mood to id3 mood tag.

Labels: beaTlet, Mood, Plugin, Release, Windows 10

It is done. Just a couple of weeks after I posted the first EA version of beaTunes 4.5, I'm extremely happy to announce the immediate availability of the final beaTunes 4.5. As already mentioned earlier, this update focuses on eye candy, usability, and “stuff under the hood”.

Eye Candy

Let's start with the obvious: Eye Candy. beaTunes 4.5 features a fresh new UI, fitting in well with the Yosemite/El Capitan look—simple, flat, yet stylish. Beyond the superficial, the UI has been gently re-organized. Top level view selectors (Library, Inspection, Charts, …) have been moved to the left edge of the application window. Similarly, list-specific sub-view buttons (Matching Songs, …) have been moved to the right edge. As a result, the status bar (bottom edge) has become optional and can now be turned on and off via the View menu. The same is true for the side bar, containing the list of playlists, charts or inspections.

Usability

I have to admit, this seems like a very small thing to mention. But in the Matching Songs table, I have added a button that allows instant adding of the selected song to the current playlist (as long as it's editable!). What's so nice about this is, that the newly added song is automatically selected and the new matches are computed right away. Because the button has a keyboard shortcut (Alt-Enter), you can incrementally add songs to the main list without your hands leaving the keyboard. I should mention that this feature was originally suggested by a user. Thanks!

A feature that has previously been realized in the form of a plugin, is the new ability to write the computed key to the song's comment field. This can now be achieved via new options for the key analysis task. There you can also choose which format you'd like the key to be written in. Related, but slightly different, is the new ability to embed Open Key Notation keys into your files. I have fought this for a long time, because the ID3 specification simply forbids it and it endangers interoperability. But since pretty much everybody else does it in one way or another, not bothering to separate information from presentation, I figured it's time to give in. So beaTunes 4.5 gives you the choice between the ID3 TKEY format and Open Key Notation. You can configure this in the general preferences.

Under the Hood

Much has changed under the hood. Most significantly, many of the open source libraries beaTunes depends upon have been updated. Thus this new version benefits from general development progress. Additionally, caching and memory management have received some attention, resulting in some general performance improvements.

The Little Things

Naturally, that's not all that has changed. There are a whole lot of little things that were improved, fixed, or added. For example, some inspectors got additional solutions and there's even a whole new inspector making you aware of missing track counts. When importing tags from Last.fm, mood-related ones can now be properly embedded into the ID3 mood field. You can now choose, whether beaTunes should write track or album replay gain into the proprietary iTunes iTunNORM tag. … Frankly, there's no point in listing it all.

Free

Worth mentioning though, is this: The update is free for existing beaTunes 4.0 users—yes! you can simply download and install the new version from here. beaTunes 2 and 3 users can use the same download, but need an upgrade license to unlock it.
I sincerely hope you enjoy this update.

Thanks so much for your ongoing support.

Labels: El Capitan, GUI, Release, Windows 10, Yosemite