beaTunes News

Friday, May 27, 2011

OK Artwork

Just to let you know... Open Key Notation now has some public domain artwork to go along with the numbers.

Enjoy the weekend!

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Thursday, May 26, 2011

beaTunes 3 Early Access 6

beaTunes2 logoToday's release focuses once more on a couple of details. For those who can't decide between MP3 and AAC, beaTunes now offers FLAC and OGG support—at least in directory based libraries. The support is still somewhat limited. E.g. the player in the Get Info dialog is working mostly, but not completely. That said, at this point I'm not aiming at writing yet another music player—there are more than enough of those out there already. And in version 3, beaTunes plays nicely with them. Just click on a song and beaTunes will let you open the song in other suitable applications installed on your computer.


As you can see in the screenshot, the context offers some other new goodies. And no, I'm not talking about Bonaparte—I meant items like Show in Playlist... or Play Next in iTunes DJ.

Other little improvements can be found in Drag and Drop on playlists, number hotkeys in the inspection solutions panel, and a bunch of other little fixes.

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 1 week after its release
  • You cannot buy this version

And here are the download links:

Important

This EA version 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 3.0. If you intend to try 3.0 and then go back to 2.x, make sure you back up the database before you try 3.0 (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.

Please provide feedback!

Thanks.

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Tuesday, May 24, 2011

The rapture, rapture...

beaTunes2 logo... the rapture... didn't come. But beaTunes 3 will be released soon and I want it to be a killer. How can that be achieved? Simple:

  • Testing
  • Testing and
  • Testing

I certainly do my part, but real world feedback is way more valuable. This is where you come in.

Please help making beaTunes 3 the best beaTunes ever—get the Early Access version and take it for a ride. In particular, I'm looking for feedback about directory based libraries on Windows. Although constructive, negative feedback is typically more helpful, even positive feedback ("yep, works!") is very much appreciated.

Thank you.

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Thursday, May 19, 2011

beaTunes 3 Early Access 5

beaTunes2 logoSo, how are you feeling? Really.. what mood are you in? And what music would you like to hear? - These are elementary questions when it comes to playlist building, mix tape creation and DJing. I certainly can't answer the question, but I can tell you that beaTunes 3 will help you a little more, finding the right music for your mood.

Unfortunately, that does not mean automatic mood labeling... yet. Even though MIR researchers are getting better at predicting the mood of a song based on its audio signal alone (e.g. with miremotion from MIRToolbox), the feature isn't quite ready for prime time yet. What's needed most is reliable reference data, i.e. data that says: many people agree, song X is so and so intense and to this degree emotionally positive or negative.

A scale, that many researchers measure emotions with, is the valence/arousal scale (going back to Russell's A circumplex model of affect). Valence represents the positiveness of the associated emotion, while arousal indicates how intense it is. Anger, for example is obviously an intense emotion and also clearly negative. Contrary to that, serenity is very low on the arousal scale and undoubtedly a positive emotion.

What does this have to do with beaTunes?

Starting with version 3, beaTunes will let you manually tag songs with a mood or emotion. You can do this either in the main table view, using a little drop down list with a couple of pre-defined moods, or use the new Mood tab in the Get Info dialog.

The colored square lets you pick an emotion, just like you'd pick a color: Red for negative and intense, green for positive and intense, and blue for low intensity/arousal. The UI will also give you feedback with numeric and descriptive values.

Once you have assigned moods to a number of songs, you can take advantage of your categorization using the corresponding mood rule for building matchlists. But even if you don't tag all your songs, tagging some of them will help me with building an automatic mood tagger. The data will be communicated to the database server (this can be turned off in the general preferences), building up reference data, which eventually will help me to create said automatic tagger.

Well, at least that's the plan :-)

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 2 weeks after its release
  • You cannot buy this version

And here are the download links:

Important

This EA version 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 3.0. If you intend to try 3.0 and then go back to 2.x, make sure you back up the database before you try 3.0 (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.

Please provide feedback!

Thanks.

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Thursday, May 12, 2011

beaTunes 3 Early Access 4

beaTunes2 logoIt's been only a week since EA3, but since a couple of things changed, I'd like to pick up the pace a little bit. Some of you might have noticed that in EA3 several analysis tasks didn't work when use online resources was turned on. This is now fixed along with a number of other little things.

In today's announcement, I'd like to highlight a new feature DJs should be interested in—if they're into harmonic mixing. For a long time, beaTunes has offered key detection, but unfortunately this is of limited use, when the instruments used in different recordings aren't tuned the same way. Typically, one tunes for the 4th A to be at 440Hz (concert pitch). But this isn't always the case. When analyzing the key (with use online resources turned off), beaTunes now also calculates the used tuning, if it can be determined with enough accuracy.


As shown in the image, beaTunes displays both the actual A4 frequency in Hz and also the deviation from the regular concert pitch tone in cents. Each cent represents 1/100 semitone. Thus 50 cents deviation mean that the tuning is shifted by half a semitone.

So when looking for a harmonically matching song, you can now take tuning into account. Obviously, a similar tuning will match better than one that is quite different.

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 2 weeks after its release
  • You cannot buy this version

And here are the download links:

Important

This EA version 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 3.0. If you intend to try 3.0 and then go back to 2.x, make sure you back up the database before you try 3.0 (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.

Please provide feedback!

Thanks.

Labels: , ,

Thursday, May 5, 2011

beaTunes 3 Early Access 3

beaTunes2 logoToday's EA release focuses on a bunch of little things. Most of the French translation has been updated, the MatchList dialog now remembers what you did last time you used it and import/export of metadata should work again. There also seems to have been an excessive debug logging problem, which is now fixed. Good news also for Windows users - error messages for failed communications with iTunes are now much clearer and allow to work around that "iTunes has a dialog open"-problem (which prevents COM communication).

Because this release improves so many little things, I'd also like to point out a small new feature, that you might already know from iTunes. beaTunes 3 allows you to choose different sort orders for certain columns. Take for example the Color column. It makes sense to sort color by hue (HSB), which is what beaTunes 2 does. However, this puts very dark and very bright colors right next to each other. Another way to sort colors is by RGB value, which ranks reddish colors highest (or lowest, depending on the sort direction). To switch between sort directions, just click on the left side of the table column header (where it says Color). To switch from ascending to descending and vice versa, clicking on the arrow in the table header still works as usual. Another column that offers different sort orders is the Album column.

And while we are talking about columns - beaTunes 3 offers a new way to turn columns on and off. Of course you can still right/ctrl-click on the table header to see the context menu. Additionally, you can now use the new View Options... menu item in the View menu. It opens a dialog that allows you to comfortably drag and drop columns from one panel to another.

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 2 weeks after its release
  • You cannot buy this version

And here are the download links:

Important

This EA version 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 3.0. If you intend to try 3.0 and then go back to 2.x, make sure you back up the database before you try 3.0 (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.

Please provide feedback!

Thanks.

Labels: