beaTunes News

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.

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