UnsatisfiedLinkError: beaTunes, Leopard and Java 6

A little while ago, Apple finally released Java 6 for Leopard. Unfortunately, the 64bit Java 6 does not support QuickTime for Java anymore. Why? QuickTime for Java depends on Carbon, for which Apple is dropping support in 64bit environments.

What does this mean for beaTunes? In the long term we will move away from the QuickTime for Java API on OS X. We already utilize CoreAudio in parts of the application, which will not be affected by Apple's discontinued support for Carbon based APIs. We will replace the remaining code that is still using QuickTime.

Are users affected by this right now? Yes, unfortunately they are. As beaTunes works quite nicely with Java 6 on Windows, the current OS X version of beaTunes (1.2.9) will also start with Java 6, if it is installed. And this will fail due to the reasons mentioned above with an UnsatisfiedLinkError. To fix this, one needs to edit the file Contents/Info.plist in the beaTunes application bundle and replace the existing JVMVersion string with the value 1.5* (instead of 1.5+)

We will release an update next week, which contains this fix.

beaTunes 1.2.6 is out

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!

OS X 10.4.11 solves iTunes Plus-CoreAudio problems

It looks like the recent OS X 10.4.11 update solved a couple of issues with opening iTunes Plus files with CoreAudio. Previously, CoreAudio APIs were often not able to even open an iTunes Plus file even though no DRM was employed. For beaTunes users this was pretty annoying, since they had to fall back to a not as fast QuickTime implementation of the same code, that had to be manually enabled.