NYE Release

EA16 is available. I fixed a number of queue issues - cancel should now work properly and other visual errors should be fixed. Most of the icons used throughout the app can now be replaced through custom themes, as I added a Theme.getResource() method, which is used for looking up icons. Internally a couple of things have changed to aid plugin development. And as a little GUI enhancement, the number of remaining songs in the queue is now displayed as badge on the dock icon (OS X only). And of course there are some other smaller fixes and enhancements.

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: EA16 isn't even a beta version (actually, we are getting very close to that, though).

And here are the download links:

• beaTunes-2-0-0-EA16 (OS X)
• beaTunes-2-0-0-EA16 (Windows)

Note for EA15 users

If you have been using the keytogrouping plugin - go to the blog post and download the updated version, remove the old version and put the new one in the plugin folder. Things will fail without removing the old version!

Copy Keys to Grouping Plugin

We all know the problem: iTunes does not show tonal key information available in beaTunes. To solve it, I wrote a little beaTunes 2.0 plugin, that copies the key info into the (often unused) grouping field. Just download the this file and place it into your plugin directory. Make sure that it is the only version of the plugin in that folder - i.e. remove any older versions.

The location of your plugin directory depends on your operating system:

• XP: c:\Documents and Settings\[username]\.beaTunes\plugins
• Vista: c:\Users\[username]\.beaTunes\plugins
• OS X: [your_home]/Library/Application Support/beaTunes/Plug-Ins

If you're interested in how the plugin works - it's trivial and here's the maven project complete with Java sources. Just make sure you somehow point to the beaTunes binaries for compilation.

Important!

This plugin needs at least beaTunes 2.0.0 EA16 to work correctly! Since beaTunes 2 is still not release, things may change and break/stop working.

Note: This post has been updated to reflect changes in EA16.

Holiday release, the 2nd

Because there have been some problems with the embedding of non-iTunes fields, I figured it makes sense to push out another release before the holidays start. This one contains the latest version of jaudiotagger, the library beaTunes currently uses for tagging files whenever iTunes is unwilling to do the job. Paul Taylor, the jaudiotagger author, has made a bunch of changes that make tagging with his library a lot safer (especially padding mp3 files). I really hope to benefit from that. Great work, Paul!

Other than that, I did some changes so that one can now run custom analysis tasks in the queue (more about that in another post), fixed some file location related issues and fixed sorting by key.

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: EA15 isn't even a beta version (actually, we are getting very close to that, though).

And here are the download links:

• beaTunes-2-0-0-EA15 (OS X)
• beaTunes-2-0-0-EA15 (Windows)

Note for EA14 users

There should be no problems.

Don't embed non-iTunes fields, the 2nd.

It looks like EA14 of beaTunes 2 still doesn't correctly embed non-iTunes fields into audio files. Please turn this feature off, if you are using EA14. To do so, just open the Preferences, open the General tab and uncheck Embed non-iTunes fields into audio files.

Holiday Release

Almost unbelievable, but true - we are slowly approaching a final release. Today's EA release focusses on some query speed issues as well as some stability issues, but at this point there probably won't be any major feature additions for the actual 2.0 release. EA14 should fix the non-iTunes field problem I posted about earlier. It also features some faster queries and faster matching against the whole Library. Additionally, I added some fallbacks for memory management, which should make the app more stable overall.

Contrary to previous EA releases, this release will expire after 3 weeks and not 2. So you can use this throughout the holidays...

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 we make a reasonable effort)
• This version will cease to function 3 weeks after its release
• You cannot buy this version

Just so that there is no doubt about it: EA14 isn't even a beta version (actually, we are getting very close to that, though).

And here are the download links:

• beaTunes-2-0-0-EA14 (OS X)
• beaTunes-2-0-0-EA14 (Windows)

Note for EA13 users

Some updates to the database.

Don't embed non-iTunes fields!

It has come to my attention that in some cases EA13 of beaTunes 2 doesn't correctly embed non-iTunes fields into audio files. I highly recommend to turn this feature off altogether for EA13. To do so, just open the Preferences, open the General tab and uncheck Embed non-iTunes fields into audio files.

Sort that color!

And another two weeks have passed... Major improvements in this release are improved stability when analyzing multiple songs in parallel, improved MusicIP data import and I switched sorting by color back to HSB instead of RGB - it just looks better, even though it certainly isn't perfect either. Last but not least, some database queries should be slightly faster - and I really hope to improve query speed some more for the next release.

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 we 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: EA13 isn't even a beta version.

And here are the download links:

• beaTunes-2-0-0-EA13 (OS X)
• beaTunes-2-0-0-EA13 (Windows)

Note for EA12 users

Some updates to the database.

Streamlined syncing with iTunes

It's been a very busy two weeks - unfortunately beaTunes 2 got only two major enhancements, but at least important ones. EA12 features a more streamlined synchronization with iTunes. In essence, longer syncs that update most of beaTunes' internal database should be a thing of the past. I also fixed that annoying deselection bug in the main table view that occurred after syncing.

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 we 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: EA12 isn't even a beta version.

And here are the download links:

• beaTunes-2-0-0-EA12 (OS X)
• beaTunes-2-0-0-EA12 (Windows)

Note for EA11 users

None.

Finding the Key

In the past two weeks a bunch of things have changed on the analysis front. I got to test the new key analysis algorithm from EA10 and as a result completely rewrote it. Accuracy of the results should be much better now. I also introduced a second BPM detection algorithm called SimpleSoundEnergy, which is generally faster than the original one, but not quite as accurate. This is hopefully great for folks who quickly want to scan huge collections and don't care as much about accuracy.

Of course I fixed a bunch of little things that are too tedious to list here. But you might want to know, that I added a couple of new inspectors. The amazon album version inspector lets you easily remove the (Album Version) suffix that Amazon likes to append to their mp3 titles. The rarely used genre inspector let's you find genres that are hardly used and maybe should be replaced by other genres. Lastly, I added an inspection that finds dupes with different ratings and lets you adjust them.

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 we 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: EA11 isn't even a beta version.

And here are the download links:

• beaTunes-2-0-0-EA11 (OS X)
• beaTunes-2-0-0-EA11 (Windows)

Note for EA10 users

There will be some updates to the database. Make sure the analysis queue is empty before starting EA11 for the first time. If that is not possible, please note that BPM tasks that are still in the queue will probably fail.

Fixes, Fixes, Fixes

Wow - EA9 brought a couple of issues to light, which I hopefully have addressed in today's EA10. So expect a bunch of more or less obvious fixes. OutOfMemoryErrors are hopefully a thing of the past...

The biggest new item is the spanking new tonal key analysis. Finally, beaTunes now knows how to fill that key field it already supported for quite a while. However, the algorithm still needs some testing and tuning, so results may vary.

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 we 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: EA10 isn't even a beta version.

And here are the download links:

• beaTunes-2-0-0-EA10 (OS X)
• beaTunes-2-0-0-EA10 (Windows)

Note for EA9 users

There will be some updates to the database.

Featuring: Savable Matchlists

Yes, it's time again for a beaTunes Early Access release - this one's number 9.

The biggest new item is the ability to save Matchlists. Yep, that's right - you can now create Matchlists and re-run the same rules, seeds etc. to update the already created playlist. This is particularly useful, when you added a bunch of songs to your library since you created the Matchlist. Or you fine-tuned the used ruleset and want to apply these changes. Or... well, I guess you got the idea. To update a Matchlist, just CTRL/Right-click on the list icon and choose Update Matchlist.

Another major improvement for Matchlists is the selection of multiple seed songs. You don't anymore have to select all seed songs before you create the Matchlist. You can start with some easily selectable songs, open the Matchlist dialog, and then add some more songs, by simply dragging them into the dialog.

I also tried to undo the damage done to the user interface by Apple's Java 1.5.0_16 update, which left most button margins/insets in a rather unattractive state.

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 versions (even though we 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: EA9 isn't even a beta version.

And here are the download links:

• beaTunes-2-0-0-EA9 (OS X)
• beaTunes-2-0-0-EA9 (Windows)

Note for EA8 users

There will be some updates to the database.

Lights, Camera, Action!

After a couple of small Early Access releases, this is definitely one with more changes. Here's what's new:

I added an audio player to the Get Info dialog, which should make tagging songs a lot easier. Just open the Get Info dialog, hit the play button, tag the song and hit Command-RightArrow (or the next button) to go to the next song. It will start playing automatically. This way you can go through a bunch of songs in a breeze. The same is true for the new BPM tap dialog. I just stuck it into the Get Info as well and it has the same functionality.

Under the hood, beaTunes now supports embedding some of the metadata it computes into the audio files themselves (mp3 and aac only). This is very useful as a backup mechanism, should your beaTunes library become corrupted. Also, if you use your files on multiple computers, having the data embedded will cut down on analysis time - just make sure you enable that import analysis task. If you don't want to embed the data into your files, make sure to turn embedding off. This can be done in the general preferences. BTW: I implemented this using jaudiotagger, an excellent library written by Paul Taylor.

The next big change is mostly eyecandy. Inspired by Filty Rich Clients, I added some animations. So the context drawer and the tree panel are now animated. I think it looks pretty cool, but check for yourself - below is one of those screencapture movies.

(Fairly technical, but very interesting - implementing the animations, I realized what a big difference using createCompatibleImage() makes. It truly makes or breaks an animation.)

Furthermore, I improved iTunes 8 support and added a rule that allows to select songs with a similar rating.

Also fairly technical, but hopefully exciting to fellow developers: Both the Amazon context component and the matching songs table are now implemented fully as plugins. In other words, once I am moving towards a final 2.0 version, I'll write more about how to write custom plugins, so you can stick other cool stuff in that lower right corner.

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 versions (even though we 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: EA8 isn't even a beta version.

And here are the download links:

• beaTunes-2-0-0-EA8 (OS X)
• beaTunes-2-0-0-EA8 (Windows)

Note for EA7 users

There will be some small updates to the database.

Update (9/18/2008, 11am EDT) : The original OS X version of EA8 had a bug - the Get Info dialog didn't work at all due to a classpath issue. I fixed the issue. Please just download again (same filename), if Get Info simply doesn't show anything. Thanks.

beaTunes 2 EA 7

I will make this a short one: EA7 offers a number of small, not so much noticeable, but nevertheless important improvements. Examples are next/previous buttons in the BPM tap dialog, a better algorithm for finding iTunes libraries on Windows and a number of UI changes/fixes. For (slightly) more info, check out the NOTES.txt file, which is part of every release.

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 versions (even though we 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: EA7 isn't even a beta version.

And here are the download links:

• beaTunes-2-0-0-EA7 (OS X)
• beaTunes-2-0-0-EA7 (Windows)

Note for EA6 users

Actually, there is nothing noteworthy... Enjoy!

Updated looks

It's been only a week since the last Early Access release of beaTunes, but as there definitely won't be a release next week, I figured I go ahead and post an update now, so people won't get stranded with an expired EA release.

Today's EA6 release features a number of GUI updates and a new Leopard theme (available only on Leopard) that finally implements the unified toolbar look found in so many modern Mac apps. Thanks to Ken, who pointed out in his blog what should have been pointed out in TN-2196 in more detail. Namely, that apple.awt.brushMetalLook produces the unified toolbar look. Now I'm just waiting for Apple to fix JDialogs, which don't seem to respect the property...

Other changes are mostly bugfixes - including one important one for Windows users: If you choose to run more than one analysis task (e.g. color and bpm), the second one was not working in EA5. This is now fixed.

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 versions (even though we 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: EA6 isn't even a beta version.

And here are the download links:

• beaTunes-2-0-0-EA6 (OS X)
• beaTunes-2-0-0-EA6 (Windows)

Note for EA5 users

Actually, there is nothing noteworthy... Enjoy!

Pluggable Rules

Another two weeks have passed, which means it's time for a new Early Access release. Again we've worked on beaTunes' guts trying to get it ready for prime time. The most interesting change from a technical standpoint, is the newly added ability to install match rules as plugins. This means that in the future, eager third party developers can create their own rules, drop them into the plugin folder and take advantage of them in the matching process. This plugin architecture is supposed to be a theme for beaTunes 2 - making it extendible and more powerful.

Other than that, we fixed some little things, improved this and that and hope this will be an overall stable EA release.

Nevertheless, 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 we 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: EA5 isn't even a beta version.

And here are the download links:

• beaTunes-2-0-0-EA5 (OS X)
• beaTunes-2-0-0-EA5 (Windows)

Note for EA4 users

EA5 changes the database schema introduced in EA4. During the update, beaTunes will display a dialog box. Please be patient.

Sort this!

Even though we made some significant changes, today's new Early Access release 4 is probably not very exciting from a user's point of view. A biggie for us is the complete removal of any QuickTime for Java (QTJ) dependencies. QTJ lets Java programmers easily access one of the most powerful multimedia libraries out there. Unfortunately, as part of the 64bit-Carbon-abandonment, Apple decided to drop all QTJ support in the 64bit-only Java 6 VM and as a result, we'll have to slowly migrate away from it. As of now, beaTunes 2 is still dependent on (native, Carbon-based) QuickTime and will only run in a 32bit JVM. But at least we got rid of the QTJ code as a first step.

In the Windows world, this move away from QTJ will have positive side-effects. For quite a while now, the iTunes updater tended to mess up the QTJ installation. Many users weren't even able to install beaTunes properly without technical support. With QTJ out of the way, we're looking forward to many happy Windows users and fewer support cases.

But enough with the technical whining - there are other neat little improvements contained in this release. First of all, beaTunes now finally supports iTunes-style sorting utilizing sort name, sort artist, etc. We added a corresponding info dialog pane and, probably best of all, some new inspections designed to deal with wrong or butchered sort names.

As you might know, iTunes determines sort names mostly automatically. If, for example, a song title starts with the word "an", it is assumed to be an indefinite English article and therefore dropped from the sort name. Unfortunately, languages like German also have a word "an", which happens to be a preposition, not an indefinite article and should not be dropped from the sort name. beaTunes now has the ability to detect such errors taking advantage of its language field. So for best results, run the language analysis before inspecting sort names.

We also got to improve the typo inspector - it should now do a better job with short names. Another goodie: Searchboxes now have a little popup menu that let's you specify the search mode. E.g., you can now limit a search to the artist field.

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 (even though we 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: EA4 isn't even a beta version.

And here are the download links:

• beaTunes-2-0-0-EA4 (OS X)
• beaTunes-2-0-0-EA4 (Windows)

Note for EA3 users

EA4 changes the database schema first introduced in EA2. During the update, beaTunes will display a dialog box. Please be patient. The update may take a while.

Windows, accelerate!

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.

beaTunes 2.0 Early Access 2

Thanks to all the brave people who downloaded EA1 and took it for a ride. Your feedback was very valuable for EA2, which is available as of today.

Changes include a workaround for a memory leak in Java 6 on Windows, lowered memory consumption while importing beaTunes 1 data, more responsive UI for big libraries, a new Duplicates Inspector, a new play/skip-ratio column etc. We have not changed the BPM algorithm or, for that matter, anything that has to do with analysis. Again, we are looking for feedback - please let us know what's great and what just doesn't work.

And here's the mandatory 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

To make this perfectly clear: EA2 isn't even a beta version.

And here are the download links:

• beaTunes-2-0-0-EA2 (OS X)
• beaTunes-2-0-0-EA2 (Windows)

Important Note for EA1 users

EA2 contains code that migrates the EA1 database to the new EA2 format. beaTunes will start iTunes (if it is not started already), then convert your database. Depending on the size of your database, this may take a long time, we've seen up to 30min, but it may be longer. You will not get any visual feedback until the conversion is completed, so please be patient, get a coffee and call a friend you haven't talked to in a while.

The conversion is a one-time process. If for some reason you have worked a lot with EA1 and need to be sure that the data is imported correctly, we recommend that you back up your database files before starting EA2. To do so, copy ~/Library/Application Support/beaTunes/Database or c:\Documents and Settings\<username>\.beaTunes\database to a safe location.

One of the reasons why the conversion takes so long, is the fact that we changed the datatype of the primary keys in the biggest tables to achieve better overall performance.

Got balls and a huge library? Test our Early Access version!

In the past couple of months we have made an effort to make some progress with beaTunes 2. One of the most important goals is better scalability, i.e. the ability to efficiently manage larger libraries while consuming fewer system resources. As a consequence, we have rewritten most of beaTunes' guts. Today, we'd like to ask the brave among you to check out what we've achieved so far.

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

To make this perfectly clear: EA1 isn't even a beta version.

Of course, the purpose of this release is to obtain feedback from real users. Please don't hesitate to contact us and let us know what does or does not work, is taking too long or does not fulfill your expectations in any other way.

And here are the download links:

• beaTunes-2-0-0-EA1 (OS X)
• beaTunes-2-0-0-EA1 (Windows)

Enjoy!

Third beta of iP2F

tagtraum industries, the maker of beaTunes, has just released the third beta version of iP2F, a new Flickr upload plugin for iPhoto.

The new release fixes some minor UI issues that occurred when multiple images were selected.

To try out the current beta version you don't need to buy the plugin. However, while iP2F is still in beta, you can already purchase a license for the final version for only $9.95. The regular price will be $14.95.

beaTunes 1.1 Early Access 1

After quite a big of work, we are proud to post the first Early Access version of beaTunes 1.1. For those who don't know - Early Access is what we call our betas. Early Access versions usually stop working one week after they have been released. There is no way you can buy an Early Access version. Usually, we'll either post a new Early Access release or a final for sale release.

This is an almost feature complete release. This means there are many, many improvements for you to check out.

One prominent one is the new blogging support. We have rewritten much of the underlying code to support Atom 1.0, customizable playlist styles, tags, etc. You can now choose the columns you want displayed and even re-arrange them by dragging. We would love to get some feedback about this! Please use the tagtraum email address on this page, since we are still having mail server trouble.

Here are the links to the new release:
OS X
Windows

Note that your system has to fulfill the requirements outlined on the regular download page.