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!

beaTunes 1.2.11 is released

Alright, beaTunes isn't quite Firefox 3, but it too has a new release out. As the version number 1.2.11 indicates, this is mostly a maintenance release - no new features are introduced. We're saving those for beaTunes 2...

This is not to say that nothing has changed. We finally taught our iTunes Music Library.xml parser to deal with the malformed XML files exported by iTunes. Yes, you read that right: iTunes exports malformed XML. More specifically, the iTunes XML exporter does not safeguard against illegal UTF-8 or illegal XML characters. RFC-3629 clearly prohibits encoding character numbers between U+D800 and U+DFFF, which are reserved for use with the UTF-16 encoding form (as surrogate pairs) and do not directly represent characters. Unfortunately, users have told us again and again that their iTunes Music Library.xml contains such characters. The same is true for the non-characters U+FFFF and U+FFFE. They are contained in some libraries, but are clearly illegal in XML.

We assume that the bad characters stem from bad id3 tags - iTunes probably copies them without paying any attention to their legality. In any case, instead of choking, beaTunes will now silently ignore them.

Happy New Year! (with beaTunes 1.2.7)

We hope you all made it safely into the new year and wish you all the best for 2008. Fresh from the bits'n'bytes press we just uploaded a new release of beaTunes to our servers. It addresses some minor usability issues, problems with empty blog labels/terms and problems with private blogger.com blogs. It also finally provides Windows folks - who don't have Windows Scripting Host (WSH) installed - with a better error message.

Enjoy!

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!

beaTunes 1.2.5 released

We just released beaTunes 1.2.5. This release fixes a couple of Leopard UI issues. Furthermore the delayed commit progress dialog now refreshes correctly, the recently-added-songs logic was improved and unnecessary fallbacks to QuickTime are now avoided. Mac users should definitely update.

Enjoy!

beaTunes 1.2.4 released

We have just released beaTunes 1.2.4. This release is a minor update that addresses an issue on Windows. Sometimes beaTunes wouldn't analyze songs with cyrillic letters in their names. This issue has been fixed.

If you are running beaTunes on OS X, you can probably skip this update.

beaTunes 1.2.3 features delayed commits

Yesterday we put a minor update to beaTunes on our website. It addresses three different issues:

• UI improvements
• Leopard compatibility
• Delayed inspection commit

UI improvements: Language names are no longer shown in the system language, but always in English. We also added the most important languages to the top of each language combobox, to make their selection easier. Furthermore, there were occasional issues with displaying the Get Info dialog correctly on systems that used very long genre names. This issue is fixed. Another small improvement: In the Get info dialog for multiple items, the checkboxes are now automatically selected, once the user enters anything in the corresponding field.

Leopard compatibility: It turned out that due to changes Apple made in the Applescript subsystem, beaTunes wasn't working on Leopard. We looked into these issues and solved them. So there shouldn't be a big surprise in October, when Leopard finally sees the light of day.

Delayed inspection commit: Some users suggested that beaTunes should wait with committing changes initiated in the inspection dialog until the dialog is closed. This, so the reasoning, should allow a more fluent inspection. We listened and implemented the desired delayed commit. It's enabled by default and can be turned off in the inspections preferences.

We hope this update makes your beaTunes experience even more fun.

beaTunes 1.2.2 is out

We are glad to announce the release of beaTunes 1.2.2. This latest release of the popular iTunes library management tool features a number of bug fixes for both OS X and Windows. If you are already using an earlier version, we recommend to update.

Thanks to all of our users who helped testing this version and gave us highly appreciated feedback.

Micro Update

We are happy to say that we had a great response to our recent beaTunes 1.2 release. Many, many people tried beaTunes for the first time and loved it.

Unfortuntely, some of them were a little disappointed, because they ran into a bug that we didn't catch before the release. It's one of those that only shows up under certain conditions, that are hard to simulate when developing. In this case, it was the combination of certain analysis tasks, configured in a specific way and combined with already existing data in the track that people wanted to analyze. The symptom of the bug was a beaTunes crash. We are sorry, that we didn't see this one coming, but that's just how software development works.

Anyhow, we fixed it, posted an updated version (1.2.1) on our site and highly recommend OS X users to install it.

Server under load!

Usually I love to report that we have many many people downloading our software. Today though, it seems like it's a couple too many. Our server is making funny noises, download times for individuals are getting longer and sometimes the server doesn't even respond in a timely fashion. To ease the problem, we ask people to download the OS X version of beaTunes from download.com, rather than beatunes.com. The software is exactly the same.

Thank you for your help!

beaTunes 1.2 released

After quite a few micro updates, we are happy to announce the availability of beaTunes 1.2. The new version is an overall improved version of what you already know and like: Plainly spoken, one of the best iTunes library management tools around.

The list of little things that we improved or fixed is quite long - we will therefore not list all of them here (if you're curious, most changes are listed in the Notes.txt file that comes with the release). But let's talk about the bigger changes...

Faster Analysis

We spent quite some time on making audio analysis faster on OS X and are quite pleased with the results. On a 2.33 GHz Core 2 Duo the analysis of just the BPM is about 1.6x faster than it used to be with beaTunes 1.1.7, when processing tasks sequentially. Now, many of you know that beaTunes can process more than one task in parallel on multicore machines. You just need to open the Preferences, go to Analysis and increase the number of tasks, then restart beaTunes.

What happens when you have beaTunes process two tasks in parallel on the same machine? That's right, it gets faster. More than twice as fast as processing two tasks in parallel with beaTunes 1.1.7. In other words, our performance improvements scale much better than what beaTunes used to offer. The more processors/cores, the faster it gets. In our limited experiment, beaTunes scaled almost linearly, i.e. the same number of tracks where analyzed twice as fast when doubling the number of tasks to be processed in parallel.

Automatic Track Identification

Do you have any tracks that are named 01-Track.mp3? From ripping offline or simply from before CDDB and freedb were all the rage? If so, beaTunes can now help you out. We integrated a feature called MusicDNS by MusicIP. It lets you compute an acoustic fingerprint that can be used to look up some basic data like artist, title and PUID (a PUID is basically a number that can in turn be used to look up metadata on websites like MusicBrainz). beaTunes uses this to automatically import metadata for those ill-named tracks. Furthermore, we use the data for a nifty autocorrection feature. Much like a spellchecker, beaTunes can now make you aware of different spellings or missing information in its Get Info dialog.

Let There Be Babel

The last major feature I'd like to mention here, is the improved support for lyrics and languages. You all know that iTunes has the ability to store lyrics for each track. Unfortunately, there is still no legal way to automatically fetch lyrics from some web service. We decided to offer two features:

1. A Google Lyrics button
2. A lyrics language analyzer

The button (located on the Lyrics pane in the Get Info dialog) does exactly what you would think it should do - it opens your browser and googles for the lyrics of the selected song. At this point you are of course free to copy the lyrics from some website and paste it into the lyrics fields. Once you have the lyrics, the lyrics language analyzer is capable of determining what language the lyrics are in (if it is a western European language). This can be useful for ordering songs or creating play/matchlists in just one language. Since not everybody has time to google the lyrics for each and every track, there is a fallback mechanism that simply looks at the titles of all tracks on an album.

And...

Well, that's the most important stuff... Of course there are also new background themes, new blogstyles, new and improved inspectors etc.

We hopy you enjoy the new version.

beaTunes 1.1.7 released

In an attempt to minimize the negative effects of the latest iTunes/QuickTime update, we have released beaTunes 1.1.7 today.

The new version provides clear instructions on how to fix a broken QuickTime for Java installation should the need occur.

Enjoy!

beaTunes 1.1.6 is out!

We have just released beaTunes 1.1.6. It's a maintenance release, featuring a couple of minor fixes:

• Fixed issues with non-ASCII digits in typo inspectors
• Fixed bug in albumartist typo inspector that lead to the artist and not the albumartist being changed
• Fixed NPE in sorted AnalysisQueueTableModels

Enjoy!

beaTunes 1.1.5 is out

We have just released beaTunes 1.1.5. The newest version of the top iTunes library management tool features several bugfixes and enhancements:

• We adapted the blogging code to recent changes in blogger.com.
• The characters &<>!@, are now automatically dropped from labels/tags sent to blogger.com, since blogger does not support them.
• To improve inspection, we added natural language single digit expansion to albumtypo-inspector and artisttypo-inspector. This means, that beaTunes will now recognize, that e.g. "four" and "4" mean the same thing. Note that this feature is limited to the numbers 0 to 9 of most major languages.
• Other minor usability improvements.

Enjoy!

Another update: beaTunes 1.1.4

Since beaTunes 1.1.3 had a couple of issues, especially on Windows, we decided to quickly address them. Additionally, version 1.1.4 brings a couple of other improvements. Here's the short list:

• Re-added artist typo inspection
• Added song matching preferences button to matching songs table
• Switched OS X distribution format to DMG
• Fixed issue with files wrongly reported as missing on OS X, when running inspection multiple times
• Switched to universal 1.5 R5 JavaApplicationStub

So finally beaTunes is distributed in a disk image and not the clumsy zip file anymore. Also, for those people who thought beaTunes was a PowerPC application, Finder now shows correctly that beaTunes is a universal binary. Last but not least - in 1.1.3 the misspelled artist inspection was left out accidently - it's now back in.

As always, you can get the new release from our download page.

beaTunes 1.1.3 is released

As already announced earlier this week, we just updated beaTunes. The update features the following improvements:

• Improved BPM tapper
• Added preferences panel for inspections
• Fixed iTunes version check

What does this mean for you?

Well, the BPM tapper now ignores taps that are obviously off, i.e. aren't even close to previous taps. This allows you to miss a beat without screwing up the overall result. The new preference panel for inspections lets you to turn specific inspections off. For example, you might not always want to check for missing files. And last but not least: The faulty iTunes version check has been fixed.

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

beaTunes 1.1.2 is out

We just did a minor update - mainly for the OS X version of beaTunes. Some of you were annoyed by the strange Command-Click behavior beaTunes exposed on OS X, when working with song tables. It took us some time, but we finally realized that this is a(nother) bug in Apple's Swing look and feel. So we filed a bug report and hacked a workaround. And since this bug is really annoying, we decided to quickly push the fix out as an update - even though this update hardly contains any other changes.

For Windows users this means, that you can pretty much skip this release, since it does not contain relevant fixes for you.

New Year's Update: beaTunes 1.1.1

Start the New Year with updating to the just released beaTunes 1.1.1! We have fixed a number of smaller issues and improved some features (for details see release notes). Just as an example: When dragging songs on OS X a translucent representation of the songs is now displayed.

Get your free 7 day trial copy from:

http://www.beatunes.com/

And let us know, what you think!

beaTunes 1.1 is released

We are proud to announce version 1.1 of beaTunes - the iTunes add-on for Mac & Windows, popular especially amongst DJs, athletes and audiophiles.

beaTunes analyzes the color and tempo (BPM) of your songs, intelligently creates playlists of matching songs, corrects your iTunes Music Library (typos, wrong genres, etc.), lets you blog about your playlists, and more.

Whether you need to build a compelling DJ set or workout-playlist for your Nike + iPod, beaTunes can help.

It lets you build better playlists.

Version 1.1 stays true to the original concept - but makes it even better. We have tuned the user interface, improved support for multi-core systems, introduced match rulesets, and completely rewritten the blogging component.

Get your free 7 day trial copy from:

http://www.beatunes.com/

And let us know, what you think!