New release - 20101023
October 31, 2010 in bliss by Dan Gravell
There's some new features and a few fixes to make things a little more dependable in this fortnight's release.
The first new feature is the ability to change album names for your albums. You can do this on the album detail screen by clicking the album name. When done, click away and the album name is changed. This changes all the album name tags in the music files for the album. It also re-runs your rules so that album art and/or your file organisation is re-assessed. When you look for alternative art, the lookup will be done with the new name.
I improved interoperability with iTunes. A recent change to bliss was to be more explicit about the type of art bliss embeds in files. In many file formats it is possible to save different types of art, for instance a front cover, a back cover, sleeve notes etc. For those that save many different types of art I was careful not to overwrite this with just a changed front cover. Unfortunately, iTunes pays no attention to the art type, and simply displays the first image in a file. Worse, it labels the art it adds as 'other' art type which means the art bliss adds is added after the existing art, and so you won't see it in iTunes! This release semi-fixes this by always adding art as the first in the list. There is also now a rule for enforcing one piece of embedded art per music file, however this isn't configurable via the UI. I'm mentioning it here in case anyone thinks it might be useful - I can tell you about it and help you configure it over email and maybe I'll add it to the UI if it is popular.
There are a few changes to make things a little more... robust. For instance:
- If bliss fails to download album art, it retries the download
- You can now request a rescan of an album. This re-assesses the album and retries any automatic fixes
- Use the Java Advanced Imaging API as a fall-back if album art images cannot be processed
- If a track name is not set for a track, use its filename instead
I improved the efficiency of reading/writing music files and in tests the speed of scanning an album on an external or network mounted disk was improved by about 50% (this isn't all bliss does though, so don't expect general 50% improvements in speed! It depends on the speed of your disk, whether you are embedded art into files and more).
Logs can now be found at http://[bliss ip]:3221/logs as well as on the filesystem. I thought this might make it easier to gather and view the logs.
I fixed a few bugs too...
- Fixed a Discogs lookup issue which meant completely incorrect art was sometimes downloaded
- I enlarged the height of the file assessment expected/actual text so that underscores can be seen
- Fixed an issue with the file system notification listener on the Mac which meant bliss thought a flood of music files were being deleted!
Get the new release from the downloads page!
