New release - 20110421 - Pause and rescan
April 26, 2011 in bliss by Dan Gravell
This fortnight's release includes control over when bliss rescans your music files. New 'play' and 'pause' buttons have been added to the user interface. This is to afford greater control of when bliss starts its potentially long-winded and computationally expensive scan of the file system.
When you first download and install bliss, the effect is not really any different to before. You choose your rules, select your music library and then click apply. However, once begun, you can pause scanning as bliss works. Pausing does not stop bliss dead in its tracks. bliss will finish what it was already doing, assessing and fixing any albums at had already started on. This means it can take a little while for the pause to take effect. Also, it means bliss stops listening for file system changes, so any change you make to your collection in the meantime will not be picked up by bliss. Pressing 'play' should pick up the changes.
The change becomes more obvious when bliss restarts. It now defaults to 'pause' mode when restarted, which means it does nothing until you either click the 'play' button or change rules.
With the upcoming work to remember scans from previous runs this both lowers the amount of rescanning bliss has to perform and gives you more control.
I also changed the genre tree user interface control to improve performance with Internet Explorer. IE is, at the time of writing, the slowest of the browsers when it comes to executing interactive Javascript. This is exacerbated in bliss, where the size of the genre tree can really stretch IE. The new UI control improves this, although there are still some obvious slowdowns.
Some other improvements include...
- Improved UI efficiency when displaying covers
- The genre tree is now pre-packaged, in case blisshq.com is not available
- Fixed a Javascript bug in IE caused by the 'flashing' of the fixes counter
- The popup balloons have been disabled
- The response after manually typing a new artist name/album name/genre/year is now instantaneous
Get the new release from the downloads page. Your existing fixes apply to this version too!
