New release - 20110809
August 16, 2011 in bliss by Dan Gravell
Two main new features this release: the ability to add bliss as a Windows service and the ability to ignore directories during bliss's scan.
Adding bliss as a Windows service makes it easy to setup bliss to start automatically when your computer starts . This is useful for server side installations, for instance within Windows Home Server.
How to add bliss as a Windows service
There's full instructions on how to install bliss as a Windows service in a more recent blog post.
bliss now ships with two extra batch files, runnable under Windows, to add bliss as a Windows service. The batch files are located in %bliss%\bin and are called install-service.bat and remove-service.bat. Hopefully it's obvious what each one does ;-) . Once this update is installed, run install-service.bat to add the Windows service. The service will be called 'bliss'. If you are using Windows Vista or Windows 7 you will have to run the scripts as administrator.
The service installs, by default, such that it starts automatically upon startup. If you don't want this, open the Windows services applet after installation and alter the start behaviour via the service's properties.
Ignoring directories
bliss now allows you to ignore files and folders in your music folder. This is done at the file system level: you create file(s) that bliss recognises and, as a result, bliss does not scan these directories. The files must be created before bliss starts, or at least before it attempts to scan the folder in question.
To ignore all of the music files in a given folder, create a file in the folder called bliss-ignorefiles. This means bliss will not assess any of the music files in that folder. It will, however, inspect any child folders within the folder and potentially assess music files located therein. To stop that behaviour, read on...
To stop bliss walking through child folders, create a file in the parent folder called bliss-ignorefolders.
If you have a folder that has both music files and folders that you want to ignore, create both files.
Note: originally these files were called .bliss-ignorefiles and .bliss-ignorefolders. I removed the leading period '.' because it was impossible for users of Windows Explorer to create the files.
Several last things...
The activity stream has had further improvements to fix bugs in the way the log was updated, and also to make the messages in the log more consistent.
A bug in the missing genre rule has been fixed. Before, if the missing genre rule was enabled but the genre consolidation rule disabled, the missing genre rule would fail to find genres. The two are now able to work independently.
Finally, a memory problem in the way the artists list was populated has been fixed. This only really affected larger libraries.
Get the new release from the downloads page. Your existing fixes apply!
Thanks to Caveman Chuck Coker for the image above.
