New release - 20111221 - clear and rescan
January 03, 2012 in bliss by Dan Gravell
Over the past few months, the cause of most problems related to running bliss has been database corruption. Strange messages such as double get for block and page header magic for block not OK mean bliss's internal database has become corrupt. It is caused most commonly by an abrupt shutdown of the bliss process, perhaps because the computer hosting it has been switched off or reset without a 'shutdown'.
This new build contains multiple ways of alleviating these problems. First, extra care is taken to avoid corruption in the first place, even if the host computer is switched off abruptly. In addition, when bliss detects a corrupted database on startup it deletes it and starts over. Finally, the same delete-and-start-over code is available for invocation manually using the clear and rescan button.
The button can be reached by clicking the down pointing triangle next to the existing rescan button. The clear and rescan button will be displayed. Clicking it deletes the existing database and starts from the beginning, re-assessing all of your music against your rules.
Improvements to acoustic fingerprinting
The acoustic fingerprinting code introduced in the last build has been polished up a little. As a recap, acoustic fingerprinting is a way of identifying music by the audio within a music file, rather than its tags, which may be incorrect (often subtly) or non-existent. This is useful when looking up information or album art for some music online.
For starters there's now a 64 bit version of the Linux acoustic fingerprinter. The existing 32 bit version would still work on a 64 bit Linux box if you had the correct libraries installed, but without them the fingerprinter would fail.
The main improvement though is a big increase in the accuracy and coverage of the fingerprinter. On the bliss test machines the fingerprinter now outperforms 'legacy' tag based lookup.
Other stuff
More stuff in this release includes:
- Fixed a memory problem when viewing 100s of album detail pages.
- Linux start script now uses JAVA_HOME, if set, as a default for the location of 'java'. Otherwise, just 'java' as before. This makes using the start script more hackable as it's possible to point the script to a different version of Java.
Get the new release from the downloads page. Existing fixes apply!
Thanks to Sebastian Anthony for the image above.
