Release 20130522
May 28, 2013 in bliss by Dan Gravell
This release contains a number of fixes for the tag editing page, to improve usability and also fix a couple of bugs...
Also included are some performance improvements!
Improvements to the tags page
Following feedback I've implemented a number of improvements to the Tags page.
First up, I fixed a couple of bugs. A few users reported 'jumping' when scrolling through the list. Others reported that when paging down the list the items would change order. Both of these were caused by the same bug, whereby the data being sent from bliss to the Tags web page would be sent out of order. This is now fixed.
Then, a few cosmetic changes. I fixed the column headers that sometimes appear offset. Next I changed the fonts used to represent the tags themselves. What I've done may require a little explanation... which makes it feel like it's not the best solution. Still, here's what I've done...
Some tags shown in the list, such as Album artist, don't actually write to the (literal) "Album artist" tag field. They write to the tag field commonly accepted as "Album artist". For example, in MP3s that's TPE2 and in FLACs that's either ALBUMARTIST or ALBUM_ARTIST. However, they are still presented together as Album artist. That poses a problem: what if the music file actually has a ALBUM ARTIST field? Which field would you be editing if you edited that column?
The answer I've come up with is that aforementioned 'abstract' tags such as "Artist", "Album name", "Album artist" and any column that writes to a tag field which is not an exact literal string match is represented in sans-serif font as before. Tag fields that write directly to the underlying field, meanwhile, are represented in a monospace font to represent them as being more "technical".
In addition to that, hopefully the tag field checkboxes should be laid out a little nicer and more efficiently now.
Performance improvements
One improvement to CPU constrained devices is that images are no longer loaded and processed as before when storing cover art. Before, each time new artwork was added to a file the image was loaded into memory. This is now done once per album rather than once per file (because the artwork is always the same for an album).
Next, the cache of tags is now flushed less frequently to avoid expensive reads from the disc. Furthermore, on the change art screen, we now cache more data about each alternative art locally, speeding up that page.
Other stuff
There's more!
- A tag field named
ALBUM ARTISTis treated as a synonym to the abstract "ALBUMARTIST" when working out bliss's view of the album artist for a release. These are quite common in FLACs. - Fixed a memory problem when very large artwork is embedded.
- The cache is now flushed when files' names are changed.
- bliss now uses Discogs directly to download images for a period before using a proxy.
- Success and failure are now shown in the change cover art page (and the cause of failure).
- The Inbox has been speeded up a bit, for cases when you have a large library but very few non-compliant albums.
Downloading and installing the latest release
Download the new release from the downloads page. Installation instructions are available on the page following download.
Existing users can update bliss from within the application. Updating is improving to the extent it now appears possible to update without restarting, in most cases. If this doesn't work for you let me know, and if the update appears to break things, here's what to do. You can also download the latest installer and install it, replacing the current installation.
Any fixes licences already purchased will be retained!
