Softpedia >Mac >Utilities >bliss >  Changelog

bliss Changelog

What's new in bliss 20180301

Mar 2, 2018
  • Added the tags view into each album page, so you can edit tags for the files in an album.
  • The bug fixes affect installation of finite fix licenses and also avoid unwanted automation of track name accuracy changes
  • Album tags view:
  • The Tags page is a useful fallback for when bliss's rules don't cover something you want to change. It's something of a Swiss Army tool inspired by "traditional" taggers such as MP3Tag; basically a grid of files with their fields which can be edited by hand.
  • More stuff:
  • Fix a problem adding 250 or 2500 fix licences.
  • Store logs in the bliss working folder, not the Java tmpdir.
  • Fix the placeholder colour in the genre field on album edit page.
  • When updating Synology SPK, preserve settings.
  • Show error messages when changing art on the change art page.
  • Support all abstract "FieldKey" tags in custom rules.
  • Make genre matching from online to whitelist much less lenient. Support the use of custom genres.
  • Fix year checking when a year and month are given for a release.
  • If track name or number is set to autopopulate as well as compare accuracy, don't automate fixes.

New in bliss 20171212 (Dec 29, 2017)

  • Improvements:
  • Support new x18 Synology devices (Apollo Lake, Broadwell, Grantley, rtd1296).
  • Avoid nesting genres inside square brackets via the capitalisation rules.
  • Better error reporting when failing to start.
  • Support converting PNGs to JPEGs when the PNG has alpha channels (transparency).
  • On QNAP, ignore @Recycle folders.
  • Update to latest version of OneMusicAPI.

New in bliss 20170418 (Apr 27, 2017)

  • Track name accuracy:
  • To enable checking for track name correctness, click the option in the settings. Then Apply rules, as ever.
  • Once an album is scanned, the summaries of compliance on the album grid will show you whether a track name is incorrect. Importantly, we've also added a track listing to the album detail page. The compliance is shown here, with a one click fix.
  • Of course, that list of tracks could be useful for a lot of reasons... we could adapt it to allow tag editing or maybe even allow a playback button to listen to the track so you can identify it yourself, for tagging purposes.
  • Further work on tag correction is going to mainly focus on adding more tags to the mix (disc number and track number are the main ones on the horizon at the moment) while also incorporating feedback.
  • It's important to receive feedback because I suspect there are some reasons that tag correction may not be everyone's "cup of tea" at the moment; for example it's strict about punctuation and capitalization, which maybe not everyone wants.
  • Strict compilation checking
  • As an aside, this release also adds compilation checking. This is worth an extra discussion because of the way it works.
  • Unlike the other tags, which will ignore the tag if there's no data currently in your library, bliss always checks whether an album is a compilation or not. So if you have a compilation album without the compilation tag, bliss will always suggest setting it.
  • More improvements:
  • Fix occasional issues when changing album or artist name.
  • If there's an update problem, failover to the last good version.
  • Disable all fields in settings when a rule is disabled.
  • Make the select fields shorter.
  • Make the album grid boxes the same width, allowing more than three/four on a line.
  • Truncate button text on the album detail page.
  • Show more information about failures on the activity page.
  • Make the album detail page more lined-up.
  • Split tag correction fixes in the Inbox by tag.

New in bliss 20170404 (Apr 14, 2017)

  • the first release of the new tag correction code. This first release concentrates on album level tag correction; in other words, metadata that exist at an album level, such as album titles and artists, release year and genre. Track level tag correction is coming later.
  • This is overall quite a large release - most obvious is also some new layout code which makes the album grid much more regular and tidier, and also a new look to the "compliance" status markers.
  • Tag correction - what can it do for me:
  • This is bliss's first foray into correctness. Correctness is the assessment of information in your music library as to whether it is consistent with online canonical sources of data about that album. For example, whether a given album name is canonically correct, whether the release date is correct for an album, and so on.
  • This helps spot a number of things. There're common aliases of artist and album names (think The White Album), misspellings, capitalisations and also punctuation differences. That last one is one I left in, but I wonder if people might begin to be annoyed by it, so let me know what you think.
  • To enable tag correction, enter the settings page and open the Tags rule. Under Check tag accuracy choose Compare with Linked Releases.
  • Click Apply rules and bliss will begin assessing all of your albums' tags for accuracy!
  • So I'll be marking this idea as complete now!
  • Next up is track level tag correction, including checking track names. Alongside that, a combining of the completeness rule to make it easy to add more tags to the completeness rule (we currently only look for missing year and genre tags).
  • More improvements:
  • The album overview grid now mandates a regular size for each album.
  • The missing artwork icon looks much nicer!
  • When working out album artist, consider other groups of files with albums of the same name.
  • When changing library, remove old activity records from display.
  • Don't show activity records pulsing anymore.
  • Don't assume bliss.sh has access to bash.

New in bliss 20170321 (Apr 3, 2017)

  • The ability to list all fixes made by bliss (i.e. everything that depletes your fix count) has been long requested. This release adds activity filtering, a way of filtering entries in the Activity page, including those activities that result in the consumption of a 'fix'.
  • Other options are to filter activity logs relating to album assessments (which tend to take up a bulk of the log), the file scan and system errors.
  • More improvements:
  • Fixed the ordering of activity events.
  • More work to avoid error messages when changing settings.
  • Support hyphens in file organisation conditional statements.
  • Ensure com.elsten.bliss.main.jar is updated by in-app update.

New in bliss 20160830 (Sep 6, 2016)

  • Moved the blisshq.com site to HTTPS.

New in bliss 20160802 (Aug 10, 2016)

  • UI refresh.
  • Read INFO tags as well as ID3 tags in WAVs.
  • Fixed out of memory issues with memory constrained devices.
  • Handle albums called "the Album" in closed class case rules.
  • In a mixed artist track, don't overwrite different track artists when executing case rules.
  • Allow rescanning to occur when a rescan is already in progress (cancelling the previous rescan).

New in bliss 20160606 (Jun 7, 2016)

  • Found an important bug in the previous version of bliss which affects writing FLAC files, and means they will appear corrupt to some software.
  • The bug is that, when writing metadata or cover art into the file which is too large for the existing padding in the file to cope, the audio segment is written three bytes too large. This is unlikely to cause problems in music players, or other organisation software, but where software is very strict as to the layout of the file it can cause problems.
  • The problem was discovered by VortexBox users who also use the MP3 mirroring facility in said music server. When running the mirror, the transcoder would display errors similar to:
  • 10-Cadillacs - Rudolph The Red Nosed Reindeer.flac: *** Got error code 0:FLAC__STREAM_DECODER_ERROR_STATUS_LOST_SYNC
  • 10-Cadillacs - Rudolph The Red Nosed Reindeer.flac: ERROR while decoding data state = FLAC__STREAM_DECODER_READ_FRAME
  • This new build fixes that problem.

New in bliss 20160525 (May 31, 2016)

  • New release with a few bug fixes and small improvements. We've fixed a permissions problem when organizing music over a network, added padding to folder and file names, and we can now fingerprint DSF files too!
  • We've had a few reports of file permissions problems from people managing their music library on Windows devices, across the network to a NAS. bliss was reporting false negatives; that it could not write to music files, when the files could be opened in other software and changed just fine.
  • We tracked it down to a change in the tagging library bliss uses. We fixed it in the library and contributed this back to the project while importing these changes to bliss.
  • More improvements:
  • The fingerprinter can now fingerprint DSF files.
  • When fixing capitalisation problems, only fix those files and tags that have a problem, rather than all tracks in an album.
  • The token can now be parameterised to force padding: .
  • Allow embedded artwork to be removed when both an ID3v2 and an ID3v1 tag are present.

New in bliss 20160406 (Apr 12, 2016)

  • Following the release of WAV and AIFF support, back in November, I'm pleased to announce DSF support in this new and subsequent builds.
  • These improvements have come from new work on JAudioTagger - the tagging library that bliss uses. As with WAV and AIFF support the support is "total" meaning anything you can do on an MP3, say, in bliss, you can also do to a DSF file. Add album art, fix tags, consolidate genres, it's all there.
  • Bug fixes:
  • WAV scanning has been made much faster for certain WAV files.
  • Parse track numbers in the format 2/0 (meaning "track 2").
  • Fixed year lookup in files with year AND date, and fixed year only lookup in ID3v2.3 files.
  • Simplified new file notification code.
  • Made file scanning much faster on Windows Vista and newer using CIFS (Samba) to a NAS
  • Make sure old directories are not watched anymore when changing music folder
  • The VortexBox v2.4 build is now based on systemd rather than init.d
  • Don't try to set ALBUM_ARTIST on ID3v1 only files.
  • Make bliss.sh arguments overridable from wrapping scripts

New in bliss 20160304 (Mar 8, 2016)

  • bliss uses some third party code called OSGi to help manage its codebase. This allows us to track versions of all aspects of the code, calculate the dependencies within the code, and therefore provide reliable means by which the code can be updated from version to version. Unfortunately, it appears a bug in the way we use OSGi meant that restarting bliss v20160217 after an apparently successful first-start would not work in many cases. In this new version that's fixed.
  • More improvements:
  • In OS X we now store settings in /Users/[username]/Library/Preferences/bliss and runtime working files in /Users/[username]/Library/Application Support/bliss
  • Reduce the number of times we try to load files when tags are missing.
  • Stop using JNotify for file system events. Use Java's own FileWatcher instead.
  • When caching tags, calculate the size of WAV tags more accurately.
  • Add opt-out of Google Analytics into the app.
  • Log when settings are changed (not what the settings are), the version of bliss and the server OS in Google Analytics
  • Fix a race condition when clearing-and-rescanning.

New in bliss 20160217 (Feb 23, 2016)

  • File organization improvements:
  • One cunning bug that it took a few days to track down concerns music files with non-ASCII characters in their filenames, where the files are stored remotely and bliss is installed on OS X (quite specific then!).
  • The problem is the way those "ΓΌ" characters are stored in the filesystem. OS X stores them in a different way to most other operating systems and also, pertinently, a different way to the manner in which tags in a music file are stored. This means, when comparing the tags to the filename, the characters appear different (to a computer) and so assessment fails - leading to non-compliance.
  • To fix this we now normalize the two character strings before comparison.
  • The second bug was related to discnumbers greater than one digit long. We were truncating these before; this is now fixed.
  • Custom rules:
  • Some more developments with custom rules. The tag list for custom rules, in the settings UI, is now nicely alphabetically ordered with common tags separated at the top.
  • We also fixed a bug where you couldn't have multiple custom rules associated with the same tag.
  • More improvements:
  • Case rules now assess and update multiple tags in a file (e.g. if there're both ID3v1 AND ID3v2 tags)
  • If a genre is missing in an album and the genre consolidation rule is enabled, all genres in the list are suggested.
  • We've fixed support for VortexBox 2.2 .
  • An error in the logs that "Cannot load com.apple.laf.AquaLookAndFeel" has been fixed.
  • For embedded artwork, empty image bytestreams (either empty or consisting purely of 0x00) are now treated as missing art.
  • The Windows installer is now dual signed with both a SHA1 and SHA2 digest.
  • You can now configure the ports that bliss uses (3220 and 3221 by default)
  • We fixed a bug where rescan could be blocked if another rescan was already running.

New in bliss 20151125 (Nov 26, 2015)

  • We found a bug where track numbers were not being tagged properly in WAV files - we've fixed that. We also noticed that the way numeric genres in ID3 tags were treated was wrong; we've fixed that too.
  • Away from WAV tagging, a bug in the disc number token within the file organisation rules which meant disc numbers with number/total syntax, e.g. "1/2", weren't correctly assessed, and would sometimes suggest a disc number of the two integers concatenated together! That's fixed now.

New in bliss 20151110 (Nov 17, 2015)

  • Support for AIFF and WAV tags and album art:
  • For a long time, bliss's list of supported file formats has stayed pretty static; most of the widely used formats were supported including MP3, MP4, FLAC, WMA and more. But we've also had requests for a long time to add support for AIFF tagging, and also WAV as well.
  • bliss has always used the JaudioTagger project to perform the actual tagging of music files. A few weeks ago support for AIFF and WAV was committed into the JaudioTagger library, and now we have bundled this into bliss!
  • This means bliss can now both scan, recognise and performing tagging of AIFF and WAV albums. As well as setting textual tags on these files, cover art can also be added and removed to WAVs and AIFFs.
  • It also means that untagged WAV and AIFF files (of which there must be many) will appear in the bliss "Untagged" page with suggestions for tagging. So if you have any old untagged WAV or AIFF files laying about, now might be the time to get them tagged!
  • It all helps with getting all of your music library complete, correct and consistent. Now WAVs and AIFFs get the same treatment!
  • Custom rules:
  • Another new feature in this build I think it's worth highlighting is that custom regular expression rules can now be contributed by saving the rule to a file in a well-known location.
  • I'll be posting more on this in the upcoming weeks, but by saving a regular expression rule into a .regexrule file into a regexrulescript folder inside the .bliss folder, bliss will pick up the rule and incorporate it into the settings page and into normal rule processing.
  • More stuff:
  • Tolerate an inability to read a file on a file-by-file basis, rather than folder-by-folder (so some files aren't lost).
  • Don't allow trim rules to be applied to compilations or cover art.
  • When fix all visible is pressed for missing genre/year, make sure the buttons show progress.
  • Bundle Java 8 with the Windows installer.

New in bliss 20151013 (Oct 20, 2015)

  • mainly stability improvements and bug fixes, although we did find the time to include a new feature: disc numbers in the Untagged page!
  • The Untagged page finds tags for albums which are missing their important identification tags; album name, album artist, track numbers and names. This worked fine, but for multi disc albums there was a problem; if the disc number for the tracks was not populated, music players would not be able to distinguish the different tracks in the album.
  • This might mean a music player plays all track 1s first, then track 2s and so on. By populating the DISCNUMBER as well this means the tracks can be properly distinguished. It also allows for a better file organisation structure.
  • The disc number column only appears for releases where either (a) the release has been found and it is one disc from a multi disc set or (b) the release information has not been found. If the release information was not found, and you tag the album yourself, you can leave the disc number column empty if you wish.
  • In addition, for the Untagged page, we also made the tagging process a little more efficient so that only tag values that have actually been set are tagged. This also allows files to be tagged without a track number.
  • More stuff:
  • Allow for "Mc" in case rules, and also camel case album names.
  • When changing the case of track artists, don't overwrite with the track name(!)
  • Force filename encoding on OS X to UTF-8.
  • Don't show albums starting with "." under all non-compliant filters on the albums page.

New in bliss 20150825 (Sep 7, 2015)

  • Whitespace trimming:
  • The 'trimming' rule is a new rule to trim the whitespace from the beginning and end of tags. Any whitespace: spaces, tabs, carriage returns; can be removed.
  • On each scan, bliss will check the tags you have chosen and, if any include whitespace at the start or end, will suggest it be removed with a one-click fix.
  • We've also worked on:
  • Handle apostrophes in case rules
  • Ignore 'EP' in case rules
  • Add extra tags to the case rules selector

New in bliss 20150811 (Aug 18, 2015)

  • Database engine improvements:
  • The first main bug fix relates to how bliss can sometimes react when changing settings. A few months back I changed bliss's database engine to a different library. This fixed some data corruption issues, but, as often happens, some different problems were introduced.
  • Specifically, the way the new database engine updates files on your computer's storage is a bit different; when bliss interrupts an update, sometimes the database engine gives up and won't write again. We've fixed this in this release, and so hopefully changing settings and rescanning won't cause the same issues. These errors didn't always occur, but there was the possibility and we received a number of reports, so we fixed it.
  • OS X users:
  • We've downgraded the version of Java shipped with bliss to Java 1.7.0_025. This is because of a number of reports of bliss failing to start. We believe the issue was that the version of Java we shipped was too recent and earlier versions of OS X (Snow Leopard and Lion mainly, it seemed) did not properly support it. So we have downgraded for now.
  • Performance improvements:
  • We've implemented a number of performance improvements. In general, these seek to minimise storage access. We noticed this makes the biggest improvement when paging through lists of albums, but there should be a general improvement as well.
  • Further improvements:
  • Ignore 'LP' and 'EP' in case rules
  • Fixed the label on the "Fix all visible" button for fixing tag types
  • The UI now runs in "production mode" to avoid nasty "comet" errors
  • Fixed a rare problem: NotSerializableException: com.elsten.bliss.music.conceptual.model.ImmutableTrack
  • Fixed the "Use" button on the cover art alternatives page being displayed off screen

New in bliss 20150522 (Jun 2, 2015)

  • New way of executing multiple fixes at once, and some more useful bug fixes.
  • First up, a new feature to make fixing all those non-compliant music files a lot faster and a lot easier.
  • The normal approach to automation in bliss is: create a new rule to manage a music library, and once bliss users are happy with what it does, consider automating it.
  • The trouble is that the gap between rule creation and rule automation is often a long one. Plus, sometimes wholesale rule automation may not be desirable because of the potential for automation-gone-wrong.
  • This release's main new feature is a way of fixing all problems of a specified type. For example, fixing all artwork that is too large by shrinking it, or changing all genres to an "allowed" genre.
  • Further improvements:
  • When a cover is picked from the cover art alternatives page, show success/failure and reload the row.
  • Fix an occasional problem in bliss's regular expression rules (affecting case rules).
  • Fix some button alignments on the individual-album change art page.

New in bliss 20150423 (Apr 28, 2015)

  • Rewritten some of the underlying parts of bliss to use a new database engine. This is due to a few reports I've received of database corruption seemingly occurring after long periods of using bliss. After a couple of weeks testing by those affected, we seem to have fixed these problems, so that's good news.
  • More improvements:
  • Exempt roman numerals and common name prefixes ("La", "De" etc) from case rules
  • Sped up tag look-up
  • Fixed the count of non compliant albums due to non-compliant file paths
  • Fixed the layout of the help and album detail pages
  • Fixed the file organization token to cope with cases where there's an album artist but no track artist

New in bliss 20150316 (Mar 24, 2015)

  • The main area of work has been in improving the consistency of bliss's internal database, particularly after large scale file renaming. I had a few reports of issues in this area, and I've reworked some fundamental database code to try to avoid said consistency problems.
  • Other improvements in this area are to take positive steps to disallow multiple instances of bliss running, and when a database corruption issue is discovered upon startup make sure bliss is shutdown completely (it sometimes runs in a "zombie" state which makes cleaning up difficult).
  • A nice little improvement is an indicator to how many compliant/non-compliant items there are.
  • Further improvements:
  • Updated the OS X JDK
  • Sped up the Inbox
  • Fixed problems working with old cover art rules
  • Don't allow double clicks on fix buttons
  • Don't allow indefinite blocking when calling OneMusicAPI
  • Store fileInfo in a database to avoid issues with overly long file names

New in bliss 20150109 (Jan 10, 2015)

  • An important fix to bliss's rule assessment/fix procedure. In the last release we included a fix to ensure that multiple reasons for non-compliance get fixed when those multiple reasons were both found by the same rule. Before it would be a two step process, with you, the user, having to click a manual response or invoke a rescan on the album in question.
  • Further improvements:
  • Further refinements to the Stripe checkout process for EU VAT data gathering
  • Fix the "missing tags" non-compliant filter (it wasn't showing albums that were missing tags before)

New in bliss 20141224 (Dec 29, 2014)

  • Search/filter tags page:
  • A new search field and button allows you to search for any value in any tag in all of your music files.
  • The way it works is that your search term is compared to all tags and if a file has a tag that contains the text you enter, that file is shown on the Tags page. Files without any tags that contain the search term are not shown.
  • It is not possible to constrain the search to certain tags, nor is it possible to perform any placed wildcard ('*' et al) searches. I thought we should see if a simple 'contains' search would be good enough for now.
  • Further improvements:
  • When missing art from a separate cover art file and the embedded artwork is non-compliant, fix both in two steps automatically (the latter first obviously).
  • Added some exceptions for common acronyms in the case rules.
  • Fixed page navigation when switching between compliance filters.
  • Be more restrictive about assigning tracks to the same album when one set of tracks has a compilation flag set.
  • Don't send disc number 'total' number when querying for cover art and tags, if it is in the DISCNUMBER field.
  • The whole file path is now shown in the untagged page.

New in bliss 20141119 (Nov 25, 2014)

  • Support for the latest version of Mac OS X, 10.10, codenamed "Yosemite".
  • OneMusicAPI is now used exclusively for fingerprinting and canonical artist lookup.
  • Fixed the "in progress" icon which wasn't showing in some browsers.

New in bliss 20141027 (Nov 4, 2014)

  • New release with support for Java 8, background work for filtering by compliance type, some UI fixes and fixing the different artist rules so they can work together.
  • More improvements:
  • Some background work for supporting filtering by compliant type.
  • Allow albums to be tagged without an album name in the Untagged page, but don't attempt to show them in the Albums list.
  • Fixed "back to list" when viewing album detail via the Artists page.
  • Allow the canonical artist and consistent track artist rules to work together.
  • Clear and rescan should clear the tag cache so files are completely re-read under all circumstances.

New in bliss 20140917 (Sep 23, 2014)

  • This is another bug fix release, with an important fix for the canonical artist rule.
  • More improvements:
  • The untagged tables are now ordered by filename.
  • "Back to list" behaves correctly after fixing something on the album detail page
  • Fixed the layout of the "run out of fixes" page

New in bliss 20140813 (Aug 20, 2014)

  • This new build contains a lot of fine tuning: performance improvements, bug fixes, and adoption of the new 500 fix licence.
  • A major change is the adoption of the 500 fix licence. From now on, the 1000 fix licence will be replaced with the 500 fix licence on the Buy fixes page. Existing 1000 fix licences continue to work as before and are still "worth" 1000 fixes.

New in bliss 20140702 (Jul 8, 2014)

  • Changed the show tags option to display the tags using the same component as is used for the Tags page. Hopefully this familiarity in look and keyboard navigation will be beneficial. As before, the tags can be edited before being tagged into the music files.
  • We also now show that same tagging component when no tags were found for an album. This means if bliss doesn't find metadata for a given album or folder it is still shown in the Untagged page with an option to fill the tags in yourself.
  • Still on the Untagged page, we now make sure albums that are tagged show immediately in the Albums page, and we also support tagging files without an artist name (this caused an error before).
  • There are some smaller fixes and improvements in this release::
  • Fixed one more capitalization rule false positive.
  • Some work to improve rule execution concurrency and performance.
  • Fixed a bug with album size dependent track number padding.

New in bliss 20140622 (Jun 18, 2014)

  • Fix some startup errors for VortexBox users
  • De-duplicate genre results from MusicBrainz
  • Make sure the genre consolidation rule works when case rules are enabled
  • When the disc number has a disc total value, don't use this to query OneMusicAPI
  • Improve the Tags page UI when a tag cannot be changed
  • Show progress when providing a URL to change the cover art to

New in bliss 20140522 (May 23, 2014)

  • Turns out Tuesday's release has a problem: it only works for existing users installing it over the top of an existing release. This emergency fix solves that problem so totally new users can also "get blissed".
  • As luck would have it, some other improvements have made their way into this release:
  • When many albums in separate folders are tagged "Unknown" and just one is tagged, avoid forcing through the untagged files into the Albums page
  • Show simpler errors on the Tags page
  • Fix some more Title case (excluding closed class words) false positives
  • Move to the latest version of OneMusicAPI

New in bliss 20140513 (May 21, 2014)

  • Performance improvements, fixes for the new case rules and fixes for year and genre look-up:
  • No new features in this build, but a mass of fixes and small improvements.
  • In the area of performance, memory use has been reduced in bliss's internal database, and when audio fingerprinting a lot of files in one directory. In the same kind-of area we also make sure that if bliss runs out of memory on OS X then we store the memory dump where it can be retrieved later for analysis.
  • There's also some performance improvements when changing libraries and/or rules.
  • Finally, under performance, we changed bliss's in-memory cache of tags so that it scales in size with the amount of memory assigned to bliss. This means more memory assigned allows bliss to store more in memory and so leads to less reason to read from files. This speeds bliss up, especially when reading/writing to files is slow (e.g. across a wireless network).
  • Some fixes for the new case rules feature: we fixed some false positives which meant album, artist or track titles with certain punctuation (e.g. apostrophes) were erroneously marked as non-compliant.
  • Finally a couple of improvements when filling in years and genres. Duplicate suggestions are now removed, as are blank "Set to" suggestions.

New in bliss 20140423 (Apr 30, 2014)

  • This new release includes case rules - the ability to ensure album, artist and track names comply with a pre-defined case style.
  • More stuff:
  • Optimised queries to OneMusicAPI a little, making queries faster, more likely to match and also more accurate
  • Fixed album 'tiling' in the album overview page to avoid 'snagging' where tiles are different heights
  • Show progress when clicking a fix in a fix dropdown
  • Allow the maximum image size bliss will process to increase in line with assigned memory
  • Ignore #recycle folders (these are created on Synology when accessed via a Windows CIFS share)
  • Fixed a bug to allow setting track number to a plain or padded integer in an MP3 when there's an existing track number total field

New in bliss 20140318 (Mar 26, 2014)

  • Speeds up cover art alternatives (the change art and cover art alternatives pages) which has slowed since the work to fix Discogs artwork download.
  • Before, two queries were made for cover art, one with the tag information and one with the audio fingerprints. Despite the fact that the former always returned much faster, the results were not displayed until the fingerprint results had also been returned. So I've changed this such that all results are immediately displayed as they are streamed back to bliss.
  • This means you get cover art alternatives much faster!
  • Further improvements to the "Browse" button.
  • All mapped drives are listed, such as those drives mapped to network locations.
  • In addition the Music library fields, populated with your music folders that contain your music files, were being converted from backslash-separated to slash-separated folder paths. This was confusing for Windows users, so I've fixed it so that it obeys the platform conventions.
  • Other improvements:
  • The automated cover art 'probability' requirement has been relaxed, meaning more matches (it was overly strict since the Discogs change)
  • Some prep work for case rules in tags
  • Upped the size limit on uploaded cover art to 8MB
  • bliss no longer indexes large (>16kb) tag fields
  • Fixed a problem saving data to the bliss internal database
  • The Inbox page loads faster by ensuring a query for cover art alternatives is not made

New in bliss 20140226 (Feb 27, 2014)

  • Better resilience to cover art database outage.

New in bliss 20140208 (Feb 10, 2014)

  • This release contains our most popular asked-for feature, multiple music libraries! You can now add multiple music folders to bliss, and have bliss scan, assess and fix all of the folders.
  • Other stuff:
  • Fixed occasional cases of Cannot assign instance of ImmutableImageInfoSerialisationProxy to field UserResponseCoverArtAssistSerialisationProxy.image of type com.elsten.bliss.policy.coverart.lookup.ImageInfo
  • When album artist is just spaces, use track artist deduction to decide on the artist for a release
  • Avoid cases where missing files means bliss won't start

New in bliss 20140122 (Jan 29, 2014)

  • Fixes for some security issues related to app signing and for bliss being slowed by App Nap.
  • The bliss application is now signed for Mavericks, so no further security errors should be displayed.
  • The effect of App Nap has been negated by declaring bliss as an OS X agent. App Nap does not work on agents. This is arguably something that should've been done before anyway; it better describes how bliss works so OS X can tailor itself accordingly. This also no means, for example, the extraneous Dock icon shown when bliss starts is no longer visible.
  • There's also some work toward supporting multiple music libraries in this release, although it's not exposed in the UI. Keep your eyes on the idea linked above for updates on this one, but it's looking likely to be completed for the next release!
  • Other stuff:
  • There's a clearer way of providing an existing licence rather than using the Buy with Paypal tab. See Re-enter an existing fixes code on the fixes page.
  • Windows services work again (whoops)
  • A few small UI alignment fixes
  • When one type (either embedded or a file) of artwork is missing and the other type is non-compliant, don't auto-install from the Web

New in bliss 20131126 (Dec 4, 2013)

  • This release contains a nice enhancement; the album overview (and other pages) are now drawn in a "fluid" style. This means the more you widen the page, the more that is accommodated. Before, bliss would always show four albums on each row of the album overview. If you have a wider browser this can now grow and grow!
  • Some more minor changes and tweaks:
  • OneMusicAPI is now used for genre and year lookup
  • Cope with files with spaces at the start of the name
  • Avoid certain memory usage problems in bliss's index of tags

New in bliss 20131108 (Nov 9, 2013)

  • Use the new version of OneMusicAPI
  • Better error reporting in popups when fixes don't work
  • Fixed multiple identical entries appearing in genre dropdowns
  • We now support Stripe for payments, so you can just supply your credit card details in the app

New in bliss 20131028 (Nov 8, 2013)

  • A new tag editor, improved cover art alternatives
  • Don't query OneMusicAPI with empty fingerprints
  • Handle errors querying MusicBrainz in rule scripts
  • Log untagged files that aren't fingerprinted
  • Lower memory usage of the database cache
  • Clean up any record of albums after fixing
  • In the settings UI, make the help popups disappear when clicking elsewhere

New in bliss 20130702 (Oct 4, 2013)

  • Automatic track number formatting, new file organisation options
  • Albums with only and album artist tag and no track artist tags is no longer considered untagged
  • Cover art lookup is a little more accurate for multi disc lookups
  • If a music folder doesn't exist at startup but is subsequently added then a rescan shall find it
  • Removed the 'feedback' tab on the Tags page, as it got in the way
  • Improved UI consistency and fixed a few other things on the Buy fixes page
  • bliss now ignores all trailing null terminators in tags
  • Don't assume a temporary folder exists at startup
  • Recover when initialisation of bliss's secondary indexes fail
  • When updating, don't try to stop the module containing the code that's currently running

New in bliss 20130617 (Jun 27, 2013)

  • This release focuses on two areas that have needed "polishing" for a while: in-app update and the maintainability of bliss's internal database.
  • In-app update has been changed such that bliss now restarts itself after the update is complete. I had to resort to this because many of the third-party libraries bliss uses are not written to be used in an update-able environment (technically, they do not adhere to various rules imposed by OSGi).
  • Separately, bliss is now more cautious about how it updates its internal database and steps have been taken to avoid data corruption when a computer itself is abruptly stopped, restarted or updated. Before, rectification meant following the instructions at How do I clear a corrupted bliss database? This fix will greatly reduce the likelihood of data corruption.
  • Changes:
  • Ignore files and folders beginning with "."
  • In the list exposed by "why?" show non-compliant items on top and make the list scrollable
  • Tolerate Acoustid outages
  • Show error messages if manual file movements fail
  • Fix artwork sizing responses not showing button text
  • Make dropdown buttons more responsive when clicking the default fix

New in bliss 20130416 (Apr 24, 2013)

  • Discogs cover art could no longer be downloaded by bliss. This new release contains a fix for this problem, and also a nice added bonus that a newer version of OneMusicAPI is used which should improve cover art matching overall.

New in bliss 20130326 (Apr 3, 2013)

  • UI improvements and bug fixes.
  • Added better feedback to fix buttons. Now, after pressing them, they should change colour to indicate success or failure. In the case of failure, more detail about the problem will be shown in a popup attached to the button.
  • A couple of improvements for cover art resizing. First, the algorithm used to shrink images has been refined so that cropping is avoided. In some cases, with some resolutions, images would be cropped slightly either on the horizontal or vertical axis. This shouldn't occur anymore. In addition, when you had configured rules for both the maximum resolution and data size for album art the fixes were being combined into one button. This meant when you clicked the button the artwork was resized twice. This no longer occurs.
  • Cleared up some duplicated items that used to appear in the Inbox.