beaTunes News

64bit, the 2nd

2009-06-24T04:58:00.003-05:00

If you are running Snow Leopard or some other 64bit VM, feel free to check out this 64 bit Early Access version of beaTunes. It probably still has some visual problems, but should more or less work.

beaTunes-2-0-10-osx-64.dmg

Feedback is very welcome!

Update: There were some things wrong with this one, so I updated the build. Same link. Give it a shot.

beaTunes on Wikipedia - lots of room for improvement

2009-06-15T05:13:00.005-05:00

Back in April I posted about the beaTunes entry on Wikipedia. Somebody was so nice to create the entry, but unfortunately it still has a broken link, it is not linked to from other pages and the entry itself isn't all that accurate. I tried to follow Wikipedia procedure and added some comments on the article's discussion page and notified involved authors, but nobody made the necessary changes.

If you feel like you'd like to contribute to Wikipedia, please correct and improve the beaTunes entry!

Thanks!

... and if you feel the German Wikipedia should have a beaTunes entry as well, please create it!

64 bit beaTunes Beta for Snow Leopard

2009-05-27T11:33:00.004-05:00

For a while now, Apple has handed out developer seeds of its next generation operating system dubbed Snow Leopard. Its focus lies on making OS X a true 64 bit operating system. For us developers this means that the old 32 bit QuickTime API will probably not work anymore.

And because the regular beaTunes still has some dependencies to QuickTime and is also still compatible with OS X 10.4, you can't just run it on Snow Leopard.

But! I'm working on migrating beaTunes to 64 bit. Unfortunately, as a side effect, I will have to drop support for OS X 10.4.

If you are running Snow Leopard, feel free to check out this 64 bit Early Access version of beaTunes. It still has some visual problems (e.g. the toolbar has the wrong gradient), but it should more or less work.

beaTunes-2-0-8-osx-64.dmg

Feedback is very welcome!

Update: Seems like this build is working fine on Leopard 64 bit, but not yet in Snow Leopard. Analysis most likely leads to a program crash.

beaTunes 2.0.8

2009-05-27T11:08:00.004-05:00

beaTunes 2.0.8 is out. Here's the short list of changes:

Fixed 'Analyze/Inspect New Songs'
Amazon requests are now signed
Deleted tracks are now moved to trash/recycling bin, if possible
Switched key notation to flats
Added clock hand to key

I'd like to give a little bit more detail about the last three items.

Before 2.0.8, deleted tracks were only removed from the iTunes database, but the actual files remained on the harddrive. 2.0.8 changes this - files are now deleted (or put in the trash/recycling bin). For more info on this and on how to delete files of duplicates that you removed with pre 2.0.8, see this posting.

The key notation was switched from sharps to flats, because many users using the Camelot wheel find it easier to refer to keys in this notation. Because the company that came up with the wheel, regards the number code their intellectual property, we can't simply display that number. But to make things a little easier, I added a little clock hand to the key color. This hand points in the same direction in which the key would be located on the Camelot wheel, thus making it easier to figure out what keys match harmonically.

Much of these enhancements are based on user input (Thank you!) - I really hope this improves the quality and usefulness of the software for harmonic mixing.

Deleting orphaned Files

2009-05-27T10:46:00.002-05:00

As most of you know, beaTunes has the ability to find and delete duplicates. Up to version 2.0.7, these duplicates were only deleted from the iTunes database, but the actual files were not removed. I changed this in 2.0.8 - whenever possible, files are now moved to the trash/recycling bin or are simply deleted, should trash or recycling bin not be available (e.g. on network drives). But if you have deleted duplicates with an old version of beaTunes, it might be difficult to identify the files that are not referenced by iTunes anymore.

To solve the dilemma, I wrote a little plugin, that compares the iTunes database with all the files in a folder, i.e. the music folder where you keep your mp3's etc. in.

Note that this only makes sense, when you let iTunes manage your music collection or all your music files are in one folder that contains nothing but those files!

To install the plugin, download deleteorphans-1.0.0.jar and place it in your plugin folder (see this posting to find out where that is). The next time you start beaTunes, there will be an additional entry in your Tools menu called Delete orphans. Click on it and enter the location of your music folder, which is usually called iTunes Music. This folder should contain nothing but your audio/video files!

The plugin now compares the iTunes library with the contents of that folder and presents a list of files it found in the folder (or its subfolders), but not in iTunes. Review the list carefully and make sure you only select those files that you actually want to delete, then delete them.

For those of you interested in how the plugin works, take a look at the sources.

beaTunes 1.2.19 update

2009-05-25T20:11:00.003-05:00

For all of you who still run beaTunes 1.2 - there is a minor update right here. The update offers nothing substantially new, but will make sure that the built-in Amazon related functionalities continue to work in the future.

Moving files to the Windows Recycling Bin in Java

2009-05-21T12:14:00.003-05:00

This is a little random and has little to do with beaTunes. However, I thought I share...

As you may know, there is no way to move files to the Windows Recycling Bin in Java (instead of simply deleting them). It is however actually not very hard. All you need to do, is get a reference to a Shell object and use it to move your file. Now how do you get that Shell object? The easiest way is probably COM4J. The shell32 typelib id is 50a7e9b0-70ef-11d1-b75a-00a0c90564fe. Use it to generate some stubs. Then you simply write something like this:

final IShellDispatch shell = ClassFactory.createShell();
// you might want to make sure your parent path has back slashes!
final Folder fileFolder = shell.nameSpace(file.getParent());
final FolderItem fileItem = fileFolder.parseName(file.getName());
final Folder folder = shell.nameSpace(ShellSpecialFolderConstants.ssfBITBUCKET);
folder.moveHere(fileItem, null);

This assumes that file is the file you want to move to the trash.

That's it.

BTW: On OS X you can simply call AppleScript with something like tell application "Finder" to delete Posix File "<your filename here>" - it'll move your file to the trash.

Enjoy DSP coding? Heard of Replay Gain?

2009-05-18T14:58:00.004-05:00

Have you ever done any DSP coding? Well, if you have and you think you'd enjoy some DSP Java coding, let me know. I'm interested in adding a Replay Gain implementation to beaTunes and am looking for someone to code it up for me...

Parlez-vous français ?

2009-05-14T09:23:00.003-05:00

Well, do you speak French? If so, good for you. Because beaTunes is now available in French. That's right a French localization. Thanks to Ronald Armand Leroux, beaTunes 2.0.7 now has a French user interface on French computers.

Viva la France!

...and Canada, of course,

...and parts of Belgium,

...and, well you get the idea :-)

(and in case you didn't know, beaTunes also has a built-in German localization)

beaTunes 2.0.6

2009-05-06T14:26:00.003-05:00

I just released beaTunes 2.0.6 - it contains mostly bug fixes. The most important one affects the missing file inspection - in some cases the entries were actually not deleted, but beaTunes didn't even show an error message. For info about other changes, please see NOTES.txt in the release.

Address those issues! At once!

2009-04-08T12:04:00.003-05:00

Today I released beaTunes 2.0.5. The update is minor one and serves mostly to make some UI deadlocks a thing of the past. Unresponsive UIs are a PITA and give apps a bad rep, so I wanted to address this one quickly.

The other thing that's changed is a new feature. At least for some issues you can now apply solutions that are suitable for multiple issues at once. So if you know what you are doing, you can apply solutions to more files more quickly. A lot more quickly. So be careful when using this one... it gives you less information, but more power.

To apply multiple solutions at once, select either an inspection or multiple issues and in the description pane on the right of the inspection dialog solutions will be offered.

iTunes, Exclamation Mark!

2009-04-02T14:21:00.003-05:00

Many of you probably know, that beaTunes has the capability to find those songs that iTunes marks with an exclamation mark to indicate that it was unable to find the corresponding file. It's called Missing File Inspection.

It was recently brought to my attention, that there is another way to find at least some of the missing tracks: Just sort by location in beaTunes. All songs that iTunes does not even know the old filename for will show up as unkown.

Eine deutsche Beschreibung der Inspektion befindet sich zudem auf der Seite iTunes Ausrufezeichen.

Who will create a Wikipedia entry about beaTunes?

2009-04-02T10:39:00.005-05:00

Are you a contributor to Wikipedia? If so, I would really appreciate it, if you created a page about beaTunes and made sure it is linked to the Harmonic Mixing, the Beatmixing and the iTunes page.

Here's why:

Briefly after the launch of beaTunes 2, I went ahead and added a half sentence about beaTunes to the Harmonic Mixing page on Wikipedia. I had noticed that the page lists most of the available key detection software that's out there, and since beaTunes 2 with its new key detection feature is now one of them, I figured that needs to be added. Now, for lots of good reasons, Wikipedia is really big on conflict of interest (COI), which is why I kept my edits to a bare, factual minimum.

To a list of key detection software I added the statement:

the same can also be achieved with [[beaTunes]] by [[tagtraum industries]].

Additionally, I added a link to the beaTunes site in the link section of the page.

And to make sure that whoever reviews my edits knows that I am affiliated with beaTunes, I wrote just that in the comment section of my edit.

I figured, that by declaring my COI, somebody else would look at the edit, realize that it is factually right, desirable and a valuable addition to the page - and therefore worth keeping.

So far I was wrong. Somebody did look at it, but simply removed it, stating COI - apparently without considering the content of my edits.

I contacted the person and we'll see what happens.

In any case. I believe that beaTunes should be mentioned in Wikipedia, but obviously can't do it myself. If you are reading this, you are most likely a beaTunes user, an expert so to say. Why don't you create a beaTunes page on Wikipedia? And enhance the Harmonic Mixing page? Or any other page, that you think would benefit from mentioning beaTunes?

And to be clear: I am an avid Wikipedia user myself and value it quite a bit (even wrote a little Wikipedia beaTunes plugin for it). Please stay factual. Don't write anything that could be seen as promotion, adhere to the guidelines. Contact me, if you need any additional information for your article.

Thanks!

Update 4/15/2009: Looks like somebody created an English beaTunes page on Wikipedia.

Thanks!

Now only the link in Harmonic Mixing is still missing and of course a German entry... :-)

Key to Comment

2009-03-27T17:04:00.002-05:00

Want to copy your musical keys to the comment field? Check out this plugin (sources).

(installation instructions are the same as for keytogrouping)

Enjoy!

Updated Key to Grouping plugin

2009-03-27T16:45:00.002-05:00

A while ago, before the beaTunes 2 release, I posted about how to develop a simple analysis task plugin. Because this plugin broke a while ago, I decided to go ahead and update the old post with a new version of the same plugin. Which isn't really news.

But!

I also updated the pom.xml of the project so that it actually compiles from the command line, i.e. with mvn clean install. Of course you need Maven2 installed, but everything else is automatic.

This is possible, because I decided to upload the beaTunes binaries to our own little repository. It should simplify plugin development significantly.

Hear plugin crashes beaTunes

2009-03-24T17:08:00.007-05:00

The new CrashReporter built into the latest beaTunes versions already provides valuable info. It looks like a number of users experience crashes that might have to do with Hear. If you see a couple of lines like these in your crashlog,

Thread 23 Crashed:
0   com.joesoft.hal                0x0e36eced osp_plugin::osp_plugin() + 13
1   com.joesoft.hal                0x0e377d2d std::vector<std::basic_string<char, std::char_traits<char>, std::allocator<char> >,

it's possible that the crash was caused by a plugin in /Library/Audio/Plug-Ins/HAL. Users have told me it might be the Hear.plugin. Removing the plugin probably solves the problem. I have not been able to verify this myself yet, but would appreciate some feedback.

Thanks!

(Apparently we are not the only ones fighting this stuff: AppJacked 2)

Update:Looks very much like Hear is the culprit. The telltale sign is very high memory consumption. Note that its not enough to simply drag the Hear application to the trash. To actually remove the plugin, follow the uninstall directions. You have to run Hear to call Uninstall from its application menu. Alternatively, you can simply remove the file /Library/Audio/Plug-Ins/HAL/Hear.plugin

beaTunes 2.0.3

2009-03-23T12:36:00.002-05:00

Things have been busy, which is why there hasn't really been a lot of news lately - posted news that is. Today I released beaTunes 2.0.3. It's a pure bugfix release that rids us from a number of small annoyances and a couple of real bugs.

The location of new MatchLists and playlists will now be a whole lot more predictable, the percentage slider in the silence detection config will actually be honored, scrolling through playlists should be smoother, etc.

The only new feature (if you want to call it that), is the capability to report crashes to my server. When you restart beaTunes after a crash, it should now offer to send the logs to the server. This includes stuff you did with beaTunes, your system info, your registration info etc. The dialog that pops up will mention the name of the file that's sent, so you can verify yourself that I am not trying to get your bank account numbers. And then of course you can simply choose not to send it.

I really hope this will make it easier to collect data from users in order to fix bugs quicker.

Just released: beaTunes 2.0.0b

2009-02-24T23:53:00.005-05:00

It's been a busy day, here at tagtraum industries. I finally got around releasing beaTunes 2, and of course this kind of thing never goes smoothly. Even though there were so many Early Access releases and I got so much valuable feedback from early testers, some things still go wrong.

It wasn't anything major, but right after the initial release, I did some sanity testing to make 200% sure that things work the way they should... and they didn't. Minor things. And then one of those early adopters contacted me and made me aware of another issue. And then there was another issue. Anyhow. All those issues are now fixed and I uploaded version 2.0.0b to the server.

Now, because these were quick and easy fixes, the 2.0.0b release will still claim that it is a 2.0.0 release. And there is no way that you can tell the difference, except for the version number of the disk image file or the Windows installer executable. So if you just installed beaTunes 2, please make sure you have the latest version by checking the version number of your installation file.

To make folks aware of this, the built-in update checker will claim that there is a new version out there - regardless of whether you have the latest version or not. I know, this is a little misleading and looks like a bug, but I rather have people download the newest and shiniest beaTunes once too often, than have them stumbling over bugs that are already fixed. I hope you understand.

Now, that said: beaTunes 2 is a huge step forward.

The short list of what's new:

Completely rewritten internal database
Much better support for huge libraries
Ability to recognize multiple libraries
Analysis on Windows is much faster
Tonal/musical key detection
Second BPM detection algorithm
New inspections (compilation, duplicates, rare genres, different ratings, sort issues, Amazon album version)
More accurate typo inspections
Support for sort names
Ability to specify filters when creating Matchlists
Matchlists can now be refreshed
Ability to embed non-iTunes fields into audio files
Search by artist/album/etc.
German localization
Updated UI (on OS X, check out that Leopard theme!)
Overall usability improvements

This is the first update in 2.5 years that I am going to charge for. This means, that if you own a beaTunes 1.x license, you can purchase the upgrade for $11.95 (USD) [as of 2/24/2009].

If you have bought your beaTunes 1.x license after 2/1/2009, you should already have received a free upgrade license.

Thanks again to all the people who helped to make this happen for their continued support. This includes all the testers, customers, friends and open source software authors, without whom beaTunes would not be possible.

I hope you enjoy my software.

Creating your own Song Context Components

2009-02-21T17:29:00.011-05:00

As a beaTunes user you know that the matching song table and the Amazon song info panel are integral parts of the application. Both are hosted in the same space, right below the main song table. beaTunes' new plugin API makes it simple to write additional, custom components for the same space. I'd like to show you with a simple example how it's done.

The idea of this plugin is to show the Wikipedia page corresponding to the selected song's artist. Because Java's JEditorPane has a rather poor HTML rendering performance and JWebPane is definitely not available on the Mac, we will use JDIC as browser component (this example will only run on OS X, the concept is the same though for Windows). Note, that the Mac version of JDIC is rather old and really only an alpha version. So expect unnecessary repaints and other visual artifacts. But this is not about the perfect embedded browser for Java, it's about custom SongContextComponents.

Subclassing SongContextComponent

Our Wikipedia component has to subclass com.tagtraum.beatunes.songtable.SongContextComponent. This superclass does most of the work for us. We only have to implement a couple of methods. Let's start with the simple stuff. Just like any other well behaved plugin, our component should have an id.

public String getId() {
    return "songcontextcomponent.wikipedia";
}

Furthermore, it needs to specify a status label text, which for our purposes may always remain empty (future versions of the API won't require this anymore).

public String getStatusLabel() {
    return null;
}

Setting up the UI

To set up the component itself, we have to declare a couple of fields and instantiate the UI component in the constructor. Also, as part of the interface, we have to implement the getComponent() method, which returns the JComponent that is going to be integrated into beaTunes' UI. Here's how it's done:

private static final Logger LOG = LogManager.getLogger(Wikipedia.class);

// the component we hand to beaTunes
private JPanel component;
// the actual browser component
private IWebBrowser webBrowser;
// we want to remember the last artist we've shown
// to avoid reloading the same page
private String lastArtist;
// page loading should be done in a separate thread, not the event thread
private ExecutorService executorService;
// loading will be done in a Future, which can be cancelled
private Future future;


public Wikipedia(final BeaTunes beaTunes) {
    super(beaTunes);
    // register the show hide action for this SongContextComponent
    setShowHideActionId("wikipedia.show.hide");
    this.executorService = Executors.newSingleThreadExecutor(
        PriorityThreadFactory.getInstance(Thread.MIN_PRIORITY));
    this.webBrowser = BrowserEngineManager.instance().getActiveEngine().getWebBrowser();
    // webBrowser already has scrollbars, therefore a JPanel is good enough as component
    this.component = new JPanel(new BorderLayout());
    this.component.add((Component) webBrowser, BorderLayout.CENTER);
}

public JComponent getComponent() {
    return component;
}

Reacting to song selections

Now that we have set up the webBrowser component, the only thing that's left to do, is to put some content into the browser window. To do so, we implement the update(Song) method. This method is called when the user selects a song in the main song table. To be precise, it is not called right away when the user selects a song, but with a little delay. This allows us to ignore the selection, should the user just scroll down a list of songs using the cursor keys.

public void update(final Song song) {
    // sanity checks
    if (song == null) return;
    if (song.getArtist() == null || song.getArtist().length() == 0) return;
    final String artist = song.getAlbumArtist() != null
            && song.getAlbumArtist().length() != 0
            ? song.getAlbumArtist() : song.getArtist();
    // is this what we just showed?
    if (artist.equals(lastArtist)) return;
    lastArtist = artist;
    showArtist(artist);
}

private void showArtist(final String artist) {
    if (future != null) {
        future.cancel(true);
    }
    future = executorService.submit(new Runnable() {
        public void run() {
            try {
                // respect the user's language
                final String language = getApplication().getLocale().getLanguage();
                final URL url = new URL("http://" + language
                        + ".wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search="
                        + URLEncoder.encode(artist, "UTF-8") + "&go=Go");
                webBrowser.setURL(url);
            } catch (IOException e) {
               LOG.error("Unable to open page for " + artist, e);
            }
        }
    });
}

That's basically it.

Showing some Action

Well, almost... there are some things we still need to take care of. To start with, we of course have to provide a plugin.xml file to register the class. But more importantly, we have to provide some Action to show and hide our Wikipedia component. To do so, we subclass com.tagtraum.beatunes.action.standard.SongContextComponentShowHideAction. Here's the class:

public class ShowHideWikipediaAction extends SongContextComponentShowHideAction {

    public ShowHideWikipediaAction(final BeaTunes beaTunes) {
        super(beaTunes);
        putValue(Action.ACCELERATOR_KEY, KeyStroke.getKeyStroke(KeyEvent.VK_W,
                Toolkit.getDefaultToolkit().getMenuShortcutKeyMask()
                | InputEvent.SHIFT_MASK));
    }

    public void init() {
        // always call super.init() to make sure the action gets enabled/disabled properly
        super.init();
        putValue(Action.NAME, "Show Artist Info");
        putValue(Action.SHORT_DESCRIPTION, "Shows artist info on Wikipedia");
        putValue(Action.SMALL_ICON,
            new ImageIcon(Wikipedia.class.getResource("wikipedia.png")));
        putValue(BaseAction.SELECTED_ICON,
            new ImageIcon(Wikipedia.class.getResource("wikipedia_selected.png")));
        putValue(BaseAction.DISABLED_ICON,
            new ImageIcon(Wikipedia.class.getResource("wikipedia_disabled.png")));
        putValue(BaseAction.DISABLED_SELECTED_ICON,
            new ImageIcon(Wikipedia.class.getResource("wikipedia_disabled.png")));
    }

    public String getId() {
        // this is the id we reference in the Wikipedia class
        return "wikipedia.show.hide";
    }

    public ActionLocation[] getActionLocations() {
        return new ActionLocation[] {
                // add to Edit menu
                new RelativeActionLocation(BeaTunesUIRegion.EDIT_MENU,
                    RelativeActionLocation.RelativePosition.BEFORE, "tree.show.hide"),
                // add as first (index 0) item to the lower right button panel
                new AbsoluteActionLocation(BeaTunesUIRegion.LOWER_RIGHT_BUTTON_PANEL, 0)
        };
    }
}

And here is the very simple plugin.xml that needs to be placed in the META-INF directory of our jar.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
<!-- Contains a list of plugins to be instantiated by beaTunes -->
<plugins>
    <!-- SongContextComponent -->
    <plugin class="com.beatunes.wikipedia.Wikipedia"/>
    <!-- Actions -->
    <plugin class="com.beatunes.wikipedia.ShowHideWikipediaAction"/>
</plugins>

Zip it!

Since the plugin uses third party libraries, we can't just put everything in one jar and place it in the plugin folder. Instead, we have to create a folder with a subfolder called lib. Into the lib folder we place the plugin's jar, jdic.jar and the native library libjdic.jnilib (both from JDIC). Then we zip the whole thing up.

In essence, the directory structure looks like this:

/lib/wikipedia-1.0.0.jar
    /jdic.jar
    /libjdic.jnilib

For beaTunes 2, the plugin classloader is configured to add all jars in the lib directory, and the classes subdirectory itself, should it exist. Note that plugins are not isolated from each other or from beaTunes, so library and/or class version conflicts are something to stay aware of.

You can download the full source for this example from here and the ready to go binary from here.

Deutsch!

2009-02-11T16:10:00.004-05:00

So... all the little UI glitches in the last couple of releases hopefully paid off with this one, EA19. All strings are extracted and a German and English set are provided. That means, German users should now be able to enjoy beaTunes in their native tongue! Please let me know, if you find any messages or dialogs that I missed or that sound awkward.

Besides the German localization, this release features a new Compilation Inspector that finds albums that really shouldn't be marked as compilations, some UI fixes and some caching improvements.

And here's the obligatory warning: Before downloading and installing this, please make sure you understand what Early Access means:

Absolutely no warranty for whatever
Features may or may not work, appear, and disappear
It may not be possible to migrate data to future versions (even though I make a reasonable effort)
This version will cease to function 2 weeks after its release
You cannot buy this version

Just so that there is no doubt about it: EA19 isn't even a beta version (actually, we are getting really damn close to that, though).

And here are the download links:

Note for EA18 users

There should be no problems.

Not much new

2009-01-28T06:29:00.003-05:00

EA18 provides some fixes for things that went wrong in EA17 - mainly localization issues, better database lock management, a fixed Vista uninstaller and a couple of other things. Not really much that's new...

And here's the obligatory warning: Before downloading and installing this, please make sure you understand what Early Access means:

Absolutely no warranty for whatever
Features may or may not work, appear, and disappear
It may not be possible to migrate data to future versions (even though I make a reasonable effort)
This version will cease to function 2 weeks after its release
You cannot buy this version

Just so that there is no doubt about it: EA18 isn't even a beta version (actually, we are getting really damn close to that, though).

And here are the download links:

Note for EA17 users

The first time you start beaTunes 2 EA18, a message might pop up, saying that the database appears to be locked. It's safe to not unlock it.

Iconic Languages

2009-01-14T03:28:00.004-05:00

Oddly enough, EA17 combines some pretty visible and some not so obvious changes. Starting with the obvious:

beaTunes has a new icon (designed by Jordan from OneToad Design)! After quite a while with the same (stock) icon, I felt it was time to get one that expresses better what beaTunes is all about. And since beaTunes is not a music player, a loudspeaker always seemed like a bad choice to me.

Additionally, I updated some of the other icons used throughout the application.

The second change is not visible and might not be visible for a while. It's localization. Yep, I started taking on the gruesome task of extracting all the strings so that beaTunes can finally speak to more users in their native tongue. At first it's probably just going to be German and (of course) English. Perhaps French will follow.

And here's the obligatory warning: Before downloading and installing this, please make sure you understand what Early Access means:

Absolutely no warranty for whatever
Features may or may not work, appear, and disappear
It may not be possible to migrate data to future versions (even though I make a reasonable effort)
This version will cease to function 2 weeks after its release
You cannot buy this version

Just so that there is no doubt about it: EA17 isn't even a beta version (actually, we are getting really damn close to that, though).

And here are the download links:

Note for EA16 users

There shouldn't be any problems.

iTunes DRM free soon

2009-01-07T07:09:00.002-05:00

In case you haven't heard it yet: Apple will start selling only DRM-free songs in their iTunes Store by the end of March. This is great news for beaTunes users, as DRM protected songs are notoriously hard to analyze.

Finally! Thanks, Apple.

NYE Release

2008-12-31T08:33:00.004-05:00

EA16 is available. I fixed a number of queue issues - cancel should now work properly and other visual errors should be fixed. Most of the icons used throughout the app can now be replaced through custom themes, as I added a Theme.getResource() method, which is used for looking up icons. Internally a couple of things have changed to aid plugin development. And as a little GUI enhancement, the number of remaining songs in the queue is now displayed as badge on the dock icon (OS X only). And of course there are some other smaller fixes and enhancements.

And here's the obligatory warning: Before downloading and installing this, please make sure you understand what Early Access means:

Absolutely no warranty for whatever
Features may or may not work, appear, and disappear
It may not be possible to migrate data to future versions (even though I make a reasonable effort)
This version will cease to function 2 weeks after its release
You cannot buy this version

Just so that there is no doubt about it: EA16 isn't even a beta version (actually, we are getting very close to that, though).

And here are the download links:

Note for EA15 users

If you have been using the keytogrouping plugin - go to the blog post and download the updated version, remove the old version and put the new one in the plugin folder. Things will fail without removing the old version!

Adding a custom menu item

2008-12-18T09:16:00.007-05:00

As I mentioned before, beaTunes 2 will be a lot more friendly towards developers who want to write plugins. As a matter of fact, many of the standard components you can see in the UI are plugins already. If you're curious, just unzip the beaTunes.jar (on OS X open the app bundle and navigate to Contents/Resources/Java - that's where all the jars are, on Windows, just go to the apps lib directory) and checkout the file plugin.xml in the META-INF directory. That file is read by beaTunes and the classes in it are instantiated and registered with the plugin manager. For you that basically means, you have to include a plugin.xml in your own plugin jar file.

But this post wasn't supposed to be about plugin.xml, it was supposed to be about how to get a new menu item into beaTunes. And that is actually pretty easy.

Obviously, a menu item is backed by an action, in the case of beaTunes it should be a com.tagtraum.beatunes.action.BaseAction. So, just subclass BaseAction. Because getId() and actionPerformed() are abstract, you will have to implement them. getId() is supposed to return a String id. Make something up. actionPerformed() does whatever you want your action to do.

public String getId() {
    return "com.mycomp.action.somethingfancy";
}

public void actionPerformed(final ActionEvent e) {
    // do something grand!
}

Now, obviously you want your action to have a name. To give it one, implement a constructor like this:

public MyAction(final BeaTunes beaTunes) {
    super(beaTunes);
    putValue(Action.NAME, "My Menu Item");
    // add other action properties as you see fit
}

At this point you have an action with a name, an id and some action method, but beaTunes doesn't know yet where to put the thing. To tell it where to show it, you have to override the following method:

public ActionLocation[] getActionLocations() {
    // install the action in just one location - in this case the tool menu
    return new ActionLocation[] {
        new AbsoluteActionLocation(BeaTunesUIRegion.TOOL_MENU)
    };
}

The sample code above installs the action in the tool menu. Now, unfortunately that does not give you any control over where exactly in the tool menu the action will be placed. To get more control, you can use a RelativeActionLocation. Like this:

new RelativeActionLocation(BeaTunesUIRegion.EDIT_MENU,
RelativeActionLocation.RelativePosition.BEFORE, "tree.show.hide")

This location installs an action in the edit menu, right before the action with the id tree.show.hide.

Now compile your action, put it in a jar and add a META-INF/plugin.xml-file that looks like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
<plugins>
    <plugin class="com.yourcomp.MyAction"/>
</plugins>

Then place the jar into the beaTunes plugin directory and start beaTunes.

Done!

Note: This code will only work with beaTunes 2. It has been updated for EA16.