Music library management

Over the weekend, bliss got its first bit of press!

bliss was featured on the TuxRadar Podcast in their 'Discovery of the Week' section. Take a listen; our coverage starts at about 33:45 (mins:secs).

Graham Morrison highlighted the way bliss runs in the background and presents a Web interface:

"[bliss] grabs album covers for your music collection, and it does it automatically, it does it in the background and it does it with a Web interface and it's very cool if you happen to run a Squeezebox or keep your music collection on a big hard drive"

This is pertinent, because home servers and NASs running Linux and other operating systems are increasingly becoming the storage location for our music. If it's stored there and, in the case of centralised jukeboxes like Squeezebox, played from there, it makes sense to manage it from there too.

Here's to more good press!

This weeks build is an interim build which has lowered the amount of memory bliss requires when it runs.

No new features, sorry!

Pick up the new release at http://www.blisshq.com/download.html; remember your existing fixes apply!

A few people over the last few months have asked me "why the name 'bliss'?". Well, five months ago I had locked myself away for a day to decide on a name for this music management software I was writing.
I'll start by explaining the existing codename for the project alternated between 'AMT' (Automated Music Tagger) and 'Metadata-Sync'. As you can see, I needed something a little more catchy.

I wanted to solve my problems with managing large music libraries. My overwhelming feeling when struggling with my own collection was one of frustration and the mind boggling complexity of having to juggle and keep track of thousands of music files. For instance: how can I keep a consistent genre scheme across the library? And other similar questions. I wanted to invert the relationship: to manage my music in general rather than file by file. So as well as taking an opposite approach to music management, I wanted a name that was the opposite of frustration and struggle.

There were a few possibilities at this point under consideration. The three contenders were: Chorus, Harmony and Bliss.

What settled the argument in favour of the latter was a bit of idle Googling on the subject of classification systems. I found a pioneer of library classification systems was a fellow named Henry Evelyn Bliss. I see bliss becoming an automatic classifier and organiser, of sorts, and so that was settled. I'm afraid the relationship runs no deeper - any similarity between the way bliss works and Mr Bliss's classification system is purely co-incidental!

And that is why bliss is named as it is.

Some more bug fixes and UI improvements here...

On the 'in progress' and 'installed' screens, the list of albums is now correctly ordered alphabetically when the page is first visited.

To improve the first-time experience, I added in a splash screen and improved the system tray popups.

I also added in another query to Google to capture a few more possible cover art matches.

The new release is available at http://www.blisshq.com/download.html and existing licences apply

When it comes to album art, bigger is almost always better. Having a high quality, high resolution album cover to view on your computer or media centre is the least you want if you've spent time installing the art in the first place (but you could make it dead easy).

However, we don't always look at album art on big screens on high resolution displays. Sometimes we view album art on our portable MP3 players or mobile phones, which have much smaller screens. At best, having high resolution album art is a waste of space on mobile devices. At worst, the album art may not even display if the MP3 player cannot downscale (make smaller) the graphics.

So how to fix? Well, you could go through your hundreds of albums, extracting art, resizing it, re-embedding it......

Or you could enforce the album art size as a rule with bliss.

Use the settings screen to set your minimum and maximum sizes for art:

bliss will ensure all art in your collection conform to this rule. If art is too big, it will be resized. If it's too small, new art is looked up on the Web. All with a couple of clicks. And, of course, the same rules are applied automatically when you add new music, so you only need to configure once.

There you have it: complete album art, with more storage space for more music.

Another set of predominantly bug fixes in this week's build...

I've improved the in progress screen so that when an album goes from in progress to asking you to confirm the album art it now updates live - there's no need to refresh the web page.

I made sure any long standing HTTP connections for looking up art are automatically aborted after a period - this allows all albums to be inspected and fixed more reliably.

I also made sure existing, incorrectly sized artwork already available in your collection is used and resized, rather than new art looked up.

The release is available, as ever, at http://www.blisshq.com/download.html and existing licences apply.

Since using bliss on my music collection I've enjoyed downloading art for recordings I didn't expect to.

My music collection contains many oddities that aren't standard album releases by mainstream artists. These include:

• Cover mounted CDs
• Music by independent musicians (REAL indies!)
• Podcasts
• Bootlegs (*ahem*)

A good example is a CD given to me at an Afghan wedding I attended. The CD was by a performer at the event, a classical tabla player. The CD came in a case with cover art, but being too lazy to scan the cover I never thought I'd see the art displayed on my Squeezebox. I was wrong! bliss found the art art on a blog using its Google search capability and installed it for me.

Another common example in my music collection are cover mounted CDs. In the UK a music magazine called 'Q' often offer compilations of tracks along a given theme, mounted on the front cover of the magazine. Previous examples were Essential Chill Out and The Best Tracks From The Best Albums Of 2000. Thankfully, art for these records is stored on the online database at discogs.org, which bliss searches, so this art was found automatically too!

It's been great to get a complete set of album art for all the odds-and-ends in my music collection. If you have trouble finding art for rare recordings, give bliss a try!