Music library management

This week's release turbo-charges the change art screen. For any album, we now offer the ability to choose from a range of alternatives bliss has found, provide your own URL, or ask bliss to refresh and have another go at picking (this could be useful if there was, say, a temporary problem with your Internet connection).

Check it out:
We also made some BIG improvements in the amount of data downloaded as bliss works. This amount should be much smaller now.

This week's release is all about improving the first time experience for new users. The settings are now an expandable region in the activity page, and pop open on first use. I have also hidden the size options so that fewer options are presented immediately.

Press the 'settings' link to reveal the settings, and press 'hide settings' to hide them again. Each '?' reveals extra information about the setting, and the size options are hidden behind the 'advanced' link.

I changed the status indicator so progress is fed back quicker once you have changed music library. For large music libraries there would sometimes be a noticeable gap between starting bliss and getting any information back that bliss had even started scanning your music library.

Finally, a bug in the Amazon art downloader has been fixed which may have caused bliss to hang under certain situations. Not good, but fixed now!

As usual, existing licences will work for this release.

It's been a little longer between releases than I'd like. We endeavour to produce weekly releases with new features and any bug fixes. Over Christmas we started work on some more complex re-writes of the underpinnings of bliss, which took longer than anticipated, but now the changes are complete, tested, and ready for download!

We've made a number of improvements to the UI. First, the albums are now all sorted alphabetically and paginated, so you can filter down the list of albums and pending questions to a more manageable size if you prefer.

I lost a couple of dear friends last Friday: my pair of Ultimate Ears Super.fi 3 Studio Earphones.

They were the best in-ear headphones I ever owned.

When I'm on the move I need in-ear earphones to listen to music and podcasts. Primarily I wear them each morning and evening, walking to and from work in London.

Over the years I've tried numerous headsets/earbuds. I tried expensive Sennheiser and Sony earphones where one earbud would just stop working (and clumsy attempts with a soldering iron didn't improve things). I tried earbuds that come free with other equipment; but they all sound tinny and don't block out road noise. I tried a Bluetooth set for a while; the things kept disconnecting, treating everyone around to a sample of my music (for some reason it always seemed to be something embarrassing playing at the time).

I needed a pair of earphones robust enough to withstand my walking and that sound good enough so I can enjoy what I am listening to.

I found that in the Ultimate Ears earphones. The buds themselves are very robust. A 5cm or so length of wire where the cable connects to the buds is mouldable to the shape of your ear, so the wire goes up and over the ear. This lessens the impact on the wire when walking. The earbuds themselves are removable and replaceable, lest they stop working (they never did). Musically they sound good. Not as rich in bass as some Sennheiser 'phones I used, but then at least they worked longer than a couple of months.

The last time I saw my earphones was when I was returning a hire car. For all I know, they're lying in a car hire car park in King's Cross right now. Fair well, old friends.

If you are looking for a pair of tough, robust, long lived earphones, I strongly recommend the Ultimate Ears Super.fi 3 Studio Earphones. Don't tell the old pair, but a replacement pair are already on order.

Another week, another release!

Just a couple of little items... First I added a drop down box to choose the location of your music library. Before you had to type it in (remember that bliss can be installed on a separate computer, so this has to show the files on the computer bliss is running on).

I also improved the shortcuts generated as part of a Linux install.

Download from the downloads page.

Thanks to everyone downloading and buying so far. Your feedback is invaluable!

A new release is ready for download and installation/upgrade.

Unfortunately I was having a couple of wisdom teeth removed last week, so there were fewer fixes than expected! General anaesthetic plays havoc with the brain...

The big new feature is that embedded art can now be removed as well as added. As ever, you specify this as a rule. If you add art to your collection with art embedded inside it, and you have told bliss you don't want art embedded, it will strip it out for you. This is useful for working with players that don't support embedded art. Some people also don't like the duplication of the same image in every music file.

We also rearranged the 'installed' page. We've made it so it appears in a grid rather than a list, using up a lot less screen real estate. Here's a sample:

This gives more prominence to your art. Looks a lot better, hope you agree!

Finally we made some improvements so bliss retries its album art sources if the source reports a temporary problem. This makes the installation yet more 'automatic'.

The new release is available from from the downloads page on the blisshq.com website. Give it a try and give us some feedback.

We've uploaded a new version!

The primary fixes are to support compilations and albums with many different track artists. Some users were reporting that bliss was treating each track as a different album. We've fixed this now.

We also gave the Google image search some steroids; it now returns more than four results, and we also cleared up the nasty image overflow layout problem.

Oh, and we found a problem with installing art for one specific album. But don't worry... it's hardly a common album... an album called 'Revolver' by some band called 'The Beatles'. I'm sure that one didn't affect anyone... (Sorry!)

The new release is available from from the downloads page on the blisshq.com website. Give it a try and give us some feedback.

p.s. if you are upgrading your version of bliss, then the best way is to uninstall the old version, then reinstall the new one. Don't worry: your licence information and your existing settings will be preserved.