Music library management

In this week's build we've 'turbocharged' the sizing options. These options now operate as real rules, governing how your existing art is stored as well as what new art is downloaded.

For example, if you have a separate collection for your MP3 player, which has a maximum size for art, you can tell bliss to monitor this collection and set the maximum size appropriately. bliss will resize any existing art. Any other art it needs to locate will also be within these size constraints.

Download it at http://www.blisshq.com/download.html

Enjoy!

Recently, new ways of packaging digital music have been developed that promise to improve the all-round experience of digital music. Traditionally, digital music would be delivered in a digital music file, for instance an MP3, which is 'tagged' internally with information about the track, artist, album and so on. These tags are static, but can be changed with a tag editor.

The recent announcement of MusicDNA
shows that the music industry is thinking about how these tags are formulated and represented. MusicDNA allows tags to be updated online. This would allow for novel new applications of tags, for instance providing information about upcoming tour dates for your favourite band. This is accomplished with a new, but backwards compatible, file format.

Another new approach to music packaging is iTunesLP. Rather than a different file format, this is a different approach to packaging tracks together. A group of individual tracks, for example constituting an album, are packaged together in one file alongside other media of interest, such as album art, videos, a self contained website and so on. Some of these are really quite impressive and take the album experience in different directions, just like great album art used to.

Both of these new packaging approaches offer useful and fun features for music consumers. Further, the tagging is likely to be accurate and complete as the music has been delivered by an authoritative source. However, they don't answer some of the deeper existing problems inherent when managing digital music libraries.

How do I ensure consistency across my music library? How can I be sure purchasing a new album won't introduce another meaningless genre I have to include in my playlists? Will compilations be tagged correctly for the different music players I use? How do I know the special way my mobile phone shows album art is catered for?

One way to ensure consistency would be to purchase all music from one source. However, that's unlikely to be practical or desirable (not to mention anti-competitive), doesn't actually offer any control over how a music library is semantically organised anyway, and finally does not help manage a music lover's existing art.

I can't help but think that while the industry may have found a new way to sell concert tickets and promote their acts, they still don't care about digital music collectors and their collections.

New file formats are helpful, but issues of consistency in music libraries remain.

This release contains some fine-tuning to various aspects of bliss.

We now show the size of the art when bliss asks you to confirm the art you want, or to change existing art.

bliss also reports the current albums that are being inspected and fixed.

We added an extra query to MusicBrainz to bring back a wider variety of results. These results are never applied automatically though, because although they are useful for badly tagged albums there's also a chance they won't be correct.

Also, previously ignored albums can now be refreshed and updated and bought back into cosy album art compliance!

I hope you find these little tune-ups useful!

In the beginning (well, 2002 anyway), there was the computer. The computer was very useful. You could read and write documents, listen to music, play videos and reminisce with embarrassing old photographs.

Over time, all this data began to grow in size. It became difficult to fit it onto a hard disk on a standard computer. We began to want to backup the data, because losing precious music and photos would be A Bad Thing. Then, as we added more computers to our home in the shape of netbooks, smartphones and tablet computers, we wanted access to all this data from all these devices.

To solve this, we decided to centralise the data.

We moved all our data to computers responsible simply for data storage. These computers are called NASes (Network Attached Storage). They offered far higher capacities, could provide your documents, music, photos and video to whatever computer in your house requested it, and were easier to backup. They tended to run continuously at a low power draw, so as soon as you wanted your data, there it was. Now, companies like Buffalo, Linksys and LaCie make affordable, easy to use home NASes that provide all of these benefits.

This worked well until we found it wasn't just the data that we wanted to centralise in our homes, but the actual applications too. For instance, music streaming servers like Squeezebox and Personal Video Recorders (PVRs) like MythTV would work, in the background, while you got on with your life. This new wave appears just ready to break through. Microsoft's Windows Home Server product is a version of Windows that you can install on servers. Linux is another popular option amongst hobbyists, as is the Mac Mini.

Where does music management fit into this?

There's no reason why music management should be something a collector has to laboriously step through on a constant basis. If we define rules by which our music should be managed, music management can be done on a continual, fully automatic basis. When new music is added to the collection, rules kick-in to ensure that the music library is maintained in a consistent, complete and correct state. If the application of the rules is not certain, then we can ask a human via normal methods such as email or a Web interface, as humans are great at creativity and problem solving.

So, the result is much less time tagging and more reliable and consistent results.

bliss is written to run on a home server.

This is why it has a web interface, so that it can be reached from anywhere in your home network. It is also why, most importantly, it applies the rules you define when new music is added to your collection. This way, you dictate the rules, and bliss does all the hard work.

Where will home data storage go next? Some say 'the cloud', a vague, loaded term that tends to refer to online storage of data over the Internet (and lots more besides). While this is an excellent solution for a number of reasons, as yet such an infrastructure is not capable of storing data in all its guises, for instance the lossless music beloved of audiophiles is simply too large both in terms of the capacity required to hold it and the bandwidth required to upload/download.

It'll be interesting to see in what directions home servers go, but so far it appears it will make music library management quicker and more accurate.

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.