We are pleased to announce the release of SongKong 6.6, this release is named after the album by Taylor Swift. Red was the album that kickstarted her transformation from country singer to pop princess, crammed full of classic pop tunes.
Improved Reports
Most of the improvements in this release are related to reports.
Artwork Size
We now show the size of artwork (width in pixels) as another label on the image
Show Labels
But you can remove this and all other labels by unchecking the Show Labels checkbox so you can see your artwork unobscured.
Text Search
You can do a text search to only show the items that match the search.
Filters
And you can combine this with filters.
For the
Artist page we can filter on artists that have/not an artist images,
artists that have/not cover art for all their albums and artist that
have/not all their albums matched to either a MusicBrainz or Discogs
album.
New Browse Sections
We have added Browse by Artist and Browse by Folder to a Browse drop down menu because we have now added some new ways to browse your collection.
Browse by Album
Displays all the albums on a single page so that it is easy to find the album you are interested in regardless of knowing the album artist. It also means that very quickly you can see albums over your whole collection that need some attention.
Filters and search are included.
Browse by Composer/Work
For classical music it is often more useful to be able to browse by the composer and their works, rather than by album artist and album so we have now added this. At the top level it shows all the composers that you have works for and you can select a composer to see their works
Filters and search are included.
Bug Fixing
We have also fixed another seven bugs. Full list of fixes can be found on the news page
We are pleased to announce the new release of SongKong,
SongKong 6.5 Doolittle named after the second album by Pixies released in 1989. Full of powerful bursts of energy, and one of the first bands I ever saw live, and now thirty years on they are touring the same album !
Continuing the theme of the previous release we have fixed over thirty bugs this months, this includes a number of long-standing and obscure bugs - please see here
Resolving bugs is important since we want to make SongKong totally hassle free, and this in turn reduces the time we need to spend on support, freeing up more time for new features. So there will be some new features soon but I do not apologize for currently concentrating on bug fixing.
Bug Analysis
I thought it might be interesting to categorise the remaining 39 bugs (this is not many at all for a product of this complexity), they are as follows:
Installer:6
iTunes Integration:6
Web User Interface:5
Matching Issues:5
Reading/Writing data:4
Albunack Database:3
Undo Changes:3
Reports:3
Error Handling:2
MacOS User Interface:2
Installer
SongKong is available on many platforms and the codebase is largely the same for all platforms but there are differences. Notably installers very considerably between platforms and do not necessarily use Java like the main SongKong application, and expectations can change as new versions of the operating system become available. The two most problematic platforms are Windows (which is complicated), and Linux where there is no clear standard for all Linux variations.
iTunes Integration
Unfortunately Apple do not make it very easy to integrate with their products, and are very secretive about bugs in their products. iTunes integration is difficult and we have to do it twice, once for MacOS and once for Windows
Web User Interface
Originally SongKong only had a regular desktop user interface. Adding a full Web user interface was a major piece of work, and we are still learning about the ever changing web, and have a few issues to fix.
Matching Issues
This is the main feature of SongKong and we are always seeking to improve song identification, and have a few minor issues related to this.
Reading/Writing Data
For some audio formats (mp4, ogg, wma) we sometimes write temporary files when modifying files and this can cause issues for users with a complex permissions model. So we would like to remove the need to use temporary files but this is quite major piece of work, this is the bulk of the issues in
this category.
Albunack Database
Some improvements require modification to our Albunack Database, this holds our copies of MusicBrainz and Discogs database.
Undo Changes
Another key feature with a few issues.
Reports
Additional Html based problems.
Error Handling
Errors can always happen, and when they do we need to deal with then sensibly, a few issues remain here.
MacOS User Interface
Of all the platforms that SongKong supports the MacOS platform is most subject to change and require updates to SongKong
