SongKong 6.5 Doolittle - released October 4th 2019

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