2018-06-04 23:00
After the reason duplicate detection and removal releases, this release is more of a stabilisation
build.
The main area of fixing is on the album detail page.
Improvements
Changed na… Read More
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Music Library Management Blog
blisshq.com
A blog about self-stored digital music collections, and the best way of organizing them.
2018-05-21 23:00
This new release builds on the previous
duplicate detection release, and now includes the (manual) removal of duplicate files.
We've also added in a bunch of bug fixes!
Duplicate re… Read More
2018-05-13 23:00
I'm back from Munich.
It was the usual hectic visit: out on Wednesday night, straight to my hotel and bed (ok - just one
Paulaner first), then up, exhibition, straight back to the airpor… Read More
2018-05-07 23:00
Tomorrow I'll be boarding a plane for Europe's biggest hi-fi exhibition - Munich High End.
This will be my fourth year at the show. It's pretty impressive in scale, taking up multiple
ha… Read More
2018-04-30 23:00
Back in the 00s, a recurring subject around computer-based music was: what was going to happen
to cover art in the computer-based music age?
It's understandable; think of the great albu… Read More
2018-04-26 23:00
This release offers up the first iteration of the long asked-for duplicate removal feature.
This initial step adds duplicate detection, with removal and further refinements to
come in later… Read More
2018-04-16 23:00
This is a maintenance release with few new features, but a lot of work to move bliss to more
recent dependencies to allow future development.
bliss uses a number of different re-usable s… Read More
2018-04-09 23:00
Just under
two years ago I blogged that we would stop making bliss updates available for the VortexBox 2.2
repositories. This meant we still built an up-to-date version for VortexBox 2.2, b… Read More
2018-04-02 23:00
This release re-introduces the cancel button into bliss. Ok, it wasn't always called the
cancel button...
it used to be "pause". But I thought the feature was similar to the cancel functio… Read More
2018-03-26 23:00
It's 2018 and yep! Disc title support is still poor.
What's a disc title? Well, admittedly it's a niche requirement. Disc titles are commonly used
on box sets in releases with multiple m… Read More
2018-03-20 00:00
Just a small maintenance release this week, honing the album-page tag editor.
The fixes are:
Undo works properly.
Undo and save are greyed out until changes are made.
The last choice… Read More
2018-03-06 00:00
This is one of those blog posts I've been collecting notes on for a while. When I'm visiting
online forums, browsing social media or replying to my email I often see repeated arguments
or i… Read More
2018-03-01 00:00
This new release has a major new feature and a couple of important bug fixes. I advise
you download and install!
The new feature is that we've added the tags view into each album page, s… Read More
2018-02-20 00:00
We're back with another new release with two big improvements and some more bug fixes and tunings!
This release adds the ability to fill in missing track names and numbers (positions). B… Read More
2018-02-14 00:00
Following on from my
Sonos maildump I decided to bring together various information I've learnt about Bluesound libraries
down the years.
Bluesound produce an elegant and audiophile gra… Read More
2018-01-31 00:00
For the DIY digital audio enthusiast, UPnP is often the bedrock of a home music network. It's an industry standard that defines how media (that's music to us) sources and playback devices i… Read More
2018-01-23 00:00
A small release with a couple of bug fixes. We've refined how the "buffering" of file modifications
works and also updated our tagging library to fix a bug in DSF tagging.
When bliss l… Read More
2018-01-16 00:00
Sometimes, when I'm on the bliss Facebook page,
Facebook make recommendations for similar pages. Frankly these are mostly pretty inaccurate, but
one day a suggestion to view the BatchPhoto… Read More
2018-01-09 00:00
I received an email yesterday:
I have recently purchased a new Audi. The MMI system of the car allows a maximum resolution of 800x800.
However with bliss it appears that I need to selec… Read More
2017-12-14 00:00
A maintenance release just in time for Christmas!
A few reported issues have been recurring in my inbox over the past month
or so, so I thought that despite other time pressures I should… Read More
2017-11-29 00:00
For a while I've been building some notes to write about trilemmas in music libraries.
A trilemma
is a situation where you can choose two options from three, but never all three. Like many… Read More
2017-11-21 00:00
90% of the customer support for bliss is done via email. The downside of this is that the conversations
tend to get locked away, so aside from a few times where I've posted about an interes… Read More
2017-11-13 00:00
One of the quieter revolutions in home digital media appears to be the growth
in consumer and home NAS.
According to recent research, the global consumer NAS market is increasing steadi… Read More
2017-11-07 00:00
Another maintenance release this week. I've fixed some bugs in file watching, support for Java 9
in the Windows launcher and some more stuff.
Improvements
Updated the Java version in th… Read More
2017-10-24 23:00
A common inconsistency inside digital music libraries is whether Various or Various
Artists is used to define the artist for a track or album. It matters because, when browsing
by artist n… Read More
2017-10-16 23:00
The ideas forum has been around a long time; looking at my billing, it looks like the first time
I paid for it was in the summer of 2011. There have been a few design tweaks but the basic
w… Read More
2017-10-09 23:00
This week's release is a maintenance one, mainly aimed at honing the QNAP integration. In addition
we've made sure bliss will always "trust" its metadata server.
The main QNAP work thi… Read More
2017-10-02 23:00
The introduction of the tag accuracy rules have helped fix a lot of music libraries.
But there are edge cases... (there are always edge cases)
Sometimes, having the canonical album name… Read More
2017-09-25 23:00
I'm going to be making some changes to bliss pricing in a few weeks, and I wanted blog readers
and email list members to hear about it first, so you can decide what to do. You'll also
poten… Read More
2017-09-18 23:00
Another release, another integration... this week, QNAP NASes get 'blissed up'.
bliss has been customised to run on a number of devices; not just desktop or laptop computers. NAS device… Read More
2017-09-06 23:00
I'm pleased to announce the availability of our official Synology package!
Since 'patters' first developed a third party package to get bliss running on Synology NASes,
it has become a p… Read More
2017-09-04 23:00
So there's this thing called abstraction which is used a lot in computer science. It's
a way of making a complex subject more understandable by hiding details of the underlying
complexity… Read More
2017-08-28 23:00
My favoured way of maintaining a lossy library alongside a lossless one is to
not have a lossy library. That's not a glib, snobbish comment
on lossy libraries. Instead it's an expression o… Read More
2017-08-21 23:00
Mostly bug fixing in this new build...
The most commonly occurring bug fixed in this version is one relating to multi disc releases.
In the previous build, we'd sometimes mix-up tracks f… Read More
2017-08-14 23:00
A common inquiry to the bliss support inbox is; once I've used bliss to embed
all this canonically correct information and all this beautiful high resolution album art...
how do I get my mu… Read More
2017-08-07 23:00
This week, a question to the bliss support inbox about restoring file and folder paths, given
a "flat" file structure...
When backing up my relatively large music file I inadvertently… Read More
2017-07-31 23:00
Here's an idea I'd like your feedback on; I've been considering it for years (!) so I thought
it was time to write it down.
Ruleset selectors would be a way of applying different bliss s… Read More
2017-07-24 23:00
This new release is predominantly a bug fixing, maintenance one. That's while I work on some
scaling issues on our metadata server, and also take a couple of weeks off for a holiday!
One… Read More
2017-07-03 23:00
Back to custom rules this week!
Custom rules are not a particularly well used feature in bliss. I understand why; they're difficult to
set up. There are some ways we could make this much… Read More
2017-06-26 23:00
This releases rounds off most of the remaining tag correction work. The important feature introduced
in this build is a way of choosing the releases used to judge whether a field is correct… Read More
2017-06-19 23:00
When trying to solve a music file conundrum I've been presented with via
email, I often need to produce an audio file of a specific format. That's because different
audio file formats store… Read More
2017-06-12 23:00
As iterations on tag correction
begin to come to an end, I'm implementing the final few pieces that allow me to consider this work 'done'.
This week: support for discnumber completion and… Read More
2017-06-05 23:00
On Linux and OS X based systems, files have permissions. Permissions denote who
can read and write a file. As such, they provide a form of access control which
makes them useful for providi… Read More
2017-05-30 23:00
Another maintenance release this week, with fixes for issues with multi disc albums, UI improvements
around tag correction and linked releases and some fixes around settings.
Bug fixes… Read More
2017-05-22 23:00
An example popped into my inbox the other day which perfectly demonstrated how music library management
must be approached in different ways.
In this case, it was an example of how synta… Read More
2017-05-16 23:00
I'm stepping outside of my office for a day or two, and heading off to Munich for
the High End 2017 exhibition.
High End is the largest audio exhibition in Europe and covers all facets o… Read More
2017-05-09 23:00
This release is predominantly a maintenance release following on from the previous work on
tag correction. It fixes a number of items, including a regression introduced in the last
version… Read More
2017-05-08 23:00
The main breakthrough in this release is the introduction of data pipelines.
Before, the tag correction and all other tag rules worked independently. This caused an issue
when the rules… Read More
2017-05-01 23:00
In this day and age you'd have thought "bigger is better".
Why not store album artwork as large as possible, when storage is getting
cheaper and displays getting larger, sporting higher re… Read More
2017-04-24 23:00
Following on from the
introduction of tag correction in the last release, this new release moves from album-level
metadata to track-level. Specifically, bliss now allows track names to b… Read More
2017-04-17 23:00
Like any pursuit, music library management has its own set of inconvenient truths.
Stuff you know is or might be a problem, but you'd rather ignore because they
sound too difficult to fix… Read More
2017-04-10 23:00
This week sees the first release of the new
tag correction code. This first release concentrates on album level tag correction;
in other words, metadata that exist at an album level, such… Read More
2017-04-04 23:00
Since we updated bliss's architecture in February, a few things broke in the
Synology package.
While we wait for patters to fix these,
I'm making available a manual-install SPK file which… Read More
2017-04-03 23:00
I'm just running final sanity tests on the next build of bliss, and it contains some of the
most important new code for some time; probably since lookup for missing genre and year tags
was… Read More
2017-03-27 23:00
I've taken a one-release break from work on
correctness and completeness to
focus on the activity page.
The ability to list all fixes made my bliss (i.e. everything that depletes your f… Read More
2017-03-21 00:00
Spring is approaching (in the Northern Hemisphere), when it's traditionally a time to think
about big clean-up and organizational endeavours. With digital music increasingly
integrated into… Read More
2017-03-14 00:00
My new focus is on generalising bliss's feature set to cover correctness and completeness
of all metadata, not just cover art,
genres and years.
The first step on this road is to push f… Read More
2017-03-07 00:00
bliss runs as a daemon style process, and its Web-based UI is accessible on both your own machine
and also, potentially, others on your network. This is useful, because
it means you can us… Read More
2017-02-28 00:00
Music fans can be fierce, loyal and obsessive about their hard-won music collection. Back in the day,
did you order your vinyl or CD collection A-to-Z by artist, album, genre or year of re… Read More
2017-02-20 00:00
As expected, last week's big release with some fundamental underlying changes did
introduce a few issues. This release fixes all those found so far.
As well as bug fixes there are a few… Read More
2017-02-13 00:00
This release has been a while in the making while I've re-written some underlying
and fundamental bits of bliss. That's why there's little new, functionally, in this
release.
But my phil… Read More
2017-02-07 00:00
As I wrote in a previous
blog post about work in progress, the next release of bliss is going to be structured
differently; in use it will look almost exactly the same, but under the cove… Read More
2017-01-31 00:00
Back in May 2011, Apple shipped an update to iTunes which both began enforcing the PNG format
for manually provided artwork, and also changed the image format to PNG for music
downloaded f… Read More
2017-01-24 00:00
It's been a month since the last bliss release, so what's going on behind the scenes?
I've been re-writing some of the fundamental building blocks of bliss, to hopefully allow
for more r… Read More
2017-01-10 00:00
A quick, technical one for Synology users this week.
When re-installing bliss on a Synology device recently I noticed an interesting error.
It appears in the DSM logs when attempting to… Read More
2017-01-03 00:00
The only thing worse than no automation is automation gone wrong.
The main reason for that is that automation gone wrong can take a lot of effort to fix.
Indeed; sometimes errant automat… Read More
2016-12-19 00:00
It's 2016 (just) and there are still some music players out there which only support certain image formats!
Whether your album covers are
saved embedded or as separate image files, some
pl… Read More
2016-12-06 00:00
A few months ago I received the following email from Ron Lyster, a long time bliss user:
A couple months ago, while I was out of town, my music server suffered a crash. I found
a progr… Read More
2016-11-29 00:00
This week's release contains a cool new feature I've wanted to implement for some time:
assessing and
storing zero or more cover art image files.
Since the bliss project started over sev… Read More
2016-11-15 00:00
This release marks the final "clean up" release before I begin on some fairly big,
fairly numerous functionality improvements (more about which soon)...
But in addition to the bug fixes… Read More
2016-11-08 00:00
As we've added more and more NAS, music server and embedded integrations I've begun to get more and
more questions about where bliss should be run. Should it be run on your computer or
on y… Read More
2016-11-01 00:00
Down the years a lot of Sonos users discovered bliss when they needed
to fix their cover art to show on their Sonos devices.
Sonos always had limitations on the resolution
and data size of… Read More
2016-10-24 23:00
There are a bunch of "bad album covers" blog posts out there. But over the past few years
I've been collecting a list of album covers which aren't so much bad as clunky;
inappropriate, misl… Read More
2016-10-17 23:00
It's been a
long requested feature to have a native installer for QNAP NASes. bliss is ideal for installation
on a NAS; its
background daemon nature means you can instantly access it when… Read More
2016-10-10 23:00
This week's release contains a number of small improvements and bug fixes...
Updated Stripe payments to the latest, more secure encryption algorithm.
The whole of the rule name 'box' is… Read More
2016-10-04 23:00
We've covered before
the difference between the DSD formats: DSF and DFF. The short of it is: use DSF; it
gives the same audio quality and adds metadata storage capability into the bargain… Read More
2016-09-26 23:00
Over the past few months I've been looking at various in-car entertainment systems and how
they display album art. This week it's the turn of Porsche's PCM system. But this post is a
little… Read More
2016-09-19 23:00
A lot to get through this week, this update is a big 'un!
The main work in this release relates to the
previously announced
change to licencing.
From now on, bliss licences will work i… Read More
2016-09-12 23:00
A good proportion of the emails I receive to the blisshq inbox relate to how to deal with what
I call "walled gardens". What I mean by
this are the abstractions added by music players which… Read More
2016-09-05 23:00
It's time for an update to how bliss is licenced, and charged for. I don't do this easily;
I've made two changes (to decrease the number of trial fixes, and to decrease the number of
the to… Read More
2016-08-29 23:00
Here's another small release for bliss. Today I moved the blisshq.com site to HTTPS. Despite the fact
that human browsers of the site get automatically redirected from HTTP to HTTPS, It tur… Read More
2016-08-24 23:00
Thanks to an email report I've found a significant bug affecting users
of the Maximum Data Size rule. This new release fixes that, and just that!
If you are affected by this bug you'l… Read More
2016-08-22 23:00
This week I'm looking at another in-vehicle entertainment system; Volkswagen's CMS (Composition Media
System). Like other systems, CMS is able to play music from a connected device.
And als… Read More
2016-08-17 23:00
In last week's mega-release, including a completely new UI for bliss, there was always
likely to be a few niggly problems introduced.
So here's a small release with a few items to iron… Read More
2016-08-08 23:00
It's been a long time in the making, but here, finally, is the new UI refresh for bliss!
I've been working hard for at least a month porting all of the pages of the bliss
app to a new d… Read More
2016-08-01 23:00
General Motors MyLink is the in-vehicle control and information system featured across the broad
GM range; from Chevrolet to Holden to Buicks and Opels. MyLink allows a range of features co… Read More
2016-07-25 23:00
You might have noticed there has been no releases of bliss for a few weeks, or at least certainly
longer than I would prefer! I tend to prefer releasing small incremental improvements of
bl… Read More
2016-07-18 23:00
Mercedes COMAND is the in-vehicle control and information system installed across the Mercedes-Benz
range. From COMAND you can navigate
with GPS, make and receive phone calls and, of course… Read More
2016-07-11 23:00
... wait a minute, stop! No cheap 80s
New Wave references here. This week's topic is about gold music libraries; what
they are, and why they are a useful way of thinking about how you stor… Read More
2016-07-04 23:00
A couple of months ago I received a tweet from BartonMeeks
to the @bliss_music Twitter account suggesting I take a
look at a YouTube video.
The video is produced by Dutch audiophile a… Read More
2016-06-27 23:00
SYNC is the Ford Motor Company's in-vehicle entertainment system which allows all manner of in
car functions; playing music, hands free telephone calls and so on. It's been around for almos… Read More
2016-06-20 23:00
DSF is an audio container format,
designed primarily for holding DSD audio. DSD has been gaining in popularity amongst audiophiles
because of its promise of high audio quality from its hi… Read More
2016-06-06 23:00
Eeep! Thanks to our users, we've found an important bug in the previous version of bliss which affects
writing FLAC files, and means they will appear corrupt to some software.
The bug is… Read More
2016-05-30 23:00
Here's a new release with a few bug fixes and small improvements. We've fixed a permissions
problem when organizing music over a network, added padding to
folder and file names, and we can… Read More
2016-05-22 23:00
How do you like the new website look?
I've been working away on a new look for the blisshq.com website
for a few weeks. I wanted a more professional, modern look, while retaining the sam… Read More
2016-05-16 23:00
DSD, and the derivative forms of DSF and DFF, are gaining popularity in audiophile circles.
While they benefit from higher sampling rates than audio ripped from or for CDs, they face
the sa… Read More
2016-05-09 23:00
After discussing with VortexBox, we've decided to stop bliss updates into the VortexBox 2.2 repository
from the next release of bliss. So the next release of bliss will be the last one tha… Read More
2016-05-02 23:00
Back to the mailbag! A recent query hit my inbox, part of which contained:
Why bother about file structure at all? I am thinking about putting all music in a single folder on
my NAS, an… Read More
2016-04-25 23:00
One possibility offered by custom file organisation patterns in bliss is that
folders and files can also incorporate constants in the path. For example, all
files processed by bliss could b… Read More
2016-04-19 23:00
A music tagging scheme is the overall set of structural, syntactic and semantic
rules that govern how music file tags are written; the content of each field and even whether
particular fie… Read More
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