2024-04-25 23:00
This month: thoughts on intentional listening, developments in music network infrastructure and Elton John forgets he ordered a tram.
Intentional listening
There remains a core of music… Read More
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A blog about self-stored digital music collections, and the best way of organizing them.
2024-04-24 23:00
This release contains a new, improved token, improvements to bliss’s handling of ID3v2.2 tags and bliss’s Untagged page.
Download… Read More
2024-04-01 23:00
This release contains an important change to how tracks are grouped into albums - before, we used to separate albums with album or artist names that only differed in case. Now, we group tho… Read More
2024-03-27 00:00
This month we’re considering sociological explanations of music streaming, exploring musical artists, reviewing new musical NAS hardware and reading a couple of excellent music articl… Read More
2024-03-11 00:00
This week, a bunch of improvements to rule execution, fix-album and fix-all and operation on Synology and QNAP NASes.
Download
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2024-02-22 00:00
This month: music journalism woes, new small-tech music projects, data openness and Apple’s Windows Store update for their music services.
Journalist rout
Looks like journalism is… Read More
2024-01-30 00:00
During last month’s release pause we were assessed for a new, upgraded code signing certificate. We underwent a verification process, assessing the company and our build procedures b… Read More
2024-01-26 00:00
This month - moving off streaming services and considering music as cultural consumption!
Just a note about our last post about a release pause. We’ve now integrated a new code sign… Read More
2024-01-09 00:00
You might have noticed a delay in new releases of bliss. It’s not the New Year blues; it’s because our code signing certificate has come up for renewal and there are a number o… Read More
2023-12-28 00:00
This month we review a couple of acquisitions, thoughts on streaming and library browsing and ways to prepare for the upcoming Google Podcast shutdown.
Acquisitions in the self hosted a… Read More
2023-12-19 00:00
In this release we’ve made improvements to bliss’s startup script for better interoperability on FreeBSD, and improved updating track numbers in MP4 files… Read More
2023-12-05 00:00
In this release we’ve fixed a problem displaying albums when they begin with accented characters and the starts-with album filter is enabled.
Download… Read More
2023-11-22 00:00
This release contains an important fix for the missing tag and tag accuracy rules.
Download
Download(Intel x86)… Read More
2023-11-08 00:00
This release contains a bunch more refinements since the tag index changes. There’s also an important fix for making sure automated track level fixes (such as changes to track name o… Read More
2023-10-30 00:00
This is a small release with a tiny fix to make sure log generation works correctly.
Download
Download(Intel x86)… Read More
2023-10-26 23:00
This month’s round-up concentrates on music acquisition, as Bandcamp gets sold (again) and Spotify consider a new hi-res tier (maybe).
Meanwhile, Google and Sonos continue to slug it… Read More
2023-09-28 23:00
More cloud related music fluffiness this month - improved cloud storage, Plex stopping access from some cloud providers and Google shutting down (yet another) product!
Cloud storage gets… Read More
2023-09-26 23:00
This week’s release concludes work on indexing performance. Using a low powered Synology NAS as a guide we’ve reduced the file scan and index time for a 2,000 album library from… Read More
2023-09-13 23:00
We’ve started a new round of performance improvements in this release. These improvements stretch into the next release, too.
In addition we’ve added the ability to disable fin… Read More
2023-08-24 23:00
This month: Disney pulls physical DVD sales (in Oz), a look back on the current status of classical music streaming services, new software for scrobbling and media serving and the Internet… Read More
2023-08-16 23:00
This release has an important fix for the execution of manually selected fixes. There are also improvements to the Windows app and the fix-all and fix-album features.
Do… Read More
2023-07-27 23:00
This month there’re more new apps for music storage and playback, more nefarious streaming company antics, CD store day and a big move for self-hosters by Intel.
New apps
A new ap… Read More
2023-07-11 23:00
In this release: some improvements to error messages and the handling of automatic fixes.
Download
Download(Intel x86)… Read More
2023-06-26 23:00
This release contains improvements to the way old fixes are executed, better error reporting when changing art and improved album filters for the Albums page.
Download… Read More
2023-06-25 23:00
This month we look back on a month providing new music collection tools, interesting reading material about how music affects our brains and some hardware news in the NAS and headphone mark… Read More
2023-06-11 23:00
We’ve improved compliance messages and also fixed some bugs around “stale fixes” in this release.
Download
Download(I… Read More
2023-05-24 23:00
This month: the disconcerting nature of AI generated music, hacking a music server onto an old phone, the BBC move to stop their Shoutcast MP3 streams and how streaming companies are removi… Read More
2023-05-18 23:00
This week’s release adds improved support for ID3 COMM and TXXX fields.
Download
Download(Intel x86)… Read More
2023-05-04 23:00
The past couple of releases have contained work on the Windows app; this release concludes that work. We’ve also made some fixes to the cover art rule, the QNAP app and a few more bit… Read More
2023-04-27 23:00
That was the month that:
The world went AI mad (and it had a big impact on music).
Apple Music Classical got into its groove (as it were).
Thousands of good plans intentions to start t… Read More
2023-04-17 23:00
This release contains improvements to the Windows app - enabling copy/paste, disabling zooming and providing more diagnostic information in the event of a problem.
We also fixed a bug on t… Read More
2023-04-04 23:00
In this week’s build we’ve added an improved user interface to the fix-album button, increased throughput by working on parallelism of bliss’s tasks and fixed a bug which… Read More
2023-03-28 23:00
This month: streaming services; new ones, delayed ones and ones that are pulling tracks! And, if missing tracks from the middle of albums really annoys you, new self hosted music servers so… Read More
2023-03-14 00:00
This release introduces the Apple Silicon build into our regular release stream. Before, we continued to release the legacy x86 version of bliss for macOS. From now on, and for every releas… Read More
2023-02-17 00:00
This release includes some fine-tuning for the new fix-all progress page and the removal of Google Analytics from the app.
Download
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2023-01-27 00:00
Another new year for digital music! This month we cover DAP hardware news, ListenBrainz’s “Year in Music” event, and the long-awaited release of Windows versions for some… Read More
2023-01-27 00:00
This new build includes a big new improvement for the “fix-all” process. We’ve added a new, dedicated, page to communicate the progress-through and results-of batches of f… Read More
2022-11-24 00:00
A month to go before Christmas! But that doesn’t mean everyone’s downing tools in digital music land… This month, coverage on two major new product releases for self-ho… Read More
2022-11-08 00:00
We’re back! After a semi-enforced hiatus due to having to regenerate our macOS code signing certificate, a kindly user stepped to our aid and helped us expedite the generation of the… Read More
2022-10-26 23:00
This month I’ve been retweeting about our relationship with music - how this has changed with the mainstream adoption of streaming, and how we can get better at being listeners to mus… Read More
2022-10-18 23:00
Just a quick post today to explain why we’ve not cut any releases for a few weeks. I’m pretty frustrated!
bliss is released for multiple platforms and some of these releases… Read More
2022-09-29 23:00
This month there’s a couple of new human-powered musical curation sites, more in the mainstream press about self hosting music software and hardware, and more QNAP attacks.
Human c… Read More
2022-09-12 23:00
This very small release adds an improvement to the way errors are communicated when loading embedded artwork.
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2022-09-05 23:00
This release adds support for changing album art, even when the missing art rule is disabled. There are also some useful speed improvements for the Inbox and fixes for licencing… Read More
2022-08-24 23:00
This month, the importance of testing your backups, a lossless music acquisition system and more on streaming versus content control.
Streaming services and content control
Ever get the… Read More
2022-07-27 23:00
In this month’s edition: streaming growth, new music players and how music file management is changing in the latest Apple music app updates.
Streaming… the charts, growth… Read More
2022-07-20 23:00
This release includes improvements for the album art rule, the Inbox, more performance improvements and support for Java 16 and later on Linux.
Download… Read More
2022-06-07 23:00
In this release: a few fixes for the tag accuracy and missing tag rules, specifically around ALBUM ARTIST and YEAR fields.
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Download… Read More
2022-05-25 23:00
This month - a trip inside a songwriter’s mind, the death-of-the-iPod backlash and some interesting insights into how streaming’s playlist-oriented use is leading to some unexpe… Read More
2022-05-24 23:00
Roon is a music player optimised to make browing your library enjoyable. It shows your music library at its best, linking your library together and furnishing it with additional metadata to… Read More
2022-05-12 23:00
Normally Friday the 13th isn’t the day I’d choose to cut and release a new build but it turns out the last build wouldn’t even start on Synology DSM 7 so here we are&helli&helli…Read More
2022-05-10 23:00
Another couple of bug fixes in this release, affecting the Windows app and the album detail page.
Download
Download
Dow… Read More
2022-04-28 23:00
This is a very small release with just one bug fix - to keep our “cadence” we’re releasing it anyway!
Download
Download… Read More
2022-04-27 23:00
In this month’s issue, musical hardware modding, metadata edge cases and a bunch of ‘TIL’s.
Hardware modding
Hardware modding (creating new systems using flexible autom… Read More
2022-04-04 23:00
This release is the final one in our recent tranche of performance improvement releases. In this release we’ve made querying “lazier” (it’s better than it sounds!) a… Read More
2022-03-24 00:00
This month we’ve seen yet more innovation on software music players. Also: thoughts on streaming, both regards its impact on piracy and also its impact on music collecting.
Niche m… Read More
2022-03-21 00:00
A common feature request for bliss is to allow the organisation of compilation albums in different ways to other albums in the collection. I recently received one such request by email, ask… Read More
2022-03-09 00:00
The performance work continues in this release with big improvements to tag caching. After this release there will be one more release (I think) of further performance improvements… Read More
2022-02-25 00:00
This month’s news in digital music was dominated by the fallout of Neil Young’s removal from Spotify. Across social media it led to many exploring alternative ways to access mus… Read More
2022-02-24 00:00
We recently had a few reports from people using bliss to manage a music collection on their QNAP device. They reported that recent updates to QNAP firmware caused error messages to be shown… Read More
2022-02-23 00:00
This release, and the next, concentrates on performance improvements. There should be some quite significant improvements to performance, particularly around I/O - writing and reading from… Read More
2022-02-11 00:00
After I posted the latest monthly This Month in Digital Music Libraries update, I realised it would be interesting to review the stories that surfaced over the previous year, to see if ther… Read More
2022-02-08 00:00
We’ve made some improvements around “linked releases” in this version, plus some small performance improvements.
Download
Down… Read More
2022-01-27 00:00
The first month of 2022 has seen lots of discussion about streaming services and in whose interests their design is optimised; are playlists a good thing? Will they retain support for &ldqu&helli…Read More
2022-01-25 00:00
In this release: improved OneMusicAPI queries for albums with missing track numbers and a number of other small improvements.
Download
Download… Read More
2022-01-03 00:00
This release includes a long-requested feature to populate ALBUM ARTIST from existing tags. Plus: fixes to the way we query for information about multi-disc releases and an optimisation for… Read More
2021-12-23 00:00
Happy Christmas! This month’s roundup of self-stored music library news includes Synology DSM and Volumio updates, pointless influencer zaniness and library management in streaming se… Read More
2021-12-03 00:00
Never release on a Friday, they say…
In the past week or two I’ve been mostly working on finding an elegant way of implementing autocompletion of ALBUMARTIST from existing tag… Read More
2021-11-24 00:00
In this months edition: predictions for the future of music, enormous-but-slow backup media, Adele’s an album-gal and ludicrous patents.
Predictions for the future of music
An inte… Read More
2021-11-18 00:00
This release contains several improvements to the way we handle ID3v1 tags and any other tag schemes where some fields may be unsupported.
There’s also a fix for startup on Synology… Read More
2021-11-09 00:00
We’ve improved some elements of file scanning in this release, and a minor although important fix to changing tag type.
Download
Download… Read More
2021-10-25 23:00
This release has further improvements to the track number/name accuracy rules.
Download
Download
Download… Read More
2021-10-21 23:00
This month: things to consider for hi-fi beginners (in podcast form), music library obsessions, a new release for the QNAP NAS operating system and new developments in the Plex ecosystem… Read More
2021-10-07 23:00
This release improves track name and position assessment, particularly suggested track names and avoiding false positives.
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2021-09-21 23:00
In this month’s edition: stats on streaming, security issues with Synology NASes and musicians winding-up software developers.
Streaming - the state of play
First up, the Covid loc… Read More
2021-09-14 23:00
This release fixes a couple of problems around the new “ignore compliance” feature, and an issue in the file path rule. We also improved the reporting of errors when updating ta… Read More
2021-09-08 23:00
It’s almost two years since Music.app was launched on macOS devices and album artwork for self-stored music is still broken.
How can this be? We all know album art is important for p… Read More
2021-08-24 23:00
In August’s edition… mergers and acquisitions, YouTube Music messes up again, and a new self-hosting podcast!
Astiga acquired by… us!
bliss has always been about mana… Read More
2021-08-05 23:00
A big day for the bliss project - we have a new sister app!
Astiga is a music streaming service… but for your own music. With Astiga, you connect to your music library stored in clo… Read More
2021-08-03 23:00
A bit late this month!
July might be the time we all head off on our holidays, but it doesn’t mean time stands still in digital music collecting, self-storage and self-hosting. In th… Read More
2021-07-26 23:00
This is a small release, building on the last which introduced both “ignore compliance” and the Synology package repository. It fixes just one small but quite impactful bug… Read More
2021-07-20 23:00
This release adds our top voted feature: the ability to ignore aspects of the compliance for individual albums.
Also, with the release of DSM 7 for Synology NAS devices, we’ve create… Read More
2021-07-07 23:00
Occasionally we have a need for a way to share music around our home. Maybe you want to test a new device, like a smart TV or networked speakers. What you need is a dead simple way of shari… Read More
2021-06-24 23:00
In June’s update, rumours of a new iPod, detecting true audio quality and another incidence of metadata loss when using a cloud music locker.
It’s all “go”!
It… Read More
2021-06-15 23:00
This is a small release with another bit of work taking us toward “ignore compliance”. There’s also some improvement to file notification listening and the way rules are e… Read More
2021-06-09 23:00
Following my research into cloud music libraries and services I was contacted to ask about hosting bliss in the cloud. The idea was: you could upload your music and have bliss manage it, th… Read More
2021-06-02 23:00
This release includes the first work toward “ignore compliance”. There are also improvements to memory use, album grouping, display of current artwork and the cover art rule… Read More
2021-05-27 23:00
This month’s look back on the world of self stored, self hosted digital music libraries. In this edition: lots going on with Spotify, ripping vinyl at scale and a few resources includ… Read More
2021-05-25 23:00
Developing a software product in a solo, bootstrapped company is lonely. Feedback about the product is vital to development of the product but also to me personally.
Unlike a services busi… Read More
2021-05-18 23:00
Sunrise, sunset. Nothing remains forever, and especially not in the world of tech. Just as there are new cloud music lockers appearing at a steady rate, existing ones are deprecated and rep… Read More
2021-05-11 23:00
There’s mostly small improvements in this release. We collected a couple of issues relating to the use of ID3v1 tags, but other than that the fixes are all “miscellaneous”… Read More
2021-04-29 23:00
After last month’s hiatus TMIDML is back! This month: new additions to the cloud music series, fist shaking at Apple, UPnP security and free, classic radio broadcasts.
MediaLeap un… Read More
2021-04-27 23:00
This release sees the new Windows desktop app being promoted to be the default launcher for Windows. There’s also a few bug fixes!
Download… Read More
2021-04-12 23:00
Before Spotify and the streaming services appeared, there was much moral panic about the impact of P2P file sharing on the Internet and the impact on artists.
At about the same time, pluck… Read More
2021-04-07 23:00
Another small release, this time with improvements to file update notifications and various elements of the main home page (also called the Inbox).
Download… Read More
2021-03-30 23:00
Interoperability. That’s what it’s all about when you have a home music network. Sooner or later you’ll add a device - a new hi-fi, phone, car stereo, whatever… you… Read More
2021-03-25 00:00
A bunch more improvements in this release! We’ve changed the behaviour of Apply rules to also include a new filesystem scan. In addition, there are a few UI improvements, fixes to rul… Read More
2021-03-18 00:00
unRAID makes an ideal storage location for your music library. Using unRAID you can store your library, back it up and install different music apps to stream music around your home.
But if… Read More
2021-03-11 00:00
This is a maintenance release with a bunch of stuff fixed and improved.
Perhaps most importantly for those with many MP4 files: before we were not correctly closing file handles after scan… Read More
2021-03-04 00:00
Last year I blogged about four musical analysis podcasts I enjoy listening to.
Podcasts are still my favoured medium for this. But the video content behemoth YouTube is also a source of a… Read More
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