After much testing and development, Tangerine! 1.2 is finally out the door. As mentioned in the previous post, the big new feature is its ability to analyze DRMed files from the iTunes Store.
While I am giddy like a schoolgirl that the iTunes Store is finally offering DRM free songs, the irony of the timing has not escaped me. However, I am sure that a lot of you Tangerine! users out there will still have DRMed songs in your library for a while yet, so this should be a welcome feature.
A new minor change with this version is better sorting of songs. I'm not sure if many of you know this, but iTunes ignores the word "The" when it sorts songs by album, artist, or title. It's these small, almost invisible details that make the Mac platform shine. We really should have had this in Tangerine! from day 1, but it's better late than never. As a bonus, when you sort by album, Tangerine! will now sort the songs in the same album by disc and track number as well, just like iTunes.
One thing that delayed the release of this update was the new iTunes 7.2. Tangerine! communicates with iTunes using a framework called EyeTunes by Alastair Tse, which in turn, uses Carbon Events. The latest update of iTunes broke API compatibility—for a good reason too—but it meant that some features of Tangerine! got broken overnight. The new release takes care of those issues, so if you find that saving BPMs to iTunes isn't working, you need to upgrade to the latest version. A big thank you to Alastair for being on the ball with the update to EyeTunes.
I also need to point out that much credit goes to Jonathan 'Wolf' Rentzsch who developed mach_star and to Bertrand Guihéneuf who ported it to Intel. While I'm not going to spill the beans on all the secrets behind the voodoo magic of getting samples from protected songs, it would have been very hard without the help of mach_star and the work of its contributors.
So, download it, fire it up, and analyze those protected songs to bits.
As usual, it's a free update, so get it now if you already purchased it. If you haven't yet, you can pick it up from our store.
Comments
Congrats on the new release! Any chance of revealing how you communicate with iTunes without EyeTunes? :D
Thanks Eamon. I'm not sure if it was unclear from the blog post, but I mentioned that Tangerine! uses EyeTunes. If you want iTunes 7.2 compatibility get the latest copy from subversion. iTunes 7.2 support is still a little rough, but it works well enough for me and Tangerine!.
I also want to congratulate on the new release! I will try to use Tangerine on my new project. Keep up the great work. Greetings
This is very nice work, but I'm finding a few problems:
All of these are on a G4 single processor Mac with a gig of RAM, working from a firewire disk. I have the latest versions of OS X 10.4.9 and iTunes, and an M-Audio Firewire Solo interface attached.
i) Very slow on G4 Macs with restricted memory
I'm finding that my 40 track playlist containing a mixture of protected and unprotected AAC, mp3 and FLAC files is very, very slow to process. It's taken about half an hour so far; ETA for the rest of my library is about two days.
ii) Processing thread stops sometimes on iTunes purchased tracks
To get it to unstick the queue I have to pause and unpause it. It leaves -1 in the BPM field after this.
iii) (a bit odd, this one) tapping BPM doesn't work across Apple Remote Desktop
My music player machine doesn't have a keyboard (it does have a monitor), but controlling it across VNC doesn't seem to work well with the BPM tapping box. The keyevents seem to get bunched up, leading to very high or very low scores.
iv) M-Audio Firewire Solo driver doesn't seem to like the metronome
It doesn't play the metronome sounds while a track is playing; it plays them all in one big lump at the end, before starting the next track.
Can you help? :-)
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