News and announcements
No Time
Written for BeatBox by Scott Ringwelski on 2012-11-03
I'm sorry to say that BeatBox will not be seeing much attention from me at this point due to lack of time.
I've added elementary to the BeatBox team, which means they can merge, pull, push, whatever they want to the project. I've recommended that they merge parts of BeatBox. Its core and plugin API could be very useful to them, but whether or not that merge happens is up to them.
Thanks,
Scott
BeatBox 0.7
Written for BeatBox by Scott Ringwelski on 2012-10-13
This release brings big changes "under the hood", as well as a some visual changes.
The UI has been cleaned up a bit, going back the the original design in many places.
The preferences window has been revamped to include preferences for plugins as well as a more robust UI for general settings.
Along with these and other GUI changes, there were tons of changes under the hood. The entire app was refactored and cleaned up. This ensure that it is easy for other developers to work on BeatBox, makes regressions less likely to happen, speeds up the core, and allows for plugin support among other benefits. For more on this, please see the previous post on the refactor.
A few of the changes include:
*Plugin support
*DB upgrading, which means no longer having to delete your db for new versions.
*Better last.fm authentication
*Smart auto scroll to current song
*Fixed issue where list view became horizontally scrolled unnecessarily
*Gapless playback
*Much faster startup
*Multi-library management. Podcasts now are a truly separate library with a separate folder associated it.
Music Store Work
Written for BeatBox by Scott Ringwelski on 2012-10-11
The music store is something that has been long put on hold. I decided to take advantage of the new plugin system and do a little work on it. Posted are a few screenshots (still very much a work in progress).
Note that the plugin is not available to use, as 7digital limits the number of queries allowed by the BeatBox application as a non-premium API user, and I need those queries for development.
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Coming soon will be a 0.7 release, and then I will be looking for somebody to take over the project as I can no longer support it.
-Scott
Major Refactoring
Written for BeatBox by Scott Ringwelski on 2012-09-20
For a couple of weeks now, I've been working on a (much needed) refactoring of BeatBox. BeatBox started as a small project and over time grew bigger than it ever meant to be, and this lead to pretty sloppy code that needed to be cleaned up. Lots of changes will not be noticed externally, but internally the following has changed:
*Better separation of code.
*Code is now split up into the core and beatbox itself. The core is like the API/Beans. It contains interfaces and simple beans (objects) that plugins can use. Beatbox itself provides implementations for these interfaces and beans. The major interfaces on the BeatBox app object are:
plugins
library
playlists
podcast
database
window
files
operations
playback
covers
actions
icons
info
settings
devices
These interfaces are ready to be used - BeatBox itself already uses them and so are already well tested.
*Plugins are now supported. Plugins have access to any of the above interfaces, plus a few more.
*Better multi-library management. Libraries (Music library, Podcast library) are now fully broken up (each points to there own folders, import media differently, etc.). Adding new libraries is easy and even plugins can do it.
*Automatic database upgrades. Users no longer have to wipe their database because of a schema change.
*Operations, playback, covers, icons, and devices interface are new interfaces that focus on one part of the overall app and do it well.
*The info interface, which is also new, is of particular interest. The info interface lets plugins aggregate data to contribute to BeatBox's info database. For example, someone might write a plugin to query 'songmeanings.com' to contribute to track data. That data is then made available for other plugins to use. One area that it is already used is the Song Info view. Plugins can add sections to that view (based on the current media's media type (song, podcast, audiobook)) using the info provided by other plugins.
*Many, many more changes
Unfortunately, with all these big changes come regressions. Any regressions you may find should be reported as a bug.
I hope to have the PPA updated soon.
BeatBox 0.6
Written for BeatBox by Scott Ringwelski on 2012-08-10
Only two months since 0.5, 0.6, or "Dear Rosemary", is now ready. While there are new features and changes in this release, a lot of this release involves code clean up, bug fixes, and stability improvements.
Some of the new noticeable features are:
*Shuffle is no longer visual.
*New top display UI.
*Closing while playing hides the window, and a new exit app menu option allows you to force close the app.
*Can now be set as default music player
*Faster startup time
*Option to eject devices from sidebar
*Nicer album view popup
*Sidebar inline toolbar
I'd like to thank some of the Noise developers for their help on a few things, such as the nice album view popup.
As usual, if you find any bugs please report them.
