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- BeatBox 0.3 Release Notes
BeatBox 0.3 Release Notes
Submitted by cassidyjames on Wed, 02/01/2012 - 20:08Album View
The 0.3 update brings an improved album view to BeatBox, sporting prettier album covers that utilize native GTK rather than a WebKit view. This means it's more accessible and easier to integrate with the rest of the app. The update also brings a new album popup view for quicker and lighter-weight viewing of an album's songs.
Speed
There was a lot of focus on speed for this release, and it shows pretty much everywhere. Everything is a bit snappier, but specifically the list and album views improved most noticeably.
Podcasts
BeatBox is now able to download, play, and sync podcasts in addition to music. Podcasts can be entered in the form of a standard podcast feed (RSS). Store integration is planned for a future release.
iPod Sync
BeatBox is now able to sync up to many Apple iPod (and related) devices, utilizing the libgpod library. You can choose what to sync from your music and podcasts (you can choose a playlist or "all" for each) and see a pretty overview of your device's storage. It supports everything libgpod supports, meaning right now it can handle many iPods and pre-iOS 4 devices.
Internet Radio
In addition to podcasts, BeatBox can now play streaming Internet radio. Currently the user can import a station from a .pls (Shoutcast playlist) or .m3u file. As with podcasts, integration with a "store" is planned for a future release.
Playlist Import/Export
With this release, users are now able to import playlists to and export playlists from BeatBox. It uses the standard .pls and .m3u formats, meaning compatibility with virtually every other music player out there.
Other Notable Improvements
In addition to the above updates, BeatBox has gotten a few smaller but still nice updates. First off, the first-run experience has been cleaned up a bit with more helpful options (and actually allows you to listen to non-library sources with no files in your library). BeatBox also now reads the album artist, composer, and disc number from songs, and it supports fetching and displaying lyrics.
Could iTunes locate BeatBox over a network for music syncing? just wondering. This may have already been answered. I just didn't read it.
Do you mean for BeatBox to locate iTunes? This would not work.
May I ask, if we can get it to tell devices it's iTunes, would it be able to sync with iOS4 and 5?
Unfortunately, it is not that easy. It requires lots of reverse engineering. BeatBox depends on a library to do this (libgpod and libimobiledevice).
I'm curious and this may have been answered already, but here is my question:
Will there be a way to rate songs? This is critical to me and a reason I went back to windows last time when briefly trying linux.
Yes sir, this is already implemented :)
Hey, I know this is rather elementary (forgive my pun) but I'd love to see more screenshots in the journal posts, especially ones like this where I could see these new functions in action - Album view, iPod sync, etc. I just miss being able to visually join in, as I am not the one to usually compile the latest build, or subscribe to the PPAs, as I'm actually waiting for the Luna release to replace Ubuntu. Just a thought though! :)
Agreed.
Hey guys, could you maybe upload some screenshots so people can see new improvements or changes?
Cheerz
/Nookie
Do you guys plan on cleaning up the toolbar? Imo, everything seems really clumped together
Personally, I don't have much of a problem with the toolbar. What did you have in mind/find cluttered about it?
I dunno. Possibly increasing the space between the widgets would be nice. Maybe moving the view widget to the left of the search bar as well.
Will the new version be backported all the way to Natty?
In fact what prompted me to move from Jupiter to Natty was the fact that BeatBox is unsupported for 10.10.
You could try compiling from source.
It works with the .deb file if you add the nemequ/sqlheavy ppa, the unico engine from the webupd8team/themes ppa, a gtk3.0 (not 3.2) theme, and granite from the elementaryart/unstable-upstream ppa.
As long as it's better than Banshee, I'm in.
I dont waiting for luna :) İt's very good.
Nice avatar ;)
Is there a place where I can go to get help installing BeatBox? I just reinstalled ubuntu after being on a 6 month-new-computer-hiatus, and the PPAs are not satisfying one of the dependencies for it :(
Yes, you also need this PPA: https://launchpad.net/~nemequ/+archive/sqlheavy
Hey, thanks for the response. Unfortunately, I've already added that PPA, and it hasn't made any difference. Terminal tells me: "The following packages have unmet dependencies: BeatBox : Depends: libgranite0 but it is not installable".
Thanks for any help I get here, I realize this isn't a help forum, but everyone else that has had this same issue hasn't had luck figuring out how to fix it anywhere else., so I figured that I would come straight to this site. Everywhere else just says to install the sqlheavy PPA, ,which apparently hasn't fixed the issue for anyone who can't resolve the libgranite0 dependency.
You also need elementary os daily PPA at https://launchpad.net/~elementary-os/+archive/daily
The interface is quite good, clean and simple, but two things I really disliked was that there's not, a now playing playlist (can be emulated though, make one with that name and always play it :P); and also when you close the window it really closes the application (rather counterintuitive for a music player).
There's a blueprint about music in background: https://blueprints.launchpad.net/beat-box/+spec/music-in-bg
Ooo looks sweet :) any chance of audiobook support similar to what iTunes offers? Pretty please? :)
Why not make a video showcasing the new features? Like the OMGUbuntu ones.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QQSpNMXdjP4
Here you are - I'll be doing more videos in the future on things like this.
Not enough press manpower here. Volunteers welcome.
Agree with you
Great news. I like to use it again :)
But I had problems to figure out how to import Radiostations (Secondary click at "Internetradio"). Maybe there is a better way, or at least a hint where to import .pls or .m3u files? ;)
The current version shows a text explaining how to add them
Nice music player. Why didn't you use libimobiledevice? It has a bigger list of supported devices.
You have libimobiledevice and libgpod confused. libimobiledevice is for iOS devices. Therefore, libgpod uses libimobiledevice for iOS devices and its own code for other ipod models. BeatBox uses libgpod.
For the "doing one thing well" approach I'd leave out the iPod stuff. You're not going to recreate the iTunes experience with libgpod.
Is there an genre / artist / album filter ?
thanks
Yes there is :)
you're great , thanks a lot!!!
Like the overlay for the songs of an album. Two things to consider:
(1) make it autoclose as soon the user clicks on another UI element of beatbox
(2) the window should not appear as separate window in the window manager. Maybe make it a modal dialog?
Improvements are really great, and soon will be tested, however I think there are 2 core features any listening oriented player should have:
1. Not to overconsume resources during big library updates (so far out of popular players only Clementine manages to do that)
2. Be able recognize various artist albums as albums (this is especially important if we go further than spreadsheet like players). In this field only Mutagen works the way one could expect.
Two apps that I think you guys could take inspiration from are Sonora and Enqueue. They both have their own share of unique ideas but keep the app minimal and lean, just the way BeatBox should be.
http://getsonora.com/
http://www.enqueueapp.com/
I particularly like the way Sonora has the artist list taking up (almost) the whole height. For large libraries this is the only way to easily browse through the whole lot if you do not already know what you are looking for.
Sonora seems such a beautiful app... and I agree with the fact that your music should not look like a spreadsheet
They're all the same. I don't like how they look. BeatBox is a way more cleaner and cooler than these weirdo-iTunes-like.
"Your music should not look like a spreadsheet." I couldn't agree more. Good find.
This seems great, but - and I'm really just asking, I swear; it's something I feel must always be asked - how many features are too many? Music players are among the worst when it comes to "feature bloat"; remember the "doing one thing well" approach.
I fully agree. One thing we might want to consider going forward is to split out extra functionality into plugins in order to keep the core super clean and stable. We'll have to talk to Scott about it and see how he feels :)
Excelente... :) Esperando que se actualice en el elementary OS Daily PPA