eMusic/J 0.16

The new version is in the usual place.

Well, finally I put the major feature into eMusic/J that I was waiting for before I put out a new release: the drop directory thing. There are a bunch of other changes, and I’ll just put a narrated and abridged version of the changelog here.

• If a download fails 5 times, it won’t be automatically started again. This stops you constantly hammering the eMusic servers just because you have three tracks that are failing. The counter can be reset by forcing the track to start downloading.
• Refactored the display of extra information (in the info panel) to be much more general, to allow more things to be displayed. This affects (and effects!) the next two things.
• Album covers now show the cover when they are selected. A couple of people had pointed out to me that it was a little bit stupid how clicking the tracks showed the album cover, but clicking the actual album cover download didn’t. So now it does.
• Genre and duration now show for tracks in the info panel. There’s not actually a lot of extra info in the .emp files (I think things like the year would be nice), but these two are, and are now shown at the bottom.
• Added ‘undocumented’ option “noServer” to preferences. If the line:
  noServer=1
  is added to ~/.emusicj/emusicj.props then the client/server business won’t happen, which will lead to faster startup on the machines that it doesn’t work on. I’ve heard from one person that the part of the program that listens for another copy starting up doesn’t work, and it makes eMusic/J take quite a long time to start (as it goes through a large number of ports to try to find one that is free). Putting this option into the properties file will stop it even trying to start that part of the program up, making it faster. Not recommended unless a) starting eMusic/J is slow and b) you get the message Failed to start the server for listening just before the window comes up.
• Drop directory support now works. The program will monitor a specified directory and autoload any .emp files that end up in there. Finally! You can point eMusic/J to a directory (it’s in the preferences screen), and every 30 seconds it will check it. Any new .emp files it spots, it will start monitoring. If they don’t change for 30 seconds, it will load them, and then delete them. The business with the ‘if the don’t change’ is to stop it from trying to load one as it’s half downloaded. This is good for downloading music remotely (just copy the file into the directory on the remote machine, wait a bit, pick up the downloaded music), and to make it easier for the people for whom the server fails to start for listening. Instead, they can tell the browser to automatically save the files to that directory.

The other thing related to this is that I’ve set up Trac, which is a simple but effective project management system. So if there are bugs, feature requests or whatever, go here and report them. Makes things a bit better than just emailing me, as this way others can see them also.