I think for my own sanity I really should either setup a Mastodon filter to mute all the Anti-AI brigade, or just dust off the block button.

I'm not a great fan of promoting stuff, but my open source macOS music and podcast player's improved a lot since May.

Check it out at https://github.com/bocan/bocan-music

Big new areas:

Metal visualizers: (1.10, 14 Jun). All visualizers now draw on the GPU. Six modes ship: Spectrum Bars, Oscilloscope, Cascade, Halo, Starfield, Nebula. Mode and palette steppers live inside the visualizer.

Trackpad haptics for love, rating, seek and volume.

Podcasts: (1.11, 21 Jun). Subscriptions, search via iTunes and Podcast Index, downloads, transcripts, show notes, chapters, skip intervals, OPML import and export, per-show speed and retention, funding links and person credits. Later releases added podroll recommendations (1.12), a Show Notes button in the player bar (1.12), a Continue Listening rail (2.9), and episode artwork in Now Playing (2.11).

Phone Sync and the Android companion: (2.0, 12 Jul). Pairing code, mutual TLS, Bonjour discovery, and a Phone Sync settings pane. Podcast artwork sync came in 2.1. Transcode to MP3 or Opus on the way to the phone, with storage estimates and a progress line, came in 2.13 just today! I'm still trying to get the Android app onto Google Play

Library Summary: (2.5, 4 Aug). Tools menu, six tabs: collection shape, audio quality with suspected transcodes, library hygiene, listening behaviour, listening time heatmap, and podcasts. Last.fm listening-history import and an Analyse Provenance batch job feed it.

Internet Radio: (2.6, 8 Aug). Radio section in the sidebar. Add a stream by hand or from an m3u or pls link. Live song titles from the stream. Stream details sheet with codec, sample rate and bitrate. Auto reconnect. A starter pack of twelve stations. Next and previous step through stations (2.7). Ogg Vorbis and Opus stream titles (2.8).

CUE sheets as in-track markers: (2.8, 17 Aug). A true single-file CD rip shows markers in the player bar. Next and previous move between the tracks. Playlist-style CUE files are ignored.

Deep Dive: (2.11, 29 Aug). "Get Info" gains a report tab built from MusicBrainz and Wikipedia for artists, albums and songs. Artists get their own Get Info. Off by default, in Settings > Library. Name matching when files have no MusicBrainz tags and Save to Tags came in 2.12.

Browsing and navigation:

Scroll position restore and sort choosers on all browse lists and grids (1.14, 1.15).

Play Album and View Album split in the album grid (1.14). Double-click a cover plays it in place (2.4).

Card-grid view mode for Artists, Genres and Composers, plus a View menu (2.3).

Type-to-search from any view (2.4). Search now filters every view, including Genres, Composers, Radio and Podcasts (2.10). Search also understands release years and months (2.12).

Mouse back and forward buttons walk history. Esc drills out one level at a time (2.6, 2.10). Back and forward restore the search filter you left (2.9).

- Artists list filter to album artists only (2.4).

Playlists and metadata:

Smart playlist multi-key sort with clickable headers. Manual playlists can sort by column and snap back to your order (2.2).

Compilations without an Album Artist tag now group under Various Artists (2.2).

Metadata editor fixes: cover art replaces existing art, lyrics embed to disk, stored lyrics show in Get Info. Identify Track gains a release picker (1.16).

Shuffle-exclusion toggle in the track context menu. Sidecar cover art picked up on scan (2.8).

Library data kept from tags: artist sort names, MusicBrainz ids, release types, disc totals, musical key. Full rescan keeps ReplayGain and skip counts (2.11).

Other notable items:

A new app icon with light and dark appearances (1.17).

In-app updates fixed for macOS 15. Users on Sequoia had been told they were up to date since the first release (2.6.1). That one was embarassing. As I purposely don't track people, I have no idea how many that hit. :-(

Settings > Advanced buttons Rebuild Full-Text Search Index and Export Diagnostics now work (2.9).

Accessibility identifiers are complete across the whole UI (2.7). I've worked HARD on accessibility.

#music #swift #android #macos #opensource