Release 20141224 - search/filter tags page

Earlier than expected, a new release including some useful new improvements, such as filtering and searching the Tags page!

Why earlier than expected? Well, it's an administrative/accounting oversight that's partly my fault. It turns out a change to the way VAT must be charged for cross-border EU sales comes into force on 1st January.

Whilst this has been in the offing for some time, it has not been publicised well. In the UK, where we have a high nil-rate band, I lazily assumed it didn't apply to me until I found out, in mid December, it did apply! Cue some frantic research and work into making sure we comply...

The upshot is that for sales to other EU countries we must now collect two items of information to locate the resident so VAT can be charged at the correct rate. I have chosen to store the buyer's IP address and also their billing postal address. Both are collected at checkout, the latter must be inserted manually by the purchaser.

In terms of the VAT itself, I have chosen to swallow this cost for now in the hope that a nil rate band will be introduced for micro/small businesses like myself so that we avoid the administrative burden of this change.

Search/filter tags page

Anyway, onto the good stuff. The stand-out feature in this release is search/filter on the tags page. A new search field and button allows you to search for any value in any tag in all of your music files.

Search and filter tags

The way it works is that your search term is compared to all tags and if a file has a tag that contains the text you enter, that file is shown on the Tags page. Files without any tags that contain the search term are not shown.

It is not possible to constrain the search to certain tags, nor is it possible to perform any placed wildcard ('*' et al) searches. I thought we should see if a simple 'contains' search would be good enough for now.

Further improvements

Here are some extra improvements:

  • When missing art from a separate cover art file and the embedded artwork is non-compliant, fix both in two steps automatically (the latter first obviously).
  • Added some exceptions for common acronyms in the case rules.
  • Fixed page navigation when switching between compliance filters.
  • Be more restrictive about assigning tracks to the same album when one set of tracks has a compilation flag set.
  • Don't send disc number 'total' number when querying for cover art and tags, if it is in the DISCNUMBER field.
  • The whole file path is now shown in the untagged page.

Downloading and installing

You can download from the downloads page. After you click through, installation instructions are available on the page following download.

If you are updating from a version older than a month or two, in app update is not recommended for this release, because of a fixed Java 8 incompatibility which is only resolved with a full re-installation.

Thanks to Isabel Cortés Úbeda for the image above.
tags: release

The Music Library Management blog

Dan Gravell

I'm Dan, the founder and programmer of bliss. I write bliss to solve my own problems with my digital music collection.