General FAQs

Does bliss just manage album art or does it have more music management functionality?

bliss is intended to become a generalised music organiser, but right now only deals with album art and file/folder organisation. You can influence the priority of new functionality by voting on the feedback forum.

What's all this compliant and uncompliant nonsense?

bliss works by assessing your music against your rules. Your music is uncompliant if it breaks these rules. If it passes the rules, it's compliant. In many situations bliss knows the steps required to make uncompliant music compliant again, and so it performs the work automatically.

Example: if you enable the album art rule with embedded art you are declaring "I want all of my music to have embedded art". So, if bliss sees an album without art embedded in all of its tracks it will embed it, either from an existing file if you have one or from art found on the Web.

How large a music library does bliss support?

Theoretically, infinite. Realistically, it's bound by the size of your storage (hard disks or solid state drives). When bliss scans your music collection, it stores information about the collection on disk.

Customers and users commonly report running with around three thousand albums. Our stress tests run bliss against nine thousand. As bliss is aimed at large music libraries, I'm always keen to hear your experiences in this regard so contact me.

What file formats does bliss support?

bliss concentrates on the tags contained in music files. Different types of music files are encoded in different ways. The formats supported by bliss are:

It seems to run a little slow... any way to speed it up?

If you are running anti-virus software, it may be worth trying to disable it for a short period to see if it helps. I wouldn't normally suggest this, but this slowdown has been reported before and confirmed in our own testing labs. I've scheduled work for the future to improve performance when running alongside anti-virus software. The reason the slowdown occurs is that anti-virus software adds another 'layer' between bliss and your music files, acting as a middleman as music files are read and written to. This makes bliss take longer to do its job.

Another reason can be if bliss is accessing your music files over a slow network. Wi-fi networks, despite making advances in speeds, are still much slower and less reliable than wired networks. If you are using a wireless network, try with a wired network to see if you get any improvement.

Why doesn't bliss work with Mac OS X versions prior to Snow Leopard?

Actually... it does. bliss, in theory, runs on Mac OS X 10.5.x and later. The reason only Snow Leopard (10.6.x) is mentioned is because we have no test machines that run 10.5.x and so don't feel we can really support it. Do try it and let us know how you get on!

Do you offer support?

Not of the emotional kind. However, my email inbox is always open for questions about bliss and digital music management. If you are reporting a problem with bliss, please follow the reporting guidelines. It means I can solve the problem quicker, and you can get on with your life sooner.

The layout of the web UI seems a little screwed up, is my browser supported?

The following browsers are currently supported:

If you have one of the supported browsers and the layout seems wrong, try clearing your browser cache and refreshing your page. If you have upgraded bliss then sometimes the browser will re-use an old version of bliss's UI layouts. Alternatively, try playing with your font sizes. If it's still wrong, report the issue.

Some album names are mangled and I can't click on them

If you use software with profanity filters (such as Net Nanny) some album or artist names may be altered. Unfortunately, the links to the album or artist detail pages are also changed. Because these links are changed, bliss cannot work out which album you wanted to view. The workaround is to disable the profanity filter, or at least exclude bliss from its clutches.

Any other FAQs I forgot or clarifications required? Post your ideas below!

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