Over the past few months I've been looking at various in-car entertainment systems and how they display album art. This week it's the turn of Porsche's PCM system. But this post is a little different to previous ones; because it doesn't appear that a full understanding of the constraints of PCM's handling of album art has been discovered.

A lot to get through this week, this update is a big 'un!

The main work in this release relates to the previously announced change to licencing. From now on, bliss licences will work indefinitely but will only work on versions of bliss released up to one year after licence installation. You will be able to purchase a lower priced licence to unlock another year's updates (currently this is expected to cost £9).

A good proportion of the emails I receive to the blisshq inbox relate to how to deal with what I call "walled gardens". What I mean by this are the abstractions added by music players which are kept inside the player only, and not stored in the music library itself.

Examples are album artwork that is displayed when using the app, but copying the files elsewhere doesn't copy the art. Or where you have changed, say, the release date for an album, but that isn't propogated into your music library.

It's time for an update to how bliss is licenced, and charged for. I don't do this easily; I've made two changes (to decrease the number of trial fixes, and to decrease the number of the top-up fixes) in the history of the bliss project, and the last one was over two years ago.

TL;DR: bliss will move to charging a yearly renewal fee to allow new licences to continue to work on new versions of bliss. Current customers are unaffected. But please read on and let me know your opinion...

Here's another small release for bliss. Today I moved the blisshq.com site to HTTPS. Despite the fact that human browsers of the site get automatically redirected from HTTP to HTTPS, It turns out that there was some code inside bliss which wasn't getting redirected, so I've rushed out a quick fix to address that.