Another release, another integration... this week, QNAP NASes get 'blissed up'.

bliss has been customised to run on a number of devices; not just desktop or laptop computers. NAS devices are being increasingly used to store music (and lots of other things else!). QNAP is another one of the major NAS manufacturers, and following some pioneering work I've rolled the QNAP build into the full, official bliss build.

I'm pleased to announce the availability of our official Synology package!

Since 'patters' first developed a third party package to get bliss running on Synology NASes, it has become a popular way of using bliss. bliss is especially suited to server-side usage because it can run in the background on the server, always there, ready for you to connect with a Web browser from anywhere on your network (or outside your network!).

So if you're sitting on your sofa listening to music and you notice a metadata error, or a some artwork you want to change, you can simply access bliss running on the NAS. You don't even need to get off the sofa!

So there's this thing called abstraction which is used a lot in computer science. It's a way of making a complex subject more understandable by hiding details of the underlying complexity, sometimes presenting the subject in entirely different ways.

I'm bringing it up because it's a topic in music library management that I think any collector should be aware of. The reason you need to be aware is that abstraction is not a free lunch.

My favoured way of maintaining a lossy library alongside a lossless one is to not have a lossy library. That's not a glib, snobbish comment on lossy libraries. Instead it's an expression of my usual solution: mp3fs.

mp3fs creates an "impersonation" of a lossy library by using a lossless one as its source. Sometimes though we can't have perfect solutions, and this only works on Linux, so what's a way of getting this to work for MacOS, say?

Mostly bug fixing in this new build...

The most commonly occurring bug fixed in this version is one relating to multi disc releases. In the previous build, we'd sometimes mix-up tracks from different discs. This fixes that issue. In the same area, we also fixed an issue where tracks have the same name.