A little background music (organisation!)

A few users and customers have said how they like how bliss runs in the background:

[bliss] grabs album covers for your music collection, and it does it automatically, it does it in the background, it does it with a Web interface and it's very cool if you happen to run a Squeezebox or keep your music collection on a large hard drive. I think it's a great tool. [...] The user interface through the Web GUI is great. If you want album art, it's the best way of getting it.
Graham Morrison, Tux Radar podcast season 2 episode 3

This is a big difference between bliss and other album art and music management tools. Most digital music users are familiar with using taggers to organise their music. Once you close the tagger user interface, the software stops working. bliss works independently and its user interface is accessed via a Web browser like Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari or Chrome. You can even access the UI on an iPad or iPhone. Close the browser, and bliss keeps on managing your music.

Hard Work

There are a few reasons for doing it this way.

  • Reason #1. bliss is aimed at large music collections. They take a long time to process and fix, so bliss gets on with its work in the background, trying hard not to bother you.
  • Reason #2. bliss aims to organise music automatically. It notices when your music files change, or music files are added, and assesses and fixes them according to your rules. So, in many cases, there's little need for a user interface.
  • Reason #3. bliss is designed for home servers that are left on for long periods and don't have a monitor attached. Having a conventional desktop user interface is pointless if there's no monitor to display it on!

So that is why bliss runs in the background.

tags: bliss

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.