PowerTunes 1.1.1, now compatible with iTunes 9

Posted on September 18, 2009 by Brian Webster
Filed Under News, PowerTunes, Updates, iTunes | Comments Off

PowerTunes 1.1.1 was released today, which now provides full compatibility with iTunes 9, along with a couple other miscellaneous bug fixes. The main points of improvement in working with iTunes 9 are:

So, if you have any older version of PowerTunes and have iTunes 9, I highly recommend using the “Check For Updates” menu item to update to the latest version.

PowerTunes compatibility with iTunes 9

Posted on September 9, 2009 by Brian Webster
Filed Under News, PowerTunes, iTunes | Comments Off

Apple released a new version of iTunes today, version 9.0, which adds several major new features to iTunes. Some of the changes in the new version will cause several features of PowerTunes not to work properly with iTunes 9.0 installed. The affected features are:

An update for PowerTunes will be published soon that will address the issues listed above. Preliminary testing indicates that all other features of PowerTunes work normally with iTunes 9, so you can continue to switch between your libraries, create new libraries, find orphaned tracks, and so forth using the current version of PowerTunes (1.1). If you do experience any problems with PowerTunes 1.1 and iTunes 9.0, please use the “Contact Support” menu item in the Help menu, or e-mail support@fatcatsoftware.com

You can check the “Automatically check for updates” checkbox in the PowerTunes preferences window to be notified when the update is made available, and/or keep an eye on this blog for further postings.

Snow Leopard compatibility

Posted on August 25, 2009 by Brian Webster
Filed Under News, PlistEdit Pro, PowerTunes, Updates, iPhoto Library Manager | Comments Off

Since Apple announced yesterday that they are releasing Snow Leopard on the 28th, I thought I’d post a quick note about the compatibility status of our products. I’ve run all of them through a thorough testing suite over the last few weeks to try and find any potential compatibility problems.

iPhoto Library Manager

Updated 9/16/09: A handful of users reported crashes when attempting to copy photos on Snow Leopard using iPhoto Library Manager 3.5.3. The cause of this bug has been found and fixed in iPhoto Library Manager 3.5.4.

PowerTunes

There are no known issues with Snow Leopard for the current version (1.1) of PowerTunes.

PlistEdit Pro

Only one issue was found in version 1.4.1 when running on Snow Leopard, but it was a fairly large one: plist files would not open in PlistEdit Pro when double clicking them from the Finder (the “Open” item in the File menu still worked properly). I just posted version 1.4.2 of PlistEdit Pro today, which fixes this problem, so if you encounter this issue, just use the “Check For Updates” menu item to update to 1.4.2.

I do my best to find any issues before an OS X update is released, but if you have any problems upon upgrading to Snow Leopard, please e-mail support@fatcatsoftware.com with a description of your problem, and we’ll try to get things figured out ASAP.

PowerTunes 1.0.2 released

Posted on December 9, 2008 by Brian Webster
Filed Under News, PowerTunes, Updates | 1 Comment

A new update to PowerTunes is finally ready today, PowerTunes 1.0.2. I’ve been wanting to get this out for a while, but Stuff™ (such as preparing to move across the country in about a month) has kept getting in the way. It’s mainly a bug fix release, with several updates for working more smoothly with iTunes 8. There were no major bugs with iTunes 8, just a few things that were either cosmetically wrong, or obscure bugs that cropped up with just the right combination of settings (mostly having to do with the new Genius playlist). You can check out the release notes for the full list of changes.

One thing that is not in the update, which a few people have asked about, is support for managing iPhone applications using PowerTunes. Unfortunately, this is not a simple matter, because as of iTunes 8.0.2, Apple does not provide any mechanism for accessing the list of iPhone applications that are in a given iTunes library. I’ve even filed enhancement requests for this, but suffice it to say, I’m not confident that Apple will be adding this functionality anytime in the near future. So for now, managing iPhone applications will have to be done manually, I’m afraid. I will be looking into other ways of assisting with this in upcoming releases though. And feel free to (politely) bug Apple for this functionality for me if you feel like it. :-)

PowerTunes 1.0 is out!

Posted on July 9, 2008 by Brian Webster
Filed Under News, PowerTunes, Updates | 2 Comments

I’m proud to announce that today I’m releasing a brand new application, PowerTunes! PowerTunes is to iTunes what iPhoto Library Manager is to iPhoto – it will let you:

It’s very satisfying to finally ship, especially after having worked on PowerTunes in one form or another for about a year and a half now. It’s been my number one request from existing users of iPhoto Library Manager and it’s been something I’ve wanted to do for quite a while.

As is always the case, I had way more feature ideas than I could possibly hope to implement in a 1.0 release (otherwise it would never ship!). In deciding the feature set for the program, I tried to concentrate on things relating to file management. There are plenty of things I could have done involving messing around with editing tags and such, which is a very common need, but is also already covered by a lot of other apps out there. My hope is that PowerTunes’ feature set is unique enough to be useful to many iTunes users, even if they already have one or more other iTunes helper programs.

The development process was, as always, enlightening, and I definitely plan to write up a couple blog posts exploring some aspects of developing this program. The most interesting thing overall is the program’s similarity in function to iPhoto Library Manager. This allowed me to reuse a bunch of code from iPLM, but it also gave me the opportunity to look back at the way I did some things in iPLM and reimplement them in new, better ways. The result of that is now giving me an overwhelming urge to tear up iPLM’s internals and redo it to match the way things work in PowerTunes. :)

So, go ahead and give PowerTunes a try! The program has a 30 day trial period during which all features of the application are fully accessible. After that, you’ll still be able to do the most basic things like open up your existing libraries, but most of the advanced functionality will be turned off until you get a license for the software.

And in case you’re wondering why I chose the name “PowerTunes” instead of, say, “iTunes Library Manager”, the answer is a) there is already a product with that name, and b) I learned my lesson with iPhoto Library Manager, whose name is really way too long. I mean come on – 9 syllables? What was I thinking? :)

Announcing PowerTunes private beta

Posted on April 23, 2008 by Brian Webster
Filed Under News, PowerTunes, Updates | Comments Off

You may have noticed things have been a bit quiet around here lately. The biggest reason for that is that I’ve been working on a brand new product for the last several months, called PowerTunes. The number one request I get from people who use iPhoto Library Manager is to have a similar program that lets you have multiple iTunes libraries. I’ve wanted to do this for a while, and finally started development on PowerTunes last year, in parallel with continuing work on iPhoto Library Manager and PlistEdit Pro. Today, it’s getting close to being ready to release, but I still need to do some further testing on it, so I’ve decided to run a (hopefully short) private beta to help work out any remaining kinks.

The basic idea behind PowerTunes is quite similar to iPhoto Library Manager: instead of just having one monolithic iTunes library where you dump all your music and video, you can instead split your stuff up among multiple libraries and switch between them. This can be useful for simple organizational purposes, and can allow you to do things such as allow multiple people to keep separate iTunes collections (and sync them with their respective iPods) without having to go through the hassle of setting up multiple user accounts to do so.

Like iPhoto Library Manager, not only does PowerTunes let you set up multiple libraries, but it also offers additional features that let you copy music and playlists between libraries, organize multiple music folders, clean out unwanted files from your music folder, fix dead tracks in your library, and much more.

iTunes 7 actually added for the first time the ability to place your iTunes library file in a different location from the default location by holding down the option key when you launch iTunes, just the same as you can in iPhoto (previously, the only way you could shift your iTunes library location was by using aliases and such). PowerTunes actually utilizes this mechanism itself, and thus requires iTunes 7 or later. Unlike iTunes, PowerTunes also ties each library to a particular music folder, so if you have music stored in separate places, it will switch the music folder location along with the library location when you change back and forth.

The main reason for want to have some other testers before a final release is that there are many possible ways one could go about setting up their iTunes libraries and music folders, including putting stuff on external hard drives, accessing stuff over file sharing or an Airport Disk, and so on. I’ve tested as much of this as I can, but there will always be setups I either can’t test or haven’t even thought of.

So, if you’re interested in helping to test PowerTunes, I’ve set up a form that you can fill out to sign up for the beta. I don’t know how many testers I’ll need or how long the testing period will take at this point. If everything works fine, it could be as brief as a couple weeks, or it could take longer if more things need fixing. So, depending on how many testers I need, not all those who signup will necessarily become testers.

Like I said before, I’ve done a lot of testing so far, but the possibility of bugs occurring still remains, so all testers will be encouraged to back up their iTunes library and music, just in case. Those who do help in testing will get a free PowerTunes license and the thrill that comes from running beta software. :-)

So, if you’re interested, head on over to the signup form and sign up to be a beta tester. Oh, and I almost forgot, a couple obligatory screenshots. :-)


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