PowerTunes 1.0 is out!

Posted on July 9, 2008 by Brian Webster
Filed Under PowerTunes, News, Updates | Leave a Comment

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:

Create multiple iTunes libraries and switch between them easily
Keep track of a separate music folder for each one of your libraries
Let you copy playlists and tracks between libraries without losing iTunes data such as play counts, ratings, etc.
Merge multiple iTunes libraries together into one
Easily share libraries and music folders among multiple users on your machine
Find dead tracks in your library whose files have gone missing and hook them back up or delete them
Clean up your music folder, finding orphaned music and video files that aren’t in your library

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 PowerTunes, News, Updates | Leave a Comment

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.