Swinsian Version 1.9.0
The latest update to Swinsian brings several new features. Firstly support for publisher, total number of tracks and BPM tags has been added. To make the inspector more usable with the growing number of tags it is now possible to customize what fields are visible: click the gear icon in the top right of the inspector to hide or show fields and show the ones that are most important to you.
Gapless playback has also been improved. Playback of files of the same type and audio format (sample rate and bit depth) will now play back gaplessly automatically, without the need to tick the gapless check box. The check box is now hidden by default (although you can turn it on as described above) but still exists since it now enables a slightly more aggressive gapless playback mode. Gapless playback of audio files requires the software to know how much ‘extra’ silence has been added to the start and end of a file by the encoder. For some formats this is always zero but for others, like MP3, there will typically be some amount of padding that needs to be trimmed. Modern encoders will typically add this information to the file, where Swinsian can read it and use it for gapless playback. For files without this information Swinsian can also try and make a guess at the size of the padding by examining the actual audio data. This should typically not be needed and can be error prone so it isn’t enabled by default. However if you do notice files where gapless playback isn’t working correctly you can try enabling the gapless check box so that Swinsian will try and calculate the size of the padding if that information is not present in the file.
As usual there are also a number of bug fixes in the new release. Some long standing crashes when connecting iPods or iOS devices should be fixed by the new update, as well as a possible crash when fetching artwork on OS X 10.6. Other more minor bug fixes include issues with the position of the art grid divider being reset, problems with the find and replace window and problems reading the audio properties of some MP3 files.