Swinsian 1.6 Preview

A preview build of Swinsian 1.6.0 is now available for people who would like to help test the new release. This release includes some substantial rewrites (the library is now stored in a different format) but most of the interface is unchanged. The improvements should be noticeable in a few areas, firstly app launch is about twice as fast now (from about 3.8 seconds down to about 1.8 seconds for a library of 15k tracks). Secondly, memory use is lower. Idle memory use (Real Mem/RSIZE) is about 20% lower, depending on how large your library is (from about 102MB to about 83MB for a library of 15k tracks). Memory use when importing tracks is also substantially lower, which was one of the motivations for the rewrite.

There are also fixes for a couple of rare crashes, dozens of other bug fixes, and several other minor improvements. There are some new features for the desktop artwork too but I’ll explain those in a later post.

Please let me know about any issues you encounter or feedback you have. Your old library file will not be changed by running the new version, but any new tracks you import won’t show up if you switch back to 1.5.8.

Full change list:

• Lowers idle memory use.
• Improves launch times.
• Significantly lowers memory use when importing files.
• Adds compatibility with Apple Remotes.
• Includes new table columns for file name, file type and comments tags.
• Comment tags can now be edited and searched.
• Fixes problems with desktop artwork when changing spaces.
• Desktop artwork themes can now contain control buttons.
• Adds an option to group compilations in the browser.
• Improves automatic sample rate switching.
• Fixes rare crashes when fetching art for tracks.
• Includes various minor performance enhancements when sorting and searching.
• Includes updated version of Growl.
• Fixes many other minor bugs.