Swinsian 2.1

Version 2.1 of Swinsian is now available to download. There are several new features as well as some improvements to the interface. It’s now possible to make Swinsian automatically select the currently playing track by enabling “Automatically Select Playing Track” in the Navigate menu. It’s also now easier to change the field shown in each browser column; right click the top row to select a different type for that column.

The option to split a genre into several values in the genre browser column (so that a track with the genre “Pop, Rock” will show up under “Pop” and “Rock”) has been extended to the artist field as well. It’s now possible to change the character used to split the field from a comma to a slash.

The layout of the track table when the art column is visible and the “Show Every Album in Album Art Column” option is enabled has been improved. The height for each album is now adjusted to save space when an album only contains a few tracks and the art column has been made narrow. It’s also now possible to hide the album and artist labels in the art column for a cleaner appearance.

The update also contains many bug fixes. For a full list of changes see the change notes.

What’s New in Swinsian 2

The latest version of Swinsian adds some significant new features as well as many improvements to the interface. It’s now possible to adjust the audio output using the built in graphical equalizer. The interface allows for more customisation in the way your music is displayed and support for peripherals has been improved.

Swinsian 2 is a free upgrade for all existing users. To download the trial visit Swinsian.com.

Swinsian Version 1.13.0

Swinsian version 1.13.0 is now available. This is largely a bug fix release but there are a couple of notable new features. It’s now possible to use membership of other playlists as a rule in smart playlists.

Swinsian Version 1.12.0

Swinsian version 1.12.0 has been released today. This update adds support for several new metadata fields: date modified, description, conductor, catalog cumber, and disc subtitle. The update fixes a large number of bugs as well as numerous improvements to existing features. For a full list of changes see the changelog.

As of version 1.12.0 Swinsian no longer supports running on Mac OS X 10.6.

Swinsian Version 1.10.10

Swinsian version 1.10.10 has been released and brings support for MusePack files. The update also fixes several potential crashes as well as other minor bug fixes to iTunes smart playlist importing and gapless playback of very short tracks.

Swinsian Version 1.10.4

Swinsian version 1.10.4 is now available. This is largely a bug fix release but there are a couple of notable enhancements:

• When importing iTunes libraries Swinsian can now import smart playlists as real smart playlists. Not all of the options available in iTunes smart playlists are available in Swinsian (for example metadata fields applicable to TV shows) and those rules won’t be converted, but the majority will be convertible.
• Swinsian volume can now be controlled by user assigned global shortcuts
• The API for desktop widgets has been updated. See the documentation for more detail.

For a full list of changes see the changelog.

Swinsian Version 1.10.3

Swinsian 1.10.3 was released yesterday. This update is a bug fix update that should fix a couple of crashes. The full list of changes is in the changelog.

Swinsian Version 1.10

Swinsian 1.10 was released recently and came with a lot of bug fixes and new features. The full list of changes is in the changelog. People using watched folders should note that adding a new watched folder now also imports any files in the folder when watching begins, which was not the case in previous versions.

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.

Version 1.8.8 Released

The latest update to Swinsian is now available to download. Version 1.8.8 is mostly a bug fix release; problems with some FLAC files have been resolved as well as a potential crash when running on OS X 10.6. See the changelog for the full list of changes.

Version 1.8.6 Release

Version 1.8.6 of Swinsian is now available to download and should show up in the in-app updater shortly. Changes include fixes for a variety of bugs including a couple of rare crashes. Selecting a playlist folder will now show the contents of all the playlists within the folder. See the changelog for the full list of changes.

Version 1.8.1 and Other News

Swinsian 1.8.1 has just been released. It’s mainly a bug fix release: several causes of crashes as well as a problem playing back some Apple Lossless albums in gapless mode are now fixed. See the change log for the full list of fixes.

This release also brings some improvements to the desktop artwork display. Themes can now customize how big they can be. This new javascript function is documented on the themes page, along with the ability to add control buttons to themes.

Version 1.6.2

Swinsian 1.6.2 is available today. This is mostly a bug fixing update (see the change log), but there is one new feature. Tracks can now appear under multiple genres in the browser. To enable this turn on the ‘Recognise multiple genre tags per track’ option in the general tab of the preferences. To add multiple genres to a track enter them in the genre field, separated by commas. For example if you enter “Rock, Pop” as the genre that track will show up under “Rock” and “Pop” in the genres browser column.

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.

Version 1.5.0 Is Out

Swinsian 1.5.0 is out and it comes with several new features. The biggest change is the removal of the search menu, which has been replaced with the quick controller window. Other new features include a new duplicate finder, find and replace for bulk tag editing and regex support in the search field.

Beta Testers Wanted

I’m currently looking for a few volunteers to help test beta versions of Swinsian. If you are interested send an email to support@swinsian.com

Album Art on Your Desktop

The latest update to Swinsian (1.3.3) includes a new feature that many people have been asking for: the ability to display album art for the currently playing track on the desktop. Enable ‘Show current track on desktop’ in the general panel of the preferences to turn it on. A couple of basic themes come built in that let you pick from a variety of different transition effects: fade, flip or slide.

AirTunes Support

Swinsian 1.2.0 is now out and it includes support for AirTunes, which means you can play back music over an Airport Express (and in the future hopefully other devices that support Airtunes such as an AppleTV). This feature is still experimental; it has only been tested with Airport Express devices so far. If you are interested in using Swinsian with other Airtunes compatible devices, please get in touch and let me know what works or doesn’t work. To enable Airtunes playback, select the device from the list in the ‘Controls’ menu, to switch back to normal playback select ‘None’.

Swinsian Version 1.0.8

A new update to Swinsian has just been released and brings several new features as well as a large number of bug fixes. When transferring tracks to iPods/iPhones or iPads, it is now possible to automatically transcode files to a lower bitrate, or to convert files in formats that are not supported on those devices into a compatible format. The transcoding preferences allow a variety of rules to be set up for different files types and different bitrates to be converted into different formats.

Swinsian Version 1.0.5

Version 1.0.5 of Swinsian is now out and fixes a variety of stability issues and improves support for cue files. To mount iOS devices Swinsian will now use Fuse4X instead of MacFUSE, if Fuse4X is installed. Fuse4X is a new fork of MacFUSE, since the original official project has not been updated for several years and lacks support for 64bit kernels. This new project is great news, so thanks to all the Fuse4X contributors who have kept Fuse alive on OS X.

Swinsian Version 1.0.4

Swinsian has just been updated to version 1.0.4. This release adds support for cue files, so albums ripped as a single audio file + cue file will show up as multiple tracks in Swinsian. Also added is an option to save downloaded album art to a central folder, rather than embedding it in the file or creating a cover file in the same folder as the tracks. 1.0.4 also fixes several bugs and glitches.

Update: Version 1.0.1

A new update for Swinsian is out today. The main improvement is the ability to watch folders on network volumes. Due to technical limitations this means regularly rescanning the watched folder rather than being able to let the OS tell Swinsian when files were added, but the scanning interval can be changed in the preferences.

Swinsian Version 1.0

I’m pleased to announce that version 1.0 of Swinsian is now out. You can download the 30 day trial here. It’s priced at $19.95 and available to buy here.

Album Artist Tags

After requests from several people, Swinsian now reads album artist tags from files. There is also a new option to use the album artist tag (when set) in place of the artist tag in the main table and browser views. For those who imported their iTunes library, reimporting the library again will update the album artist tags.

Beta Trial

A public beta trial version of Swinsian is now available to download for free. Please take a look and let us know what you think. We are keen to hear any feedback about features you would like to see or improvements that could be made.

New Blog

This is the Swinsian blog. Updates about Swinsian may or may not appear here from time to time.