MusiCHI new version 5.1.00: Can you play this from memory?

Major feature, Memory playback

The audio quality improvement is very noticeable and it sounds amazing. The file is loaded entirely in memory first and then is played from RAM, so no electric noise pollution from the reading of the disk nor another process (the reading of the disk) competing with the process of playing. To enable Main menu > Settings > Audio > Memory playback

Hiding the mini player

Some users wanted the ability to have the player to behave like a normal windows application when minimized, to collapse to the bottom task bar, without showing the mini player. Best of both world, it is very easy to switch between modes. Main menu > Settings , check or un-check hide mini player.

Play list enhancements

1. You can add the content of selected tracks in the playing queue to an existing playlist. Why is it useful? if you had created a playlist “My favorite arias” and you are listening to an opera, if you really like a few tracks, just select them, 2nd option “Add to a play list” after clicking the playlist toolbar button.  So you can grow your play list over time with minimum efforts.
2. Some audio optimizer do disable the drag and drop feature of windows, preventing to add music from the windows explorer into the playing queue with the mouse. Tracks can be added using the 6th option “Pick tracks to add to playing queue” after clicking the playlist toolbar button.

MusiCHI new version 5.0.20: Views and generic support for external players

What are “views”?

With this version you can save and retrieve cascading order of the columns with optionally a filter on it. An example will make obvious why it is a nice feature. First here is a screenshot of my most used columns arrangement for the MusiCHI player [aka the Default].

Let’s assume I want to have every week-end a breakfast with baroque oboe concertos as a musical background. To make the best selection I would have to move my columns around this way (this picture) and then decide on the composer(s) I want for the event (Note that I switched to composition view).

I can save this view by clicking the monitor icon, pick “Save current view” and fill up a short description, so next week-end I can get to my favorite breakfast selection right away.

And because, I did the same for my default screen I can get back to it in 3 clicks. The monitor icon, “Recover view”, select item I want by moving the bar on the list [NOT the check box, see below] and click “Select”.

Needless to say, you can save as many columns arrangement as you want: Being a J.S Bach piano fan, I have this as a saved view.

To delete unused views, then check the line you want out and and click “Delete”.
You can also see the available views if you click on the “Saved views” button before saving a new one.

External players

Before we did support only foobar, now you can pretty much use any players you want as long as they can load a playlist upon opening.

MusiCHI new version 5.0.01: The best got prettier

Player

We added a skinning engine to the player and added thumbnails to the the playing queue. There are 20 skins available, sure you will find your favorite…Light or dark.

Also some new icons, to toggle between Compositions/Album views and Tabular/Cover views.

Now the player has a great look and is faster to navigate.

Tagger, Ripper & Library manager

To make it “smaller screens friendly”, we added some scroll boxes in the manual edit forms and the text processor form, so if the form needs to be re-sized, you can still visit any area of the display.
In the library manager (Tool tab) you can reconcile you composers and performers data with our MusiCHI Clean reference database, useful for checking work in progress or past mistakes.

This upgrade is easy, there is no need to re-do the libraries, just install over the existing version, hence do not hesitate to do it.

MusiCHI new version 4.5.25

The main event here is the enormous work that has been done on the MusiCHI Clean reference database. Now we have the complete catalog of compositions of the 125 most popular composers (about 26,000 compositions), and many performers have been added as well, now counting over 10,000. The MusiCHI tagger and ripper have been modified to improve the searches.

The other improvement: now the sorting on all columns (for example composers, performers, etc) is not case and diacritical sensitive, so names will be sorted most conveniently. A picture worth a 1000 words, notice d’Anglebert is just after D’Albert, and Döhler just before Dohnányi. The same work has been done on the FTS searches (Full Text Searches), if you for example search for “etudes” you will filter all tracks that have Études, Etudes, études or etudes somewhere. IMPORTANT: To take advantage of these sorting features, though you will have to scrap your old libraries (the MUSICHI*.FDB) and their corresponding FTS files (the MUSICHI*.db3), create new ones and re-scan your music. If you do not want to bother, the application will still work but you will have the old sorting method. If you want only the FTS feature then, it is painless, just delete the old MUSICHI*.db3 files, located in the same folder as the library with the same name, and they will regenerate themselves in a few seconds, once you open the player and connect to the corresponding library.

MusiCHI new version 4.5.01

Mainly an update of the DB server and libraries allowing for tags of greater length; for example now Artist is 400 letters long, Instrument 800, Album artists 2000.

Detailed list of new features:
a) Update the Firebird database server from version 2.1 to 2.5. It had to be done because version 2.1 was getting too old and phased out..
b) Thanks to this Firebird upgrade, the fields sizes could been increased considerably, so no more truncation of metadata any longer.
c) In the library manager, you can download to a text file the list of your albums.
d) If a column is too narrow to display the full text, it is shown on hint over it.

Important steps required!
1) The manual removal of the old Firebird server program.
a) Go to the control panel, locate “Programs and Features” or type “add or remove” in the “Search programs and files” after clicking the start menu button (if you still have one). Find Firebird 2.1.etc and uninstall it. You may say “Yes” when it asks to remove common components.
b) Like most windows programs, not all files are removed, when a program is uninstalled. So we have to do it manually. In the file explorer, go to the folder C:\Program Files (x86), if you are running Windows 64 or to C:\Program Files, if you are running Windows 32. Locate the “Firebird” sub-folder and delete it. We are done. The new server is included in the new setup files
2) the old libraries structure is not compatible with the new server, so they have to be deleted as well as their corresponding *.db3 files. Example, if you have a MUSICHICLASSIC.FDB and next to it MUSICHICLASSIC.db3 delete them both. The same would apply to MUSICHIJAZZ, MUSICHIPOP etc.
3) Create new libraries and scan your music again.

If you want to continue to receive the updates for MusiCHI Clean with new composers, performers and composition catalog, please you have to update because the new reference files have a different format too. Hence the users that purchased the Tagger only should update as well.

New “Tagging & audio topics” page

Here is the location

Check out the new “Tips” page

Here is the location

Version 4.0: The player becomes more graphical and gets a search engine

Across the Suite

Better integration among the modules of the suite, the ripper and tagger can add or update new tracks to a library in a transparent way (no more calls to the library manger) and we use the same incremental update method as in the player, hence that task is accomplished much faster.

The Player

That is where the bulk of the improvements take place:
1) A search engine both in text view and artwork view
  “Google” type queries are possible now. Here I just typed “renaissance sm” and I got all albums where both words are present in any tags; I found mostly my high definition files (studio masters i.e. SM).Without leaving this screen, I typed a new search, this time “bach johann sm” and I got all my studio masters by papa Bach. Note that the search is not case sensitive and the words do not have to be complete (ex beeth harnon, would give me all albums or compositions by Ludwig van and Harnoncourt).

Of course the same applies to text view:

2) All tool bars are part of the main screen
So, they are always visible even in artwork view or when the playing queue is closed as you can see below. As a consequence, we could make the playing queue more narrow which is more suitable for laptops or lower resolution screens.

Moreover the tool bars are dock-able/floating, so you can position them where you see fit, here a view with the tool bars floating away from the player screen.

3) Conclusion on the FTS (Full Text Searches)
When you know what you want to listen to, or the spelling your tags is not consistent (ex. you have Maria Callas or Callas, Maria or La Callas) this is a faster and/or more accurate way to find your music. However when you want to “discover” what is inside your lib, step by step, the structured search in text view is superior. As I was told “why not offer both?”, that is done now…

The Ripper

The ripping tag has a revamped interface, which improves the organization of the options. As mentioned previously, adding the newly created tracks to the library is faster and easier.
The Tagger

Simplified add/update to the library, also as mentioned previously much faster procedure.

Version 3.7.04: The icing on the cake

Although we just released a new version we just added 3 new features which will help to speed up even more your work flow:

• the way to number the movements, many compositions at a time
• an improvement on the search and replace of the text processor
• the possibility to pick more than an instrument at a time while editing

Let’s see in more details each of these new feature.

1) Movement numbering

a) The case for a separate movement field, MusiCHI offers 6 custom fields, so there is plenty room to optimize our metadata universe. We already talked about why it is important to have a separate field for Catalog number and /or Opus in a classical library, click here to see the post. It is nice to use another one of the non select-able custom field to write the movement. You would keep the usual “Name, title or movement” field which is your original source of data, so in case you make a mistake while tagging there a way to start form scratch, but this field offers no consistency in terms of text format, the internet data sources deliver data of very poor quality. But it needs to remain, most players or portable device expect that field to to be there. However, you should copy the movement and the movement only in one separate tag, that can be formatted easily, consistently and the way you like (roman numerals, decimal, padding zero etc…). It is prettier but more importantly, if you were to sort on that field you can compare interpretation of the same composition. So the idea is to break the “Name, title…”  field into 3 parts:

1. the composition per say (with or without the performers)
2. the catalog number or opus
3. the movement only

You can even do without “Name, title or movement” and remove it from the display

b) Having said that, the new tool! We already had a movement numbering tool, in the “Format 1 tag/Function” and it is still there but it works for one composition at a time which is fine if you have one composition to edit, but if you are tagging many CD’s at a time it is a bit cumbersome. We added a new tab in the text processor to solve this problem. Stating the obvious: the composition field has to be filled up, to be able to group  and number the movements properly. Let see an example: the initial state, you can see that the movements are not numbered and are delimited by a “:”
We are going to copy the movements in the “Movement” field which is mapped in MCHICUST4, using the text processor, taking the right part.

Worth noting that given most of the time the delimiter is “:” or “-” you can save these actions in your “action repository” to recall them at any time. So you you can perform these routine operations more quickly. Then by switching to the “Numbering movements”, you can see the track are automatically numbered. The format you choose (Text before, numeral style, padding characters etc..) will be saved for next session. Naturally the numbering can be done on any tag you want not only the “Movement” field, you can use the “Name, title or movement” field and move the text where you want with the “Offset” counter, which will move the text around.

2) Search and replace

We introduced an occurrence counter for the search and replace, meaning if the text is found many times, which group of that  text you want to modify, the first? the second? or all.
The example below will illustrate better how it works: Haydn, Violin Concerto HobVIIa.004 in G-M: I. Allegro moderato, as we all know the Haydn’s (Hoboken) catalog should be written with a “: ” HobVIIa:004 not with a dot. So we should just replace the “.” by “:”, the problem we have another “.” in the line I. Allegro. Previously the search and replace was replacing all occurrences of the found text. Hence we would end up with Haydn, Violin Concerto HobVIIa:004 in G-M: I: Allegro moderato and that is not what we were trying to accomplish. Now by setting to 1 the Occurrence field we can achieve our goal: Haydn, Violin Concerto HobVIIa:004 in G-M: I. Allegro moderato.

3) Selecting instruments

If you have a string quartet to tag, and want to enter in the instrument field, Violin, Viola and Cello, previously you would have to click 3 times the “Instruments” button, now it can be done in one pass.

You just need to check all the instruments you need, then double-click or press “Enter”. If you have a lot of Telemann overture to process, I can assure you that is a huge time time-saver.

Version 3.7.02 features list

IMPORTANT NOTE : To create of a third custom tag that can be viewed in the selection panes, we had to change the libraries database structure, therefore the previous format will NOT be compatible with this version, this implies that libraries must be re-created and the music files re-scanned.

We made a small applet that will convert your libraries to the new format, so you do not have to delete them. However, if you have previously used the Custom 3 field you will have to re-scan your music, otherwise you can proceed as usual. To download it click here. 

Player

1. To improve access all the Random Play options, a separate item has been added to the main menu (Random play).
2. The number of custom tags to be used in the selection panes has been increased to three (see above note).
   As the Tagger now supports tag writing of individual element of a composition (see below), this enables you to filter by e.g. Opus, Year, Key. To learn more about that, please read the relevant article on our blog, click here:
   and to actually make it happen see out page “How-to”
3. In the column “Album Artist”, one can filter on the roles, showing for example only the piano soloist and/or the conductors. To see how it works click here.
4. We opened the architecture: if you rather prefer to actually listen to your music with the foobar player, for sonic preference or to be able to use the Jplay driver. We send our playing queue to foobar automatically, so you can use our player just as a front-end database to select the tracks. Incidentally, this solves the problem of gap-less playing.
5. If you copy your library to a laptop with a smaller screen, the bottom splitter may be hidden, you can recover it by going to Main menu > View > Increase track panel height.

Tagger & Ripper

1. The user interface of MusiCHI Clean has been completely re-done and vastly improved. Now, you can control, in much a more flexible way what goes in your metadata. Also the search results status will be indicated with some icons for all search topics (Composers, Compositions and Performers aka Album artists); moreover the inclusion of multiple roles is also now supported (for ex. both Piano & Conductor). To see some screen shots, click here.
2. Any part of a composition (for example Opus or Tonality) returned by MusiCHI Clean can be written straight back into a custom field, we mentioned it previously but here is how it works, click here.
3. One can modify the font size on the “text processing utility” as well.
4. Two new toolbar buttons to speed up adding the “Composer” and “Album artist” to the front and back of the “Composition” field.

Ripper

We added the same modification of the font size than in the Tagger.

MusiCHI Clean
Baroque extravaganza! Catalogs of the following composers have been added:

Corelli, Arcangelo (1653-1713)
Locatelli, Pietro Antonio (1695-1764)
Geminiani, Francesco (1687-1762)
Tartini, Giuseppe (1692-1770)
Purcell, Henry (1659-1695)
Telemann, Georg Philipp (1681-1767)
Buxtehude, Dieterich (1637-1707)
Scarlatti, Domenico (1685-1757)
Boccherini, Luigi (1743-1805)