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Announcing Helium Music Manager 9 official beta

We are proud to announce Helium Music Manager 9 official beta. This release comes with new features, simplifications and many improvements. All to make this new version of Helium Music Manager smoother, faster and more polished.

Key changes

Less views, more control

One of the biggest improvements in this version of Helium Music Manager is the joining of the Playlist view and the Search view which is now fully integrated into the Music Explorer.

The main idea is to eliminate switching between views and create a more flexible Music Explorer view.

The Search element in the Music Explorer allows you to create new advanced searches and will give you access to your twenty most recent searches. Just click on either a recent search query or an advanced search query to see the results directly.

The Playlists element in the Music Explorer allows you to create and manage all your playlists per user (Network version) with full folder support, just like in the "old" Playlists view.

Smart Playlists, Webradio channels and Podcasts are also fully integrated with full multi-user support (Network version) and folder support, just like Playlists.

We have worked hard to make the integration as seamless as possible and easy to use. Full drag and drop support is of course available.

Multi-track selecting in the Music Browser

The Music Browser has finally got support for selecting of multiple tracks for several pages, which allows you to very quickly select one or more tracks for playing and enqueing. This has been a very requested feature.

Support for selecting of multiple tracks are available from the Artist pages, Album pages, Track charts and search results.

Discovering your music library from the Music Browser has never been as powerfull as it is now!

Windows 8 ready!

Helium Music Manager 9 is fully ready for Windows 8.

We have made much testing with Windows 8 to ensure that you can use Helium Music Manager 9 with Windows 8 without problems or additional software components.

The Network version of Helium Music Manager 9 also has full support for Azure cloud databases if you prefer to store your music library in "the cloud".

Windows 8

Intelligent background processing

A new cool fully automatic feature in Helium Music Manager 9 is the support for background scanning and generating of so-called AcoustIDs.

AcoustID is a digital music fingerprint which is used by many of Helium Music Managers tools and features.

For example, if the files on an album is missing tags, but has AcoustIDs, you can download full album and track information for all tracks from the album with one simple click. Everything from album art to release year as well as track titles and much more will be downloaded fully automated.

New multi-user roles available (Network version only)

Two new roles (groups) are available in this version of Helium Music Manager:

Editing which allows or disallows editing of tag and database meta data for a user.
Move, rename and delete which allows or disallows moving, renaming and deleting of files.

These new roles takes Helium Music Managers unique multi-user system to a completely new level. It is now possibel to enable full access-control for users of your Helium Music Manager database and your music library.

Database groups and roles

Updated database handling

Databases The support for our three database types, SQL Server Compact, SQL Server and MySQL has been revised.

Performance and stability has been strongly improved with this version of Helium Music Manager. SQL Server Compact (default database type) has been optimized and improved to give a much better experience.

For SQL Server database types, all database methods are now threaded and handled with SQL Servers own connection pool to take advantage of Microsofts own optimizations. The revised database model allows full connectivity with Microsofts cloud database system Azure.

MySQL is now also fully threaded and is using revised connection drivers. This gives MySQL users highly improved performance and stability as well as allowing better and easier connectivity with NAS servers/devices and Linux based systems.

Multiple improvements to the CD Ripper

The CD Ripper has been revised to support better automated downloading of track information. If you perfer to use an alternative freedb server - MusicBrainz for example - it is now possible to change this from the CD Rippers Options page.

When an album cover is downloaded or selected to be applied to the resulting album, the album picture can now be automatically embedded in the resulting files meta data, for the formats that support embedded pictures.

We have also improved the automated track numbering logic used in the CD Ripper to ensure that 100% proper metadata always will be set.

CD Ripper

Minor changes

Apart from the key changes listed above Helium Music Manager 9 comes with the following changes and improvements:

Automatic migration of settings, templates and databases from Helium Music Manager 8 is now fully supported upon the first start of Helium Music Manager 9
Improvements when selecting entries in the Album details view
Improvements and stability corrections for offline data synchronization
Highly memory and speed optimizations when using the random tracks auto-enqueue mode
Corrections to loading of Add audio CD plug-ins
Improvements and optimizations related to album handling
Updated Hungarian language
Updated Swedish language
Updated German language
Improvements to backuping of user options in the backup tool
Improvements to APEv2 tag attached pictures
Many improvements and optimizations related to downloading of artist information from the Tag Editors
Improvements to error handling when saving tag information in the Advanced Tag Editor
Improved error handling when rendering Now Playing pages
Compatibility improvements related to synchronization of data to iTunes
New version of the AAC playback plugin which solves errors raised when playing specific AAC files
Optimizations and improvements to the Add files tool
Many improvements related to the plug-ins used when downloading track and artist information from the Tag Editors and the Edit artist information tool
Improvements, bug fixes and performance optimizations when playing Smart Playlists
Corrections and improvements related to importing of player data
Improvements to the automated saving of the Play queue which will strongly reduce the risk of losing any data
Performance optimizations of the background caching
Improvements to the backup handling of MySQL databases
Performance optimizations and compatibility improvements to importing of iTunes databases
Performance and stability optimizations when downloading (automated and/or manually) AcoustIDs
Improvements and bug corrections related to the Artist view filter
Performance and accuracy improvements for identifying duplicates in the Duplicate finder
Timeout and stability fixes for the most of the download plug-ins
Visual and performance improvements for the Similar artists listing in the Music Browser artists page
Corrections and performance improvements when printing album reports with the Print report tool
Improvements and optimizations for reading of FLAC files and Vorbis tags
Improvements and compatibility optimizations when reading ID3v2 tags
Full support for iTunes/dbPowerAmp M4A tag sort fields
Optional automated housekeeping of automatic synchronization paths
Improvements when using the Split audio file function when only one resulting track is selected for creating
Bug corrections when splitting an audio track to multiple tracks of the same length in the Split audio file tool
Updated BASS library (audio playback)
Performance improvements related to the database housekeeping
Improved ID3v2 tag compatibility. Previous naming of Helium Music Manager specific fields are now automatically converted during saving (the old names are still supported) to improve compatibility with other applications and external devices
Simplified and quicker auto-downloading of information when using the Add Audio CD tool
Multiple improvements to the Internal player when using crossfading

Summary

We are very proud to present this version to all of our users which is the most stable and quick version we ever have released.

Apart from all new major and minor improvements we have focused to solve all reports our users have reported to us, no matter if they are reported via our Customer Center, our user forum or via our auto-reporting feature.

All fixes and new features as been tested with all supported database types and on multiple operating systems to ensure that the user experience should be as good as possible.

We really hope that you will be satisfied with this version and if you find something that does not seem to work as it should, if you miss something or just would like to suggest a change, please let us know!

Beta Testing

First an important health warning; this is a beta version and so you are very strongly recommended to only test using copies of your database(s) and music.

This beta version is able to automatically upgrade existing Helium Music Manager 8 databases, but please note that an upgraded database is NOT backward compatible with Helium Music Manager 8.

Download

You can download Helium Music Manager 9 public beta by clicking this link.