Helium Music Manager (Blog)

Sneak preview of the upcoming Helium Streamer for iPhone

Mon, 30 Aug 2010 22:01:49 +0200

[YouTube id=0ZHZAaI58xs width=240 height=436]

We are proud to announce a sneak preview of our new iPhone application, Helium Streamer.

Helium Streamer interacts with your Helium Music Manager database and let you stream and playback your entire music collection from anywhere!

You can play any track on your device, even those which are not natively supported (in this case the application will transcode them in real-time for you).

The user interface allows you to see information about the currently playing track, view and manage the Play Queue, search for tracks, view artist and album information, access your Helium Music Manager Playlists and much more!

Helium Streamer fully supports the background mode features available in iOS4.0, meaning that you can play music with Helium Streamer in the background when using other applications, playing games and similar operations.

You can also double-tap the home button to get full access to the player menu to pause/play and skip tracks.

Instead of inviting you to just read about the product, we have published a sneak peak video.

If you are interested in reading more about the Helium Streamer, please click this link.

Helium Remote 1.1 for iPhone soon to be released

Tue, 06 Jul 2010 10:56:36 +0200

Helium Remote, our iPhone/iPad/iPod Touch application, is soon to be released in an improved version. It has been submitted to Apple for approval and as soon as they accept it, it will be available and of course free for all Premium & Network users. Many things have been improved in this version (called 1.1), some of the changes are mentioned below:

Support for iOS 4
Asynchronous downloading of data, so that the User Interface will not be blocked
Refreshed User Interface, presenting more information
Possibility to not only play tracks directly but now tracks can also be enqueued
Larger album cover support
The top information bar can be hidden/shown on demand
Support for lyrics presentation
Possibility to search your Helium Music Manager database to find tracks to play/enqueue.
A new Artist view, which lets you see general information about an artist/group (with picture support) as well as all releases and appearances from the artist in an easy to use grouped user interface. By selecting a release, you can browse it in the second new view, the Album view, decribed below.
The Album view lets you see general information about an album (including picture) as well as all the tracks in the album. The tracks are grouped by CD for multi-CD albums. A track can be played/enqueued and you can also browse a specific artist from a track in the Album view.

All these features and other minor fixes and corrections have created a new more powerful and easier to use version of the Helium Remote client.

We are currently seeking translators for Helium Remote. Please contact us if you are interested in helping us out!

New section for video tutorials

Sun, 06 Jun 2010 20:11:20 +0200

We have just launched our first video tutorial for Helium Music Manager. This first screencast video will show the benefits of the Album Picture Manager which is a tool that greatly simplifies the task of downloading and attaching album picture to the albums of your music collection.

We plan to release more video tutorials as time goes. This gives us great opportunities to take you to the depths of what Helium Music Manager has to offer, which often goes unnoticed.

Make sure to either follow the HeliumMusic Manager YouTube channel or the Video tutorials section on our site.

We look forward to stunning you with feature guides, tips and tricks and in-depth tutorials of the very best of what Helium Music Manager has to offer.

Look at the first video tutorial - Introduction to the Album Picture Manager - below:

We plan to release more video tutorials as time goes. This gives us great opportunities to take you to the depths of what Helium Music Manager has to offer, which often goes unnoticed.

Make sure to either follow the Helium Music Manager YouTube channel or the Video tutorials section on our site.

We look forward to stunning you with feature guides, tips and tricks and in-depth tutorials of the very best of what Helium Music Manager has to offer.

Look at the first video tutorial - Introduction to the Album Picture Manager - below:

[YouTube id=dAOQPjfiflE width=480 height=385]Album Picture Manager[/YouTube]

Helium Remote for iPhone available for testing

Sat, 15 May 2010 23:29:46 +0200

We're proud to share with you that our first iPhone App has been tested and approved by Apple!

We are now offering our current users of Premium and Network versions to test the App before we officially release Helium Music Manager 7.1 - which is needed to use the Helium Remote.

If you are a current owner of Helium Music Manager 7 (Premium or Network), have an iPhone and want to try out the new Helium Remote application please log in to the Customer Center and download the latest release candidate (RC 3).

Read on how to set up the Helium Remote for iPhone.

The Helium Remote is available for free download at the iTunes App Store at the following location, but remember that you also need a pre-release of the upcoming version of Helium Music Manager 7.1 (available in the Customer Center for owners of Premium or Network versions) to make it work:

http://itunes.apple.com/se/app/helium-remote/id370891560?mt=8

Group tracks to be more productive

Mon, 26 Apr 2010 20:32:06 +0200

The next version of Helium Music Manager will come with the possibility to group your tracks in Track Details. Groups can be created for all available fields and can of course be combined with sorting.

By grouping tracks you can easily identify tracks that are from a specific album, CD, bpm range and much more. Grouping is very quick and allows you to instantly switch between different groupings.

Track Details grouping will be available in all Helium Music Manager versions, including the free version. If you want to try out this new feature it's already available for current customers in the release candidate available for download in the Customer Center.

New developer API to be released

Mon, 19 Apr 2010 22:22:30 +0200

We are currently working on a new application programming interface (API) which will enable third party developers to make fancy applications that interact with Helium Music Manager.

This API will be able to both get information about the currently playing track as well as control the internal player to play, stop, pause and skip tracks.

The API is running as a HTTP service, enabling access through a regular REST interface which returns XML data.

The Helium Remote for iPhone will be the first product we release that will use this interface and we hope to build more in the future.

We also want the community to take the opportunity to develop cool things that uses this API. We will be expanding the interface according to requests and needs. The API will of course be fully open and available in all versions of Helium Music Manager (Free, Premium and Network).

Developers interested in learning more or to get a preview release to try can contact us through our contact page.

We are looking forward to seeing people utilizing this great new opportunity!

Control Helium Music Manager from your iPhone

Mon, 25 Jan 2010 21:26:49 +0100

Soon you will have the possibility to control Helium Music Manager wirelessly from your couch just using your iPhone or iPod Touch.

We are currently developing an iPhone application that will be able to remote control Helium Music Manager.

It will work similar to Apples Remote for iTunes, with the basic functions such as Play, Stop, Pause, Next, Previous and it will display now playing information of the currently playing track and show the album picture.

The application will also have access to view the current Play Queue in Helium Music Manager and also view and enqueue your playlists stored in Helium Music Manager.

Win a license for Helium Music Manager 7

Mon, 14 Dec 2009 22:25:38 +0100

The Windows Gadget now works for both Windows Vista and Windows 7 with Helium Music Manager 7.

The Gadget can be downloaded from our extras section and it will work in all editions of Helium Music Manager including the free version.

We are also anouncing a competition for a redesign of this Gadget, where the winner will get a free license for Helium Music Manager 7 Network edition. The competition will be open until January 31, 2010.

If you want to contribute in this competition you can contact us using our contact form.

The Gadget looks like this at the moment and your contribution should contain a design of both the main window and a subpage window. The contribute could be delivered in any non-destructive image format (such as .psd or .png) but preferable in a Photoshop document.

The winner will be announced after the competion is closed in this blog.

Improved Performance!

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 21:11:50 +0100

We are currently working on a new optimized version of Helium Music Manager which will run quicker.

The first stage of our optimization development affects the Track List views (detail mostly) and will be quicker compared to today’s implementation.
The initial read will work much as today (but be a bit quicker), however once an item has been read it will be cached and can then be fetched quickly for future reads.

An example from our initial testing sessions shows that reading 8,000 items today takes about 6.2 seconds (using an SQL Server 2008 Express database). When using the new system it takes about 3.5 – 4 seconds to perform the initial read and then subsequent reads are taking around 90-100 milliseconds to read and display the tracks again!

In the longer term we have plans for other optimizations as well; better caching in the Music Explorer (the expanding of nodes) and in the Album/Artist Browser.

These will be developed when this first optimization is completed and tested.
This first implementation is a big change which is requiring significant code rewrites as well as the retesting of most functions, therefore it will be some time before we can release it. In due course, we plan to release official Betas in the Customer Center to allow registered users to test the new system and give us feedback of how it works.

New product - Access your music library from anywhere

Mon, 05 Oct 2009 21:23:38 +0200

With the release of Helium Music Manager 7 we will be offering a brand new product, Helium Music Streamer.

The Helium Music Streamer is a web application where you can browse and play your music from anywhere. All you need is access to a web browser and your entire music library is at your fingertips.

A mobile version of the Helium Music Streamer is also shipped with this product, which lets you access your entire music library from your mobile phone.

At last you will be able to access your music from any computer that has access to the internet, disregarding of operating system - Linux and Mac OS will work fine.

The Helium Music Streamer can be purchased for a low cost together with Helium Music Manager 7.

Helium Music Manager goes free

Mon, 14 Sep 2009 21:16:26 +0200

New licensing model

Starting with the release of Helium Music Manager 7 we are implementing an enhanced licensing model and upgrade policy. We are also introducing more competitive pricing.

It is a more generous system, giving more freedom of choice to you as a user of Helium Music Manager.

A Free Version

The most important change is that we will no longer be providing a time or feature limited trial version. Instead we will be offering a functional, non-expiring free version of Helium Music Manager. This version will contain the most frequently used features, such as our much respected tag editors, the unique File Rename Wizard and many other tools.

You will of course still be able to do unlimited playing, scrobbling to Last.fm and lots of other things that you could previously only test for 30 days.

The Premium version will continue to have all the features found in previous releases and more.

Detailed information about the differences between the free and the Premium version will be released later.

A Better Upgrade Policy

Another important change is that we will give our Premium customers access to major upgrades for a longer time.

Instead of the now-existing grace period of three months we will be offering an absolute minimum of one year for major versions. This means that if you purchase a Helium Music Manager license, you are guaranteed to get any update to a major version that occurs in the next 12 months from your purchase date. You will of course continue to get any minor updates to the version you purchased for free.

A More Competitive Price

You may have noticed that we have recently been running a summer discount price for Helium Music Manager of $29 (US) - previously the price was $44.95 (US).

We have now evaluated how this has worked and due to its success we have decided to set this discount price as the new regular price for the upcoming Helium Music Manager 7.

Some more features of the upcoming beta release

Mon, 10 Aug 2009 21:25:17 +0200

Some more features of the upcoming beta release

Since quite a while ago, we have been working hard with the next version of Helium Music Manager.
Some major new features has already been mentioned in earlier blog posts and today we will present some more new features;

New importing system
The next version of Helium Music Manager will come with a new architechture for data importing.
One of the more major changes is that this architecture will be fully opened so that 3rd party developers can create their own importers.
To create a new importer, you will need nothing more than basic .NET programming knowledge.

Four importers will be released with the next version of Helium Music Manager:

iTunes import
Windows Media Player import
Winamp 5.x import
MediaMonkey 3 import

We plan to release the source code for all four importers, to simplify implementations of new importers.

Artist reports
Since a few versions ago, users have requested support for printable artists reports.
We have carefully listened to our users requests and created three new printable reports which are included in the next version of Helium Music Manager:

Artist report with album information
Artist report without album information
Simple artist/album list

All reports can as usual be printed on paper or exported to PDF, Word, Excel, XML, HTML and more.

The beta version of next Helium Music Manager is planned to be released to our registered users within 1-2 weeks.

Maintenance release planned for the next days

Tue, 04 Aug 2009 12:21:46 +0200

We plan to release a new maintenance release (previously announced in this blog) within a few days.

This maintenance release will contain all corrections made in Helium Music Manager 2009 since the current release (build 6910, June 22th 2009).

Summer work

Mon, 27 Jul 2009 20:25:07 +0200

Currently we are working with a maintenance release of Helium Music Manager 2009 which will be released within 2 weeks.
The next maintenance release will contain bugs reported from June the 22th until the date of the release. The next version will contain some minor improvements apart from the bug fixes.

We are also almost finished with the first beta version of the next generation of Helium Music Manager, which will fully support Unicode characters.
We have worked hard to support Unicode both for all tag-formats which support it as well as all database formats (Access, Microsoft SQL and MySQL).

Apart from Unicode support, many of the tools has been simplified as well as the workflow is cleaner.
New tools are also added to make tagging, cataloging and replaying much more powerful and easy.

With full Unicode support comes support for much more languages than before, Chinese and Japanese for example.

We will soon release a beta version of the next generation of Helium Music Manager for all existing customers, so stay tuned!

Welcome to the Intermedia Software blog

Mon, 29 Jun 2009 20:20:29 +0200

Welcome to the Intermedia Software blog – the place where you will get the most recent information first!

We plan to publish development reports about upcoming features and improvements as well as tips & tricks. Our goal will be to keep all posts as informal as possible, focused on actual functions. We will try to update the blog regularly with everything worth to know – announcements, bug fixes, workarounds as well as new features.

New Filename to Tag tool

The first new feature we will present is a feature for the next Helium Music Manager version. The feature is a highly enhanced Filename to Tag tool.

The tool will work much like the Tag Editor (Sheet), allowing you to work with huge batches of files at once. When the tool is started, the tool will perform a best match operation for all files automatically, trying to identify which of the pre-defined templates that can be used. The result (including which template that was matched) will be presented in the file list.

After this has been performed, you will have the possibility to manually adjust the matched templates for each file, either by directly enter the codes (e.g. %ctr - %art - %tit) in the file list, or from a more “visual” dialog. Templates can be applied to the selected rows, applied down and copied freely just like any other field in the Tag Editor (Sheet). This tool can be executed directly from the menus or from inside the Tag Editor (Sheet) to allow pre-handling of the tag data before you start with the actual tagging.