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Today we are proud to present the first official beta version of Helium Music Manager 8.6.

This version comes with both major and minor improvements (as well as bug-fixes) since the last version was released.

The most important changes are listed below:

Highly improved information downloading

With this version of Helium Music Manager we have focused on major improvements related to information downloading. The most noticeable changes apply to the downloading of album and track information as well as artist information.

Improvements in the Tag editor

Under the Download button in the Tag editor, there are now some new download alternatives:

Album and track information (automatic look-up):
This option will generate audio fingerprints for the selected files (if not already present) and use these fingerprints to create a fully automatic look-up of the album in the MusicBrainz database.
When the album is found, additional information will be downloaded from other sources (including Last.fm, Amazon and Discogs) using the album identity to get as much information as possible, in an exact way.
This means that you can identify and download information for all tracks from an album without the need of having any previous tags at all!
Track information (track-by-track, automatic look-up):
This option will also generate and use audio fingerprints to lookup each track in the MusicBrainz database and automatically download as much information as possible about it from multiple sources (including Last.fm, Amazon and Discogs).

Tag editor

You can also choose to automatically download artist information for all artists from the selected album/files in the same download batch.
The downloaded information will be merged with any possibly existing artist information in your database to ensure that you will get as much information as possible without overwriting existing information.
This function is also fully automated meaning that no additional clicks are necessary!

Of course, all the old download methods where you can choose which download sources you would like to download from is still available.

Improvements to the edit artist information tools

The edit artist information tools (where you can download artist information for one or more artists) now take advantage of audio fingerprints and multiple download sources (including Last.fm, Amazon and Discogs) to give you as much information back as possible, in the simplest possible way.

Edit artist information

Multiple Genre support

Helium Music Manager 8.6 comes with support for multiple genres per track.
When you tag a track you can optionally choose more than one genre.
Multiple genre support applies to all core functions in Helium Music Manager, meaning that it has been transparently integrated into all tools.
An example is that if a track is tagged with "pop" and "rock" as genres, it will be found in searches when you search for either the "pop" or "rock" genre. Multiple genres are read and written to tags using semicolon separated genres, like Genre1;Genre2;Genre3, which means that it will work out of the box if you previously had tags like this.

Edit multiple genres

Other improvements

Support for favourite folders under the My computer in the Music Explorer.
You can now choose to pre-listen to tracks played using the Internal player. When you pre-listen to a track, each played track will be played for a specific length of time and then the player will automatically change to the next track.
When visiting an artist page in the Music Browser, information for the artist can automatically be downloaded and populated in the background if any of the artists files contains a MusicBrainz artist identity. This means that you can automatically populate artist information by simply browsing artists in the Music Browser. To turn this feature on you will need to enable the Download artist information in Music Browser automatically setting under the Online information sources > General page in Options.
Support for the storing of artist, album and track MusicBrainz identities on tags.
Audio fingerprints (AcoustIDs) can be generated for multiple files in a batch by using the Action manager.
Each unique user in the network version can name their ratings.
Support for multiple artist WMA tags generated by dbPowerAmp.
Possibility via right-click to remove duplicate entries in a playlist.
Audio tracks can be compared using audio fingerprints in the Find duplicates tool.
Stored advanced searches can be accessed, edited and created from the Music Explorer.
The Discover artist function is now available as a toolbar button.
Improvements to the Convert to function so that all destination paths are verified before the conversion starts.
Performance improvements related to ID3v2 tag reading and writing.
Improvements to Podcast handling.
Updated German, Swedish and Italian languages.

Apart from the above mentioned fixes we have also completed all tickets reported by users since Helium Music Manager 8.5 was released.

Please note that this version of Helium Music Manager will upgrade your existing database and make it incompatible with Helium Music Manager 8.5.
Therefore we strongly recommend that you to create a backup of your original Helium Music Manager 8.5 database before you use it with Helium Music Manager 8.6.

Helium Music Streamer beta also available

For those of you that also run the Helium Music Streamer, there is a beta version of next release (1.7) available for this product too, in the Customer Center. Helium Music Streamer 1.7 is only compatible with databases updated to Helium Music Manager 8.6.

All registered users can click here to download these new releases from the Customer Center (Products section)