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Elixium 1.4.0

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@github-actions github-actions released this 04 Sep 03:38
· 14 commits to main since this release
v1.4.0
c7527a0

Elixium 1.4.0

YouTube Music is now a full download service, alongside Deezer and Qobuz.
This release also fixes a serious Deezer quality bug, rebuilds the download
manager, and makes the app much faster to start.

Everything from the 1.4.0 betas is included.

New

  • YouTube Music — browse, search, play and download, with full tags,
    artwork and lyrics. Two formats: AAC (.m4a, ~131 kbps) and Opus (.opus,
    ~147 kbps). Most tracks need no sign-in; Settings takes a cookies.txt if
    YouTube asks for one.
  • Pick a quality for one download without changing your default. Right-click
    an album or playlist tile, use the ⋮ menu on a track, or the arrow next to
    the Download button. A normal click still downloads at your usual quality.
  • Pause and resume downloads. A paused download keeps what it has and picks
    up where it left off.
  • Download history is kept in the download manager.
  • The quality being downloaded is shown on each row — FLAC · 1411k,
    MP3 · 320k, and so on.
  • Metadata settings let you choose which tags get written, per service.
    Off by default; everything is tagged as before unless you turn it on.
  • Turn services off in Settings → Services to hide ones you do not use.
  • Pasted links follow the service you have selected. A Deezer, Spotify,
    Qobuz or TIDAL link can be downloaded from YouTube Music, and a YouTube link
    from Deezer or Qobuz.
  • Play buttons on every card, and artist and album names are clickable
    everywhere, on all three services.

Fixed

Deezer quality

  • Deezer downloads ignored the quality you picked. Choosing FLAC gave a
    320kbps MP3. If you downloaded anything during the betas, it is worth
    downloading again.
  • Paid accounts got 128kbps. Elixium asked once at startup what your account
    could stream, and kept the answer — so if it asked before you were signed in,
    everything came down at 128 until you restarted. It now re-checks when your
    session changes.
  • ReplayGain is no longer written by default. It made files play quieter
    than copies from elsewhere, which sounds like worse quality but is not. You
    can turn it back on in the metadata settings.

Playback

  • Playback stalled every few tracks, sometimes for a minute, and blocked the
    rest of the app while it recovered. Four tracks went from 70–202 seconds to
    2.0–2.7 seconds.
  • Playback stopped completely when one track would not load. It now skips
    that track and carries on.

Downloads

  • Cancel did nothing. Pressing cancel on a 14-track album left it
    downloading all 14. It now stops, and removes the half-finished file.
  • Playlists spanning folders with similar names failed to write their playlist
    file.

YouTube Music

  • Downloads ran at 32 KB/s; now over 5 MB/s.
  • Starting a track took eleven seconds; now under two.
  • Most of an album arrived with no title, artist or cover.
  • Music-video audio was downloaded instead of the album version.
  • An imported session stopped working within the hour.
  • Genre pages showed Deezer's catalogue, artist pages showed 5 tracks instead of
    21, and search stopped at 20 results.
  • Featured artists were dropped — a track with a guest showed only the headline
    artist.

Elsewhere

  • The Settings page would not open at all in beta.3.
  • A Spotify link waited on Qobuz first, so an expired Qobuz token broke Spotify
    links for people not using Qobuz.
  • Spotify errors said [object Object].
  • Explicit tags were being discarded on YouTube Music.
  • Album covers loaded as blank squares on long discographies.

Faster

  • Downloads run up to four at once instead of one at a time. A 14-track
    album went from 36 seconds to 16.
  • The portable build opens in about two seconds after the first run, instead
    of around 50. It now unpacks once into an Elixium-app folder beside the
    .exe and reuses it. Delete that folder and it is rebuilt on the next launch.
  • Smaller download and install on every platform. Two things were being
    shipped that nothing ever loaded: the entire development toolchain — the
    TypeScript compiler, prettier, eslint — and a complete copy of the repository
    itself, which the build had been packing in since long before this release.
    The Windows download drops from 191 MB to 82, and the installed app from
    roughly 710 MB to 286 — the copy of the repository only ever affected
    Windows. macOS and Linux shrink by about 18%: the macOS download goes from
    127 MB to 104.

Notes

  • macOS builds are unsigned; Apple Silicon requires a first-run bypass.
  • YouTube Music audio is lossy at source. For lossless, use Deezer or Qobuz.
  • TIDAL and Qobuz links can only be read through Qobuz, so converting one to
    another service still needs a working Qobuz token. Deezer and Spotify links do
    not.
  • The command line is unchanged by the quality and download-manager work.
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