CrateDigger 2.0.0 beta 8 (build 80) — the filter means what it says

Everything in the 2.0 line so far, newest work first. Unfinished by
definition: this is where 2.0 is built, and it is offered to nobody who has
not asked for it.

Beta 8 is one fix, for a bug that quietly made a mess of your album folders:
filtering the artwork search to one source and pressing SELECT ALL fetched the
hidden sources too, so an album could come back with two covers and a set of
duplicate booklet pages.

Beta 7 is the console becoming yours. Every theme can carry its own logo in
the header, with a crop table in the editor to frame it, and the parts that
light up stopped taking their colour from the accent, so a theme built around
black finally has LEDs that work. The gallery also says what you are looking
at.

Beta 6 is the browser finding things. You can search your library at last,
the crate list tells you where the results live, and the three columns are no
longer welded to Artist, Album and Track: each one shows whatever category you
pick, and each crate remembers its own arrangement.

Beta 5 is about artwork getting out of your way. Fetching a whole release of
scans no longer locks the window, the images you fetched actually show up, and
you can throw one out from the viewer you are looking at it in. FIX TAGS also
stopped renaming songs it had no business renaming.

Beta 4 is a fix release on top of beta 3: playlists play again, and the
artwork panel tells the truth about what it did.

Beta 3 was about artwork and the panels you work in. Artwork you find is now
staged and only written when you say so, the ART tab finally shows the picture
that lives inside your audio files, and the conversion panel lost its costume.

Beta 2 was mostly foundations: CrateDigger keeping a record of what you listen
to, and the browser's selection and sorting moving into the tested core of the
app.

Added

• A logo for every theme. The header's right side, opposite the CrateDigger
  name, is the theme's mark now. Carbon, Cobalt and Llama '97 each ship one
  drawn in their own palette, for light and for dark. A theme with no logo sets
  its name there instead, so nothing is ever blank.

• A crop table for it. The theme editor's BRAND section shows the header row
  at actual size with your mark in it. Choose an image or drop one on the
  section, then drag to move it, pinch or use the SIZE fader to scale it, and
  FIT and FILL do the two framings you usually want. APPLY renders exactly what
  you framed into the theme. ADJUST reopens the mark you already have. A theme
  carrying both a light and a dark version gets a logo for each.

• Dividers in the gallery. Sorting by year, A to Z or artist now cuts the
  wall of covers into labelled sections, and the label stays pinned to the top
  of the feed as you scroll past it, with a count of what is under it. Arrow
  keys follow the sections rather than stepping blindly across them.

• The search key reaches the gallery. The magnifier in the browser header
  now shows in gallery view too, searching the same records the list does.

• Lamps and meters are their own colours. Three new tokens in the theme
  editor: Key Lamp for the LEDs on the VIEW, THEME and EQ keys, Meter High for
  the loud end of the volume, EQ and VU meters, and Buttons under Corner
  Roundness for how square the keys are. Each starts out following the accent
  exactly as before, so no theme you already have changes, but a theme whose
  accent is black can now light its LEDs without giving up black buttons.

• Search your library. A field across the top of the browser, results as
  you type, over artist, album, title, file path and format. Every word you
  type has to match something, so "mil blue" finds Kind of Blue and "flac
  live" finds live FLACs. Command-F puts the cursor in it, Escape clears it,
  and the magnifier key in the browser header puts the field away or brings it
  back. Searching a record's name gives you the record, not the one track that
  repeats it, and a search stays out of everything but the browser: convert,
  queue and relink keep seeing the whole crate.

• The crate list says where the results are. While a search is running,
  every crate's count becomes its match count, in the search's colour, and a
  crate holding nothing dims instead of disappearing. Click one and you arrive
  with the query still applied. The CRATE / ALL switch beside the field widens
  a search to every crate you own, which is what All Records already was.

• SEARCH on the display. A seventh screen, summoned by Command-F or by
  typing: what you typed, how many artists, albums and tracks it found, how
  wide it is looking, and a bar for how much of the crate survived.

• Any category in any column. The browser is one, two or three columns,
  and each shows whichever you choose: Artist, Album Artist, Album, Genre,
  Year, Decade, Format, Rating or Track. Click a column's header to change it;
  the layout key in the browser header sets how many columns there are. A view
  can end on an album or a decade rather than a track list, and every crate,
  playlist and device remembers its own arrangement. Nothing changes shape
  until you change a crate.

• Genre numbers read as names. Old rips tagged with an ID3v1 number, or
  with the raw two-byte genre atom an old iTunes wrote into an M4A, now show
  as Rock, Alternative, Pop and so on in the browser, the track table and the
  inspector. Files you scan from here on are stored with the name.

• A lamp of its own for the transport. The LED behind the play/pause dome,
  shuffle and repeat is a theme colour of its own, Transport Lamp, so a theme
  can retint the transport without dragging the meters and the position bar
  along. Unset, it follows the accent exactly as before. The SEARCH screen's
  annunciator has one too.

• Throw out a scan while you are looking at it. The artwork viewer can drop
  the page you are on from the rotation, or move the file to the Trash, so you
  no longer have to remember which one was wrong and go hunting for it in the
  ART tab afterwards.

• Artwork waits for you now. Anything you import from the search window, or
  pick off your own disk, is held aside instead of landing in your album folder.
  You look at it, set roles, drop what you do not want, and press SAVE. Removing
  a file you already had is a mark rather than a deletion, so it is reversible
  right up until the moment you save. Leaving the ART tab with work pending
  keeps the work and tells you it is waiting.

• See the artwork inside your files. The ART tab shows the picture embedded
  in the audio itself, with its pixel size, alongside the images in the folder.
  It can be removed: saving rewrites the tracks to drop the picture, and it says
  how many files that is before you agree to it. The audio is copied rather than
  re encoded, so nothing is lost but the picture.

• Your scans and the internet in one window. FIND ART replaces the two keys
  that used to do half the job each. Images you choose from disk land in the same
  grid as the online results, with their role read from the filename, and go
  through the same review and the same import.

• Import AutoEQ. Paste or drop a parametric EQ config from squig.link,
  AutoEQ, oratory1990, Wavelet or Poweramp, and CrateDigger fits it onto the
  twelve faders. It draws both curves, the one the file asks for and the one
  twelve bands can actually produce, so you can see how close the fit is before
  you take it. Save it straight into one of your own slots.

• Three EQ slots of your own. Store a curve, name it, load it back. Right
  click a slot to save the current curve into it, rename it, or clear it.

• Choose which EQs the header key cycles. Every preset in the equalizer now
  carries a lamp. Lit ones are what the EQ key steps through, so a rotation of
  three presets is three presses instead of seven.

• Find every album with poor artwork. Library Cleanup has an Artwork tab
  that sweeps your whole library for albums with no cover or a cover too small
  to look at, lists them worst first, and fetches better ones in one run. It
  never replaces a cover with a smaller one.

• A field you pick in the inspector. The row under the cover shows Genre by
  default. Click it to show Bitrate, Sample, Added or Plays instead, and it
  remembers.

• CrateDigger remembers what you play. Play counts, skips, when you last
  heard something, when it was added, and a one to five star rating on every
  track. Rate from the inspector or with Command-Option-0 through
  Command-Option-5. None of it is visible in the browser yet; it is the
  foundation the smart crates and the listening stats are built on.

• Deep Scan: fix tags by listening to the record. Fix Tags searches with the
  tags a file already has, which is no help at all on a rip with no tags or with
  somebody else's. Deep Scan fingerprints the audio instead, asks AcoustID what
  it is, and offers the answer through the same review sheet, with the tracks
  paired to the record by recording rather than guessed into order. It never
  runs on its own: press DEEP SCAN in the match window when the proposed record
  looks wrong, or take the offer in the alert when nothing matched by name.

• Receive beta updates. Settings, Advanced. Off unless you turn it on, and
  turning it on is the only way a stable install is ever offered one of these
  builds. It selects a separate feed rather than tagging the stable one, so
  leaving it alone means a mistake in a beta cannot reach you. Turn it off to
  go back to finished releases.

Changed

• The display rail leads with what is playing. The track name and the clock
  moved to the left of the rail, where they read first, and the row of mode
  lamps moved to the right where a status strip belongs. The clock is pinned to
  the edge, so it no longer shifts as the title changes length.

• The header's two columns line up. The library keys and the VIEW, THEME and
  EQ keys sit on one grid now, both starting under the traffic lights and both
  ending level with the bottom of the display.

• The grain stops at the silicone. Moulded rubber is smooth, so the
  console's texture no longer crosses the transport caps.

• Artwork downloads while you carry on. A full Cover Art Archive release is
  dozens of scans, and the window used to sit locked behind a spinner for the
  best part of a minute. The search panel closes the moment you press STAGE, the
  ART tab counts the images in as they land, and the display flashes when the
  set is ready. Browse and listen the whole time. Four images come down at once
  now instead of one, so it finishes sooner too.

• FIX TAGS shows you what actually changed. A row correcting "Honeymoon is
  Over" to "Honeymoon Is Over" and a row replacing a title outright used to look
  identical: two long strings side by side, and yours to compare. Only the part
  that differs is picked out now, so a capitalisation tidy up and a wholesale
  rename can be told apart at a glance. The column that repeated the title
  beside it is gone.

• The artwork viewer keeps the zoom you picked. Turning a page dropped you
  back to Fit every time, which made comparing the same corner of two scans
  impossible.

• A dimmer, instead of a focus switch. How far the app behind the artwork is
  dimmed out is a slider now, rather than the two fixed positions FOCUS offered.
  The viewer's controls read as one set of controls as well: the pager reads as
  a pager, and CLOSE is no longer wedged between BACK and FWD.

• The playback position moved to the foot of the display. It is the line
  above TRACK, FORMAT and the rest, filling in as the track plays, so it spans
  the whole glass instead of a short bar squeezed between two clocks. The volume
  meter has left the display entirely: the fader in the footer was already
  saying it.

• A much bigger cover. The inspector's cover now takes whatever height the
  text below it leaves, and follows the window as you resize it. The tabs and
  the library tools moved out onto the chassis around the panel, the rows that
  repeated what the display above already said are gone, and a long album title
  sits on one line until you click it.

• The Patch Bay is now Conversion. A patch bay is where you plug cables
  between things; this picks a format and a folder layout, so it says so. Its
  keys lost their glow and their rows of lamps for a readout with a hairline
  scale, the folder modes read MIRROR, FLAT, TAGS and CUSTOM instead of one word
  that meant nothing, and the pattern editor only appears when you are using it.
  The destination is a single line you click.

• Artwork search shows where each image came from. Cover Art Archive,
  Discogs and your own disk each get a badge and a filter, every image shows its
  true pixel size, and releases can be ordered by the cover they actually carry.
  Discogs scans announce themselves while they load rather than appearing
  unannounced, and can be switched off entirely. The release you imported from
  is remembered, so reopening the search lands on it.

• Notices are centered on the display. Messages like "MATCHING TAGS" used to
  sit hard against the annunciators on the left and shove the transport strip
  sideways every time one appeared. They now sit in the middle of the glass and
  no longer move anything else.

Fixed

• The artwork search staged images you had filtered out of sight. The
  source chips above the grid, CAA and DISCOGS and DISK, decided which scans
  were drawn but not which ones the buttons acted on. So filtering to one
  source and pressing SELECT ALL ticked everything, including the tiles you
  could no longer see, and STAGE then fetched the lot. An album could end up
  with the same cover twice and a stack of duplicate booklet pages, and the
  counter beside the buttons read a number that did not match the grid in
  front of you. Every control now works on what the chip is showing: SELECT
  ALL, NONE, shift-click ranges, the counter and STAGE. Images the filter
  hides keep their tick and come back selected when you lift it, so a chip is
  a way of looking at the grid rather than an edit to it.

• The theme editor no longer flips the appearance. Opening it while in Light
  threw the whole app into Dark, and the other way round, because the editor
  previews the layer it is editing and always started on the theme's declared
  one. It starts on the appearance you are already in.

• The browser's column titles are the right size again. The name in each
  column header is a menu, and a menu label on macOS ignores the font the header
  sets, so the facet name rendered in 13pt system type beside 8.5pt monospace.

• A theme with glare on no longer stretches the editor's preview. The glare
  and dot screen overlays were sizing the view they sat on rather than the other
  way round, which pushed the preview panel out of shape.

• Saving staged artwork read the staging session off the main thread, a
  data race that Swift 6 would refuse to compile. It reads the roles and disc
  numbers beside the files it is writing now, the way it already did for the
  images.

• Artwork you just found appears straight away. Images fetched from the
  search window sat as spinning placeholders in the ART tab until you pressed
  SAVE, so the one moment you needed to look at them was the one moment you
  could not.

• A wrong track number no longer renames your songs. FIX TAGS trusted the
  number in a file's tags above everything else, so a rip whose numbers had been
  shuffled quietly offered to swap two songs' titles, confidently and with
  nothing to say anything was odd. A title that matches a different track almost
  exactly now wins the argument. A file with no title still goes by its number,
  which is all an untagged rip has to go on.

• Playlists play again. Double clicking a track in a playlist did nothing
  at all. A playlist row can be dragged to reorder it, and being a drop target
  swallowed the second click before it ever reached the thing that starts
  playback. Playlists were the only source where that applied, which is why
  everything else was fine.

• A playlist plays as a playlist. Starting a track used to build the queue
  from the album that happened to be selected rather than the list in front of
  you, so most rows quietly did nothing and the play button started something
  else entirely. The queue is now the list you are looking at.

• The inspector describes the track you picked. In a playlist it showed
  whichever album was selected in a column the playlist does not even display,
  so the cover, year and format belonged to a different record than the one
  playing.

• A stray PDF no longer takes over the artwork button. Cover art searches
  can return a PDF, and any PDF in an album folder was treated as that album's
  booklet, so opening artwork went to the page reader instead of the artwork
  viewer for good. A PDF you have given another role is left alone, and PDFs
  now appear in the ART tab so you can remove one.

• Opening artwork lands on the cover. An album whose folder held only
  scans or a back cover opened on a page of scanned paper with no way to reach
  the front.

• Removing embedded artwork looks like it worked, because it did. The
  files were rewritten correctly but the ART tab went on showing the picture,
  since it was reading metadata cached from before the change.

• The artwork grid stops moving under the pointer. Setting a role scrolled
  the grid, so the next click landed on nothing. The close buttons are also
  bigger targets than the thin glyph they were drawn as.

• A thumbnail is no longer blown up to fill the screen. Opening artwork used
  the small picture inside your files even when the folder held real scans. It
  uses those now, and falls back to the embedded one only when there is nothing
  else, at its own size rather than stretched.

• The equalizer reads 0 at the centre. A fader sitting at zero used to show
  +0, or sometimes -0.

Notes for testers

Betas can lose data. Point CrateDigger at a copy of your library, not the only
copy, and keep a stable install to fall back to. 2.0's plan is at
cratedigger.mrbarkan.com/roadmap.html.

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Install: open CrateDigger-2.0.0.dmg and drag CrateDigger to Applications. This is a beta: it is offered only through the beta update feed, and Advanced ▸ Receive beta updates is the only way a stable install is ever shown it.