Helium 13 beta 2 now available

Welcome to Helium 13 beta 2!

Major changes in this version

• Performance optimizations in the Albums, Artists and Labels view
• Shared playlists support – share playlists between multiple Helium users
• Release type overlay shown on album thumbnails
• New language: Russian
• Updated German, French, Spanish, Portuguese and Dutch languages
• General purpose plug-ins code repositories for plug-in development together with documentation is now available. Please see the following links for more information:
  • Create general purpose plug-ins
  • Code repositorities
• Improved drag and move handling to track lists
• Improvements to drag and drop handling of pictures
• Improvements to the file synchronization tool
• Various bug fixes and minor improvements

 

Download Helium 13 beta 2

Click here to download Helium 13 beta 2.
Please note that all licenses for Helium 12 will work with this release.

Working with beta versions

Please note that these are beta versions meaning that all tools and features are not 100% tested.

The beta version will install into a specific folder so that you can have both Helium 12 and 13 installed at the same time.

Any databases that are opened with Helium 13 will not be usable in Helium 12 since they will become upgraded.

Please backup your database and settings before installing this version.

If you find any bugs or such with these releases, click here to let us know!

 

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Welcome to the first beta of Helium 13

The first beta version of Helium 13 is now available for downloading.

Major features and improvements

• Rewritten Music Explorer with new nodes and better features.
• Audio Joiner tool.
• File synchronization tool.
• Possibility to customize which views a specfic user shall have access to .
• File format type support for releases and filters as well as displaying in releases.
• Possibility to lock playlists from modification.
• Support for tracklists below the content pane for the releases, artists and labels view.
• Advanced filtering support for Music explorer, Releases, Artists, Labels, Tracks, Genres and Years views.
• Improvements to backup and restore
• Possibility to create your own toolbar with frequently used tools.
• Major speed improvement when tagging MP3 and FLAC files.
• Collection/volume support is back and with new powerful features.
• Support for General plugins as well of he possibility to develop own general plugins
• Editing and displaying of lyrics with support for HTML formatted content.

Click here to see a detailed description of some of the new major new features and improvements.

Helium Streamer 3.3

Helium Streamer 3.3 will be the next release of Helium Streamer. It will only be compatible with databases created with Helium 13. The main focus with this release has been to move towards multi-platform support. The ultimate goal is to make Helium Streamer available on Linux and Mac OS apart from Windows. Even though we’re not yet there we have made significant progress.

Statistics

We have added a first version of a statistics view to Helium Streamer 3.3. It currently displays the following graphs:

• Releases by release year
• Tracks by recording year
• Top artists
• Top genres
• Top labels
• Release types
• File types
• Track ratings
• Album ratings
• Artist ratings

More statistics is planned and will come in an upcoming release.

Downloads

Download Helium 13 beta

Click here to download Helium 13 beta.
Please note that all licenses for Helium 12 will work with this release.

Downloading Helium Streamer 3.3 beta

Click here to download Helium Streamer 3.3 beta.
Please note that all licenses for Helium Streamer 3.2 will work with this release.

Working with beta versions

Please note that these are beta versions meaning that all tools and features are not 100% tested.

These beta versions will install into a specific folder so that you can have both Helium 12 and 13 installed at the same time, as well as Helium Streamer 3.2 and 3.3.

Any databases that are opened with Helium 13 will not be usable in Helium 12 since they will become upgraded.

Please backup your database and settings before installing this version.

If you find any bugs or such with these releases, click here to let us know!

 

General purpose plugins

A new feature in Helium 13 will be support for General purpose plugins.

A general purpose plugin can be seen as any additional feature that can be started at any time.
Examples can be a mini-player, notification tray rating feature, a kareoke function and anything else.

We will ship some free general plugins with Helium 13 as well as their source code.

General purpose plugins can be developed by anyone in any .NET language, plugin samples written in C# and VB.NET will be available.
The plugins will be able to consume all functions in the Scripting engine, plus that we have added many new functions.
Full documentation will soon be available.

If you are interested in starting to develop general plugins today, feel free to contact us for more information.

News about Helium 13

At the moment we are working with our upcoming major release, Helium 13.

This version is still under construction and we have no exact date of release yet. Most likely we will release one or more beta versions before the official release.

Major new features

• Rewritten Music Explorer. We have rewritten the Music Explorer to be more performant, with better updating of the user interface when switching between views. It also comes with new nodes; Album collections, Collections/volumes (see more below) as well as Untagged items.
• Audio Joiner tool which lets you join several audio files into one. You can take files from various input formats and convert to an output format of your choice. The tool supports volume normalization and pitching.
• Possibility to restrict the views a user will have access to see and use.
• File format type support for releases and filters as well as displaying in releases.
• Possibility to lock playlists from modification.
• Support for tracklists below the content pane for the releases, artists and labels view.
  
  

  Track list for Release view

  

  Track list for Artist view
• Advanced filtering support for Music explorer, Releases, Artists, Labels, Tracks, Genres and Years views. This new filter allows you to create an advanced filter per view with support for Collections/volumes (see more below) and more. These new filters supersedes the old global filter function.Advanced filter with instant filters (Releases, Artists, Labels and Tracks view)
  Advanced filters only (Music explorer, Genres and Years view)
  
• Toolbar command support. Create your own toolbar with frequently used commands in your preferred order, title and colors. (See screenshots above)
• Collection/volume support is back. This feature allows you to put a track into one or more volume which can be used in searches and filtering. This combines the “old” collection/volume support with the “old” categories function. During add you can select which volume a track should be added to as well as create rules based on path which volumes a track should automatically be mapped to. These rules also apply during moving/renaming of tracks. Collection/volume comes with full integration in the Music explorer, filters and advanced searches.
• Editing and displaying of lyrics with support for HTML formatted content.

Apart from all news listed above we have been working a lot with performance and stability fixes to make Helium 13 even better than before.

Helium 12.4 is here!

Welcome to a brand new Helium 12 version!

Major improvements to Helium 12.4

• Carousel view which allows albums to be viewed in a cover-flow style. Fully customizable for displaying number of items, perspective and more.
• Track list instead of detailed view for the releases and artists view in split mode.
• Permission management per user allowing to set permissions what a specific user can and cannot do.
• Smarter saving of tags, only contents that are actually changed will be saved and therefore saving of tags will be more efficient.
• Album collections can be reordered and the Release tooltip template can be configured to display which album collections a release is contained in.
• Possibility to use genre style grouping in the Genres view as well as possibility to manage genre styles and contained genres.
• Possibility to set more descriptive names for rename templates.
• Copy tags tool which allows copying and transcoding of tag contents between files and different formats.
• Several new track list columns has been added.
• New search fields has been added.
• Several of the the views are loaded on demand, leading to increased performance and less memory consumption.
• Several improvements to shortcuts and keyboard handling.
• More information shown for playlist folders
• Various user interface improvements

Major bug fixes in Helium 12.4

• Many fixes related to memory consumption and some memory leaks.
• Corrections to replaying of files from several tools.
• Gain related fixes for subtrack tagging
• Various corrections to the duplicate finder
• Improved cancellation handling for the split and convert tools.
• Corrected handling for updating of pictures.
• Deleting of playlist folders removes child contents properly

For more detailed change logs, please see the following pages:

• https://implodedsoftware.wordpress.com/2017/04/16/helium-12-4-beta-now-available/
• https://implodedsoftware.wordpress.com/2017/05/24/helium-12-4-beta-2-now-available/
• https://implodedsoftware.wordpress.com/2017/06/10/helium-12-4-rc-now-available/

What’s next?

There are always a lot of things going on, visit our forums to get the most recent information as well as be able  to come with input for a specific feature.

You can help us to spread the word about Helium either on a specific blog or by leaving a review on our Facebook page.
For the 20 first uses which leaves a review on Facebook we will give you a free Helium 12 Premium and a Streamer 3 license, for existing users we will upgrade your Helium license to a lifetime license.
For more information, please contact us.

Download

Click here to download Helium 12.4

Helium 12.4 RC now available!

Welcome to Helium 12.4 RC.

This version is the last planned release before we release 12.4 officially, which will happen in a few weeks.

Improvements in this version

• New tab on label details, All tracks which will show all tracks from this label.
• Better multi-monitor support
• Sorting of rename templates
• Improvements to cleanup of temporary files
• Various user interface improvements

Bug fixes in this version

• Ogg conversion settings are properly saved/restored
• DirectSound playback shows correct playing position
• Grouping of releases is properly preserved after editing artist details
• Cancellning a picture update from a detail page will no longer show an empty image
• Gain values are properly set and preserved when editing subtracks
• Corrections to removing of folders in the Music Explorer
• Various reported bug fixes and stability improvements

Working with the release candidate

The release candidate version is almost completed, but some glitches can still remain. Please note that this version will upgrade the database and therefore to be able to use it together with Streamer 3 you will need to use the updated Streamer 3 (read more below)

News in Streamer 3.2 RC

• Support for translations
  English and Swedish currently available.
• Light theme
  Try out the new light theme by switching to it in Settings.
• New labels view
  This new view closely resembles the one already present in Helium 12. Labels can be filtered by name. Total number of tracks from the label is shown in a bubble on each label.
• Filter added to genres view
  Type something in the new filter box to only show genres that matches the search criteria.
• Track list can now be sorted in Tracks view
  Click on the column headers to sort ascending or descending.
• Album collections created in Helium will now be loaded and available in the releases view
  The possibility to manage album collections as well as adding and removing albums from them will come in a later version.
• Added experimental support for SSL
  This can be tested by adding a “UseSsl” flag (set to true) in the config.json file, under the “Host” entry.

Click here to download Helium 12.4 rc

Click here to download Streamer 3

 

Helium 12.4 beta 2 now available!

Welcome to a new beta version of Helium 12.4.

Major improvements in this version

• Major improvements to memory consumption and removal of memory leaks. This leads indirectly to performance improvements.
• New Ogg vorbis reader and writer. The new version of this file format reader fully supports segmented Ogg vorbis files
• Possibility to use Genre style grouping in Genres view. Genres can be grouped as childs to a genre style using the Manage genres tool. Full support in smart playlists and advanced searches
• Possibility to set descriptive names for rename templates to more easily identify specific rename templates
• Copy tags tool which allows copying and transcoding of tags from one format to another, for multiple files
• Conductor column available in track lists
• Original year column available in track lists
• Various user interface improvements and fixes
• When renaming files and a file with the destination filename exists with another extension, it is shown with yellow background
• Tracks sorting applied to My Computer view
• When adding a file with subtracks, gain values for the master track are “pushed” to the subtracks
• When calculating gain for a file with subtracks, resulting gain values are “pushed” to the subtracks
• When adding files, recording year is no longer used to set release year, if release year does not exists

Minor improvements and bug fixes in this version

• Lock function in Advanced Tag Editor works properly with “delta changes” logic
• Corrections to saving of Conductor field from the Tag Editor
• Minor corrections and improvements to the Duplicate finder
• Views are lazily instansiated to reduce memory consumption
• Cancellation improvements for Convert files and Split files tools
• Improvements and bug fixes for updating of album, artist and label images
• Drag to reorder improvements for Playlists
• Corrected tooltips on label items
• Visual drag indicators properly shown when using drag to reorder in track lists
• Corrections to Tag editor, switch command
• Corrections when adding tracks with same length in the Split tool
• Bugs fixes related to removal of files from a root path
• Bug fixes related to setting of release type
• When renaming a file with subtracks, subtracks are properly updated with the resulting filename
• Corrections when using “Start withs” argument for textual fields in Advanced search/Smart playlists
• Corrections when playing next/previous subtrack
• Proper data is used when using the rename tools on subtracks
• Position slider corrections when replaying a subtrack
• Ratings are no longer changed when working with scripts against files that does not exist in the Library
• Updates to several components

Working with the beta version

Please note that this is a beta version meaning that all tools and features are not 100% tested.

This beta version will NOT install into a specific beta folder, instead it will upgrade your existing Helium 12 installation and you can continue to use your settings without the need of cloning them.

If you find any bugs or such with this release, click here to let us know!

Click here to download this beta version of Helium 12.4 beta 2