What's new?

The Manage Pick Lists screen is one of the most important screens of your Music Collector software. This is the screen you need for:

• Merging duplicate artist entries
• Correct an Artist sort name
• Fixing typos in Genres, Tags, Locations, etc…
• Removing unused pick list entries
• etc… etc…

But… judging from daily questions in our support channels, many users don’t even know of its existence. (Hint: it can be opened from the Edit menu). So with today’s update we are aiming to increase the awareness the Manage Pick Lists screen and to make it easier to access from anywhere.

From the main screen folder panel

In the main screen, you can now easily access the Manage Pick Lists screen for the selected folder field. Just click the new button right above the folder panel:

From the Edit Album screen

The Edit Album screen now has a big Manage [..] List button at the bottom, that automatically changes to match the field you are currently at:

From the Add/Edit item screen

Fixed:

• Cat. Nr for box sets wasn’t showing in some templates.
• Artist links going to HTTP websites weren’t clickable in some templates.
• User Defined Yes/No fields are now available as options for the folder panel.
• Edit Multiple: Updating date fields wasn’t always working correctly if you only filled in a year.
• Edit in List: Editing the Collection Status field did not work.
• Folder panel: “Collection Status” folder option has been moved to “Personal” heading.

A big update for the Music Collector software today, with several improvements and fixes, all based on the daily feedback we are getting from our users.

Changing your folder field is now much easier

The folder panel is one of the most powerful tools of your Music Collector software. However, in our support conversations with users, we are finding that most users are always leaving their software on the out-of-the-box Artist folders and never use anything else.

Which is sad, as they are missing out on a great tool. The folder panel instantly lets you group and filter your database on other fields too, e.g. by Genre, by Studio, by Release Year by Location, etc.. Super useful and fun!

Now… I must admit that changing your folder panel to a different field was not very easy or obvious. As you had to create a “preset”, add your desired field(s), give the preset a name, save it, then finally activate the new preset in the folder panel.

So… we decided to make this all *much* easier, especially for single field folder settings.

• You can now directly select any folder field for the folder panel, without having to create a preset first. Just instantly pick your desired folder field under the “Folders” heading in the menu of the Folder button.
• Presets are now called Favorites.
• You can still create your own Favorite folder options, e.g. for multi-level folder settings (e.g. Genre, then Artist), or just to make a specific 1-field setting easily accessible.
• Your Favorite folder settings are listed at the top of the menu, under the Favorites heading.
• New: no more need to manually name your Favorites. Sensible names are created automatically (the selected fields separated by slashes).

Columns and Sorting

• For Columns and Sorting, “Presets” have been renamed to “Favorites” too.
• For Sort Favorites: no more need to manually name your Favorites. Sensible names are created automatically (the selected fields separated by slashes).

Edit Album: add multiple artists, studios, etc.. in one go

The Select screen for adding artists, studios, composers, etc… now includes checkboxes, so that you can multiple in one go. No more need to go back and fort between the Select and Edit screen to add multiple.

The new checkboxes for selecting multiple values in one go are now available in the Select screen for the following fields:

• Artists
• Composers
• Studios
• Musicians
• Credits
• Conductors
• Compositions
• Orchestra’s
• Chorus
• Genres
• Tags

Fixed:

• Using “Select All” in your list was very slow. Super fast again now 🙂
• Print screen: “Field ID 221 has no XML tagname” error, when printing the Collection Status field as a column.
• Removed the annoying “beep” when searching in the Add Albums screen.

Last week we implemented several small improvements to the Connect software, based on suggestions (and complaints) from you all, our loyal users:

Configurable Date Format for Edit screen

Two months ago, we introduced a Date Format setting to control how dates are displayed throughout the Connect software. But the date editors in the Edit screen still always used “yyyy-mm-dd” as the format. Which could be confusing to some users.

So in the Settings screen, under Editing, we have now introduced a new setting, specifically for controlling the order of the year, month and day boxes in the Edit screen:

New “Year” options for folders, colums and sorting

Some dates were already available as Year-only options for folders, columns and sorting (like Release Year, Publication Year, etc…), but we have now updated the available options to include ALL date fields as Year-only options, for example:

• Added Year
• Purchase Year
• Seen it Year
• Read it Year

Improved Auto-Capitalization feature

Small tweak for the Auto-Capitalization tools: it now correctly auto-caps letters that follow a parenthesis, bracket, square bracket, single quote or double quote.

More Totals in Statistics screens

The Statistics screen has been updated with more Totals at the top, e.g. for Purchase Price, Current Value.

Version 6.0 is coming up for all five CLZ mobile apps:
CLZ Books, CLZ Music, CLZ Movies, CLZ Comics and CLZ Games (probably in that order).

For “Vee Six” we decided to finally implement THE most commonly requested feature:

Editing Multiple entries in one go! (aka: Batch Editing)

At the same time, v6 will come with completely re-designed Edit screens. Check out some sneak preview screenshot below. More information about app-specific v6 features and improvements will follow later!

Finally: Edit Multiple entries in one go!

This has been the most common feature request for many years: How can I edit (or clear) the Grade/Location/Owner/etc… for many of my database entries in one go?

And in v6, it will finally be possible:

• Just select the entries you want to edit (using tap and hold), and choose Edit from the menu.
• Then select which fields you want to edit (or clear).
• Finally, set the values you want to set and click Done.

Some screenshots:

(These screenshots have been taken from the iOS edition of CLZ Comics, but the other 9 apps will look very similar):

Edit screen re-design

Also new in v6: completely re-designed Edit screens, to make them clearer, more compact and nicer looking.
No more long lists of fields, one per row. In the new screen, fields are placed side by side where possible, with the Cover on a separate tab. Resulting in a more compact screen, requiring less scrolling. Especially on tablet devices!

Some sneak preview screenshots:

(These screenshots have been taken from the iOS editions of CLZ Books and CLZ Music, but the other 8 apps will look very similar):

At customer support, we were regularly receiving questions about the Edit Multiple screen, so in today’s update we made several changes to make it clearer.

• The checkboxes (for unlocking fields) have been replaced by clearer “lock” icons. Click the lock icon to unlock a field for editing.
• Or, just click on a lock field and you will receive a popup asking you to unlock it.
• An extra notification at the top explaining the unlocking and clearing of fields.
• Save button now indicates the number of albums that are being edited.
• Extra warning when saving “You are about to change data for 4 albums. This can not be undone. Would you like to continue?”

Using “Edit Multiple”

Quick reminder on how to use Edit Multiple:
In the main list, use the checkboxes to select some albums, and click “Edit” in the blue action bar that appears above the list.

Small tweak for your Music Connect software today:
The Alphabet Bar can now be used for Composers too!

Fixed:

• If cover downloads were disabled, the program would still download a cover URL
• If no rating was set, it would show with rating “0” in the rating column. It now shows “nothing” in the column again.
• If no rating has been set for an album, it would show in a “0” folder, and now shows in a “[None]” folder in your folder panel.

Fixed:

• In some case, new entries added through Add from Core would get images with .tmp extensions, instead of .jpg.
• Editing pick list items directly from the folder panel did not work anymore.
• Dragging items between folders did not work anymore.

Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger!

Here’s another big update for your Music Collector software, with two further performance improvements:

Faster image downloads

We were able to make several improvements to the way images are downloaded (cover art), making it much faster than before.

This change affects all places where images are downloaded from our servers, that is, when Adding Albums from Core, when Updating from Core and when down-syncing from CLZ Cloud.

Faster Update from Core

On large collections the old Update from Core feature was quite slow, as it updated your albums one by one, that is, doing separate requests to our server for each and every album.

So for this update, we also complete rewrote the Update from Core feature to do the updates in batches of 100 albums at a time, making it much much faster! (roughly 4 times as fast).

Remember: Update From Core can be used to update your local album entries with possible extra data from our Core online music database. To use this feature, select some albums, right click, then choose Update from Core.

Fixed:

• Add Albums from Core: when adding by barcode and the barcode is not found, it now automatically pops up the Unrecognized Barcode screen, so that you can 1. add the album anyway and 2. report the missing barcode to our Core.
• When using My Rating as the folder field, the “0” folder was missing.
• When using multiple levels of folders in the folder panel, sometimes the displayed counters were wrong.
• Images View: it is now possible to change thumb size using Ctrl + mouse wheel.
• Card View: Composer will now show instead of artist if it is filled in.

Fixed:

• Images View: Improved spacing between thumbnails
• Images View: Mouse over on images didn’t show the title of the item
• Cover Flow: Now uses big sharp images instead of the small thumbnails
• Find Cover: Could give an Access Violation when finding GIF images

In yesterday’s build the thumbnails couldn’t be set as small as they used to and we forgot to put in the dark background for the classic images view. Both fixed now!

Fixed:

• Thumbnails can now be set as small as before
• Classic shelf in dark skin: dark background was missing

When users send us screenshots during support conversations, we are seeing that many of you are using the Shelves View when browsing your collections. And we can’t blame you, that IS a cool looking view 🙂 However, it *could* be a bit slow and jerky, especially when displaying many cover images in one list.

So our Windows guy Joe has spent several weeks to make this Shelves View faster and smoother. At the same time, our in-house graphics man AJ has created two new Shelf styles. Here’s what’s new:

• Images are now loading a lot faster.
• Scrolling is faster and smoother.
• Shelves background is smoother, no more visible tile edges.
• Shelves now always continue over the full width, even when a row is not full.
• Two new Shelf Styles are now available: White and Concrete.

The new “White” style:

The new “Concrete” style:

One of the most common complaints about the CLZ Music app has always been the lack of support for multi-disc albums. So we finally sat down and designed a good user interface to fix these problems once and for all.

The solution we implemented has two parts:

Add Albums screen: Add as Multi-Disc Album

This lets you add your new multi-disc albums the right way, straight from the Add Albums screen. Just select multiple 1-disc results and add them combined into a multi-disc album.

Merge existing albums into a Multi-Disc Album

This is for existing entries in our app, where the discs of a multi-disc album may be listed as separate albums. You can now combine/merge these into one album with multiple discs. Just tap and hold to select the albums, then select MERGE from the menu button.

Redesigned Select Folder Field screen

Through the years, the number of available folder fields has grown enormously, making the Select Folder Field screen a bit “unwieldy”. We decided to come up with a better solution.

This update includes a re-designed Select Folder Field screen, with all folder options nicely grouped under sensible headers, and the most popular options (Artist, Genre, Format) instantly accessible at the top.

Fixed:

• In the Add from Core screen, when adding an album that is already in your app as ‘On Wish List’ or ‘On Order’, the app will now offer to change its status to ‘In Collection’
• When scanning barcodes the “beep” sound would only sound on the first scan
• Search on own collection could be forgotten during scrolling/browsing your collection
• Field defaults screen could cause a crash

One of the most common complaints about the CLZ Music app has always been the lack of support for multi-disc albums. So we finally sat down and designed a good user interface to fix these problems once and for all.

The solution we implemented has two parts:

Add Albums screen: Add as Multi-Disc Album

This lets you add your new multi-disc albums the right way, straight from the Add Albums screen. Just select multiple 1-disc results and add them combined into a multi-disc album.

Merge existing albums into a Multi-Disc Album

This is for existing entries in our app, where the discs of a multi-disc album may be listed as separate albums. You can now combine/merge these into one album with multiple discs. Just tap and hold to select the albums, then select MERGE from the menu button.

Redesigned Select Folder Field screen

Through the years, the number of available folder fields has grown enormously, making the Select Folder Field screen a bit “unwieldy”. We decided to come up with a better solution.

This update includes a re-designed Select Folder Field screen, with all folder options nicely grouped under sensible headers, and the most popular options (Artist, Genre, Format) instantly accessible at the top.

Fixed:

• Details view didn’t show multiple artists for single tracks
• Edit Screen: disc button could change colors when it shouldn’t

New in the Cover tab of your Edit screen: built-in Crop and Rotate tools for your cover images!

Super useful for fine-tuning images that you uploaded or found through the Find Online tool. You can even Crop/Rotate images that you received from Core, in which case they will be automatically turned into a custom image.

To use the new Crop/Rotate tools, open your Edit screen go to the Cover tab and click the “Crop/Rotate” icon on the top right above the Front or Back cover image:

Then:

• Click the Rotate icon to rotate the image 90 degrees to the right.
• Drag the blue crop rectangle to indicate your desired crop area.
• Click Apply to apply the changes.

After feedback from some of our most active Music Connect users, we decided to make several improvements to the track editing on the Tracks tab of the Edit Album screen:

• After clicking Add Track, the cursor is automatically put in the Title box of the added track.
• Hitting Enter while in the Title box of the last track now automatically adds another tracks AND puts the cursor in its Title box.
• Re-order discs by dragging the disc tabs.
• Use checkboxes to select tracks. From the blue action bar that appears, you can now:
  • Remove the selected tracks
  • AutoCap the selected tracks
  • and (NEW): move the selected tracks to another disc

New in Connect today: We have added several keyboard shortcuts to the most commonly used features:

For the Main screen:

• Navigate through your items with your arrow keys (works in List, Images, Shelves and Card View!)
• Use c + a or c then a for Add from Core
• Use c + m or c then m for Add Manually
• Use c + h or c then h for Add Hardware from Core (Game Connect)
• Use c + j or c then j for Add Hardware Manually (Game Connect)
• Use c + e or c then e for Edit Selected Item

For the Edit screen:

• Use cmd/ctrl + s to Save and close
• Use cmd/ctrl + j to Save and go to Previous item
• Use cmd/ctrl + k to Save and go to Next item

Fixed:

• Fixed several issues with AutoSync that could cause Access Violation errors
• Updated a couple of translations

Fixed:

• When downloading new entries from CLZ Cloud, previously cleared fields could get filled in.
• In the Add from Core screen, when adding an album that is already in your app as ‘On Wish List’ or ‘On Order’, the app will now offer to change its status to ‘In Collection’.
• On devices with intermittent internet connection, app could revert to trial mode
• After down-syncing updated cover images, the list could still show old cover.
• Improved error messages in case of core search problems.

Faster CLZ Cloud syncing!

We have made several structural changes to the CLZ Cloud syncing, making it much much faster than before, especially when syncing large amounts of entries up to the CLZ Cloud or down from the CLZ Cloud.

To enjoy the faster syncing, you need to use the actual Sync with CLZ Cloud screen.
(The Auto-Syncing in the background is also slightly faster now, but if you need to sync many entries up or down, please use the Sync with CLZ Cloud screen.)

Fixed:

• Link to Core: changing the search criteria could crash the program
• Add screen: changed the “already in collection” font color in dark skin to be more readable
• Main screen: The “Rating” column could not be moved to a different place
• Improved cover scaling for syncing
• Field Defaults: Location field was missing
• Manage pick lists: Compositions: next/previous buttons wouldn’t save certain fields
• Editing an album could multiple the length (time) of an album
• Subtrack length wasn’t shown in the template

In the Add Albums from Core screen, it was already possible to select multiple 1-disc search results and add them together as one multi-disc albums. But, as of today, you can also merge existing albums in your database into a multi-disc album.

Just select them in your list with the checkboxes, then select Merge Albums from the blue Action bar.

See this feature in action here:

Previously, the “Add to …” button in the Add screen let you choose between “Add to Collection” or “Add to Wishlist”. But as of today, you can now choose from ALL possible Collection Status option directly. For instance, this lets you add an item as “On Order” straight from the Add screen!

Now, the possible choices are:

• In Collection
• For Sale
• Wish List
• On Order
• Not In Collection

Fixed:

• Scanning CDID would give the “no results” entry before the actual result

A big update for Music Connect again, in which we introduce many new settings for further customizing your software to your own liking.
And while we were at it, we updated the Settings screen with clearer grouping and naming of settings.

Here’s what’s new:

Auto Capitalization

This is a completely new feature, for automatically capitalizing your album titles.
Auto capping can be done:

• when adding albums from Core. This is OFF by default as our Core delivers nicely capped album titles in general.
• as you type titles in the Edit and Add Manually screens, very useful when adding albums manually
• by clicking the AutoCap (aA) button above the Title box in the Edit screen

The Settings screen lets you choose between 4 Auto Cap methods:

• First Letter of Each Word with Exceptions
• First letter only with exceptions
• UPPER CASE
• lower case

The Auto Cap Exceptions list comes pre-filled with a sensible list of common exceptions, but is completely user configurable.

Date Format

Choose how date formats are displayed throughout Connect.

Timezone

Choose your own timezone and all Date Added and Date Modified fields will be displayed according to that timezone. (previously these all showed in UTC time)

BTW: also new today: new column options Date/Time Added and Date/Time Modified, for showing the full added and modified timestamps.

Sorting

Four new options that control the sorting and how names and titles are displayed.

• When sorting, ignore sort titles: check this if you prefer to ignore all sort title when sorting and just have the software sort on the regular Title field.
• When sorting, ignore sort names for Artists, Composers and Conductors: check this if you prefer to ignore all sort names when sorting and just have the software sort on the display name field.
• When displaying, show sort title: when sorting by title, showing the actual sort titles that it sorts on can make your list a bit “easier on the eye”.
• When displaying, show sort names Artists, Composers and Conductors: showing the actual sort names for persons can make your list a bit “easier on the eye”.

Faster CLZ Cloud syncing!

We have made several structural changes to the CLZ Cloud syncing, making it much much faster than before, especially when syncing large amounts of entries up to the CLZ Cloud or down from the CLZ Cloud.

To enjoy the faster syncing, you need to use the actual Sync with CLZ Cloud screen.
(The Auto-Syncing in the background is also slightly faster now, but if you need to sync many entries up or down, please use the Sync with CLZ Cloud screen.)

Improved stability when using Auto-Syncing

At the same time, we have resolved several issues with the Auto-Syncing in the background, problems that could cause Access Violations in some situation. So this 20.2 version should provide a more stable experience too.