Yate Release Notes

Version 6.10.3 (11078.11071)

      The Chapter Editor

• Evidently some people use chapter names with leading spaces to denote sub chapters. The Chapter Editor and the Chapters action statement will no longer trim spaces when modifying a name.
• There is a new setting at the bottom of the Chapter Editor window which can enable the display of spaces as centered dots.

      Action Statement Changes

• The Make Numeric statement has two new functions. As Alphabetic Index will return a value of 1 through 26 if the first character in the source is in the range of A through Z (case and diacritic insensitive). As Unicode Character Value returns the Unicode value of the first character in the source.
• The Decompose option has been removed from the Combined Credits Functions statement. The option did not do what was documented and is redundant as the Format Credits statement can perform the decomposing of merged people on credits.

      Bug Fix

• When reading a FLAC file with Roon encoding, if a Conductor tag was in a PERSONNEL comment as opposed to a CONDUCTOR comment, it was assigned to Involved People. It should have been assigned to Musician Credits. This more than likely never happened as Conductor has its own dedicated field.

Version 6.10.2.1 (11070.11060)

      Bug Fix

• The Count Items statement when processing a list in a named variable, unescaped the delimiter twice. This was almost always benign.

Version 6.10.2 (11069.11060)

      Rename Templates

• IfExists constructs always treated 0 as does not exist for various numeric fields such as Track, Disc, etc. From now on custom fields which are declared as being Yes/No fields will be handled the same.
• There are new tokens named IfTrue and IfFalse to logically test the value of a track variable.

      Year Field Formatting

• Version 6.10 changed the default value for the Preferences - File List - Do not enforce formatting of the Year field to be initially on. The setting only affected the display of the Year field and manual edits in the field. Actions and importing metadata can set any value.
• In order to retain the current functionality and to add the ability to force the truncation of the Year field when saving files, the setting has ben modified. It is now named Format the Year Field and can be set to Never, Display as YYYY or Display and Save as YYYY. The effective previous value is preserved.

      XML Files

• Yate can now open XML files in the Container Viewer. All open modes and Finder Open With are supported.

      Action Statement Changes

• The Prompt From Container statement supports new items to force and maintain a single selection from a list of items.
• The Make Numeric statement has a new function to return 1 for true or empty for false.
• The Test Value of Boolean in Container statement will now work on String items.

      Resource Action Changes

• There is a new action named GetSongBPM which uses the API provided by the GetSongBPM.com site. The action extracts various metadata from the site's database of over six million songs.

      Documentation Updates

• The Renaming and Restructuring Files and Folders document has been updated.

      Bug Fixes

• When using an Open URL statement to get data and the url was malformed, Yate could hang.
• The Compare Text statement's fuzzy test mode was not hiding the trim options which are effectively always enabled.
• When the Container Viewer was saved as a property list a beep was always issued.
• Saving the displayed contents of the Container Viewer as a property list was creating an invalid file if the container contained a NULL.
• File>Open from Clipboard could not load plist files.
• Fixed a bug introduced early in the v6.x cycle which caused various flow control action statements executing Grouped-Once to fail.

Version 6.10.1 (11056.11050)

      Preferences - Actions

• When the Batch Processor is done its panel remains open and allows you to view the created log file. The last created Batch processor log file is always available on the View menu. You can set the Automatically close the Batch Processor panel when done option to have the panel close when done. Note that the setting is ignored if the Batch Processor was cancelled or if it was running in any mode other than traversing disk folders.
• An action can use the Preferences statement to override the Automatically close the Batch Processor panel when done setting. Overrides will be ignored unless you enable the Allow actions to override the auto close Batch Processor panel setting option.

      Action Statement Changes

• The List Manipulate statement has a new Join function. Two lists are combined on an item by item basis, joined by a specified delimiter.
• The Preferences statement has a new single preference to override the auto closing of the Batch Processor panel. Note that this setting is ignored if the new Preferences - Actions Allow actions to override the auto close Batch Processor panel setting is not enabled.

      Bug Fixes

• The List Manipulate statement's Key-Value function was not coalescing keys of the same name. The case and diacritic sensitive options were ignored.
• When creating a database if preserve sidecar and standalone were specified, the sidecar would be preserved even if the standalone status differed.
• The change made to sorting in v6.10 to correct sort as in Finder messed up the matching of names in the Preferences list manager. It was possible that names differing only in alphabetic case were duplicated in a list. It also meant that the Combined Credits Manager's Apply Alphabetic Case of All Known People function did not work.

Version 6.10 (11044.11040)

      The Year Field

• The Preferences - File List - Do not enforce formatting of the Year field setting is now initially enabled in new installs.
• This build turns the setting to enabled. If you want the old behaviour, change it in the preferences.
• Ten years ago almost everyone used iTunes and the old default value made sense.

      The Discogs and MusicBrainz Wizards

• You can now search by barcode.
• To search by barcode enter a UPC/EAN barcode in the ID field with a letter U (case insensitive) anywhere in the field.
• All characters which are not decimal digits will be removed before issuing the search.

      Plist files

• The Container Viewer can now save its content as a plist file.
• File>Open and Finder Open With can now specify plist files. The files are opened in the Container Viewer. You cannot use this mechanism to import Yate plist files.
• plist files dragged to the main window are expected to be Yate plist files and will not be opened in the Container Viewer ... unless the Option key is down which forces their display in the Container Viewer.

      The Container Viewer

• When saving files you can now save as JSON (compressed or not) or a plist file (XML or binary).

      Copying Metadata

• The UI based Copy Metadata>Copy Configured functions can now specify exclusions for UDTIs. Excluded items are not copied or removed. As an example this is useful to copy all UDTIs except for an Apple App PID.

      MusicBrainz Earliest Recording

• The previous implementation always attempted to match titles and artists. The new implementation also supports only searching by title.
• As the functionality is performed by an action, a second action will be imported for the title only menu item.

      Action Editor

• Debug statements are easy to locate as they are displayed with red text and can be selected by the Find panel making them easy to delete. There are also context menu items to disable Debug statements.
• Often while debugging an action you might introduce non Debug statements for debugging purposes. There are new context menu items to mark statements as being debug statements. These statements will be displayed with red text and will be identified via the Find Panel's Debug search. The marked statements will also be affected by the Enable / Disable Debug context menu items.

      Action Manager

• The Log Action Usage function has been renamed Log Action & Debug Usage. It will now log any action which contains a Debug statement or any statement marked as debug.

      Resource Action Changes

• The Apple Music set of actions has new imports related to artist artwork.
• The UI for the Sync Files suite has been completely rewritten. All options are now presented on a single panel. The previous versions issued far too many questions. There are additional syncing options including the ability to convert only selected file types and to copy others. The utility is now at v5.0.
• Two new template mapping are provided for Roon. One which is the older Roon custom panel with recording fields and associated named variables added (Roon+). The second is a custom panel which only contains the recording fields and associated named variables (Roon Rec Info). View the Roon Mappings online help for the download links.
• There is a new Compare Apple App Track List to Disk set of actions. The following items are identified: tracks in iTunes/Music which are not on disk under the specified root folder; tracks under the specified root folder which are not in iTunes/Music; tracks on disk which cannot be added to iTunes/Music. This is done without reading or writing any audio files.
• There is a new Create Database Utility action which allows you to configure various settings and then runs the batch processor to produce a track and/or album database, create Yate Track and Album IDs and save folder.jpg files. Everything is optional and is intended to simplify the creation of the databases.
• The Musician Credits to DB action now handles all credits: built in and in custom fields. The action can optionally produce a track inclusion column when a single album is selected.
• There is a new action named Split FLAC using Cue File and XLD. All cue files in a selected folder are used to split their referenced files into multiple tracks.
• There is a new Update Files from Track Database set of actions. The actions are run from within a track database and update files (loaded or not). One action updates based on selected rows in the database. The other action uses a Modified column to determine if a file needs to be updated. Once a file is updated, the Modified column is cleared.

      Escape Sequences

• \?pm returns the current state of the preserve modification date/time when saving files setting.

      New Action Statements

• There is a new action statement named Create Container from XML. A container is created from the supplied XML source.
• There is a new action statement named Get Tracks from Apple App Playlist. The statement extracts the paths of tracks in the specified playlist. Specifying Music will extract the paths of all tracks.

      Action Statement Changes

• The Clear statement can now be used to clear a list of named variables.
• The Contents of Folder statement can now optionally return hidden files.
• The Copy Metadata Between Files statement supports a list of UDTI exclusions in named variable Transfer UDTI Exclusions.
• The Create Album/Track Database statements can now specify which export set to use at runtime.
• All container statements which can enter JSON text in a multi line editor will now give error messages and position to an error. We've written our own parser just to handle errors.
• All container statements now return error text in named variable Container Error.
• All Prompt statements: The Continue-Always button mode is changed to Exit which is functionally identical. Continue-Always can no longer be selected. If you edit an action which used Continue-Always you will be notified that changes were made and you'll have to save the action.
• The Compare Numeric statement's compare against zero mode has been removed. The default for new statements is now compare against text with an empty text string which is equivalent to zero. This removes the need to change the mode in order to enter a compare against value
• The Debug statement can now open and position actions to the calling Debug statement, from the call stack at runtime.
• The Extract Data from Container statement has two new modes. You can extract the directed path of a specific row by matching data. You can extract the directed path of all rows containing a specific key. These modes can be used to avoid having to reference array items by their absolute index ... which might change over time.
• The Extract Preference Set statement has new modes to extract the names of all Export Sets; those Export Sets valid to use when creating an album database; those Export Sets valid to use when creating a track database and a list of all actions.
• The Indexed Artwork statement now supports per file indexes and has a new mode which returns an index matched based on the picture type and/or description.
• The Involved People / Musician Credits Functions statement has a new mode called Combine Credits. The credits across all files are combined such that they are the union of the individual credits.
• The MusicBrainz Earliest Recording statements now supports matching by title only.
• The Open Database for Querying statement now sets named variable prefix-DB Type to one of track, album, or standalone.
• The Preferences statement now allows you to change the value of the preserve modification date/time when saving files setting.
• The Prompt statement's User Log mode can now specify an alternate location for the file.
• The Prompt for Fields statement now supports Menu buttons.
• Prompt from Container statement
  • You now open the get file panel for rows which support it clicking on the icon to the right of the Value field.
  • The display of popup rows has been changed to use a custom control which works as expected. The built in controls which were used in the past did not. Potentially editable popup rows now display a down triangle for the icon. Non editable popup rows display an up-down arrow icon.
  • Popup menu items can now optionally be Objects as opposed to Strings. The following keys are processed: name, hidden, disabled
  • Rows can provide a help key which supplies per row help.
  • Rows can provide a getPathPrompt key which is used as a prompt when a get path/folder panel is displayed.
  • Each row can now be disabled based on multiple tests against the state or value of different rows.
  • The Prompt Window Size named variable read and written by the statement now also identifies the width of the Name column.
  • The valueIsPopup item is now a Number as opposed to a Boolean. Older items will work correctly. The valueIsPopup key now distinguishes between popups which take indexes as values; editable text based values and non editable text based values.
  • The popupEditable key is no longer required although it is still supported ... for now.
  • The valueRO item has new settings providing additional granularity.
  • The statement now supports Exit and Menu buttons.
• The Read/Write Plist File statement can now write XML or binary plist files. When reading it sets named variable Read Text File Encoding to XML plist or Binary plist.
• The Repeat For statement will now assume an adjustment value of 1 if it is omitted.
• The Scanner statement's bracketed functions now support a single delimiter to be used as the left and right delimiters.
• The Search Discogs and Search MusicBrainz statements can now search by barcode.
• The Split Field statement has been renamed to Split.
• The Test File Type statement can now specify Vorbis and Opus for additional granularity in OGG files. The file types you are interested in testing can now also be specified at runtime via a list in a named variable.
• The Test if File Exists statement now sets named variables describing if the item was a folder and if it was hidden.
• The Transfer Metadata statement has adjusted return status codes allowing for more granularity. It also supports a list of UDTI exclusions in named variable Transfer UDTI Exclusions.

      Bug Fixes

• The Artwork to folder.jpg statement was displaying as Artwork to folder Icon. The statement executed correctly as only the display was incorrect.
• It was possible to open the Discogs and MusicBrainz wizards when an action was running.
• All multi line text displays now attempt to preserve the position when inserting from a context menu. Far less jumping around.
• The Add Item to Container Array statement's Items in List mode was not handling the delim field correctly. It was losing focus after each character.
• Directed paths produced by the Container Viewer were not always escaped properly for use in an action.
• The Contents of Folder statement had issues with folder paths ending in a space and filenames containing backslash characters.
• The Export to Apple App statement was cancelling batch processing on a error.
• The Logical Set statement was only accepting numeric values. true is now recognized as 1. false previously worked as intended.
• The Prompt statement was enabling Show Step Info when selecting Alert or Critical Alert.
• The Prompt for Text statement was not always giving the text field the focus when the panel was first displayed.
• The Prompt from Container statement:
  • The statement would never show the context menu if the State column was hidden.
  • Rows which were editable popups were not editable if the menu was empty.
  • Setting a menu name to empty was not hiding the menu item as documented.
• The Preferences - Export Sets Yes/No column was cropped on Monterey.
• Yet more tweaks to the writing of the status bar from within an action to force the display faster.
• The Play Sound statement was not saving the correct sound when edited.
• Various sort as in Finder functionality was not always as in the Finder. This manifested mostly with 16 bit Unicode characters.
• The Involved People / Musician Credits Functions statement's Remove Empty Credit function was not working as expected.