Yate V4 Release Notes

Version 4.7.1.1 (8096)

      AcousticBrainz

• The interface has adjusted to support new rate limiting rules.
• The interface has been rewritten to perform far less network accesses when running over more than one file.

      m3u files

• m3u files which were encoded as UTF8 and have an .m3u as opposed to an .m3u8 extension, will be read correctly.

      Bug Fixes

• The Preferences-Video panel had a label which moved if the panel was resized.

Version 4.7.1 (8092)

      Application Help

• There is a new Search Yate Help item on the Help menu.
• The Search Help panel locates topics containing your specified pattern and display's each topic's title. Searching can be done by contains, match start or word boundaries.
• Double clicking on a title or using the context menu, you can launch the associated help page in your browser. In the browser you can use the native find support to locate the pattern.
• There is an option to automatically position the opened content to the search pattern.
• Specifying * as the search pattern will display a list of all the help topics.

      Preferences

• When saving artwork to folder icons, you can now optionally have the corners rounded. Preferences - Artwork has a new setting named Round corners when saving icons. Note that this setting affects the UI and action based saving to folder icon functionality. It also affects the creation of custom toolbar icons for actions.

      Action Statements

• The Remove List Item at Index statement now supports negative indexes with the same logic as the List Item at Index statement.
• The Preferences statement has a new single setting override called Rounded Icon Corners.
• The Remove from iTunes startement will now also remove any retained PIDs.

      MPEG-4 Files

• Up until v4.0, MPEG-4 files which had no audio or video data would not be loaded. As of v4.0, the file could be loaded and edited. These files are damaged and once again will not be loaded.
• MPEG-4 files will now automatically be repaired, under the right conditions, if the low level component containing the audio data is present but has a garbled identifier.

      The Multi Field Editor

• An Exchange function has been added. The contents of two specified fields are exchanged.

      Database Files

• From a database file's context menu you can now create an alias to the file on the desktop. This really only makes sense if you set the file, or all files of the same type, to open in Yate. You can do this in the Finder's Get Info panel.

      File to Tag Templates

• When extracting to a field which requires a numeric value, all extraneous text after the number will automatically be tossed. For example extracting 2 file to a Track field will only retain the '2'.
• See the online help in the File to Tag token editor for additional information and as to how this differs from the Numeric qualifier.

      Blue Text in the Edit Panels

• Previously blue text was used to indicate the presense of control, newline or tab characters in fields where they are not valid.
• Text will now also be blue for extraneous data after the number in a numeric only field.
• When the text is blue, the associated function button will have a menu item named Why is the Text Blue?

      Bug Fixes

• The Discogs Metadata for Release statement was not exporting the full date for the Year key, even when available.
• The Discogs Metadata for Release statement had a potential crash depending on the received JSON data.
• The MusicBrainz Metadata for Release statement was not exporting the following per track keys: Recording date, Recording end date, Recording location and Recording start date.
• When executing an Add to iTunes statement in the Batch Processor the optional import of the PID was not performed unless the Verbose option was set.
• When importing from iTunes, Loves/Dislikes values were not handled correctly.
• The Episode ID field's Synthesize function was not working.
• Worked around an issue on Mac OS 10.14 or later where interaction with iTunes was not freeing resources.
• When batch processing an Access Discogs or Access MusicBrainz statement would crash if the action has a Batch Start sub action.
• The Clear User Defined Items statement was missing tMDb and Yate as sources.

Version 4.7.0.2 (8036)

      Bug Fixes

• The Repeat With statement's escaping of the source delimiter was broken for a source list in a named variable. Introduced in v4.7. Both the Repeat With and Build List statements now always handle escape sequences in the source delimiter field. Previously when the delimiter field was interpreted as characters, it was not unescaped.

Version 4.7.0.1 (8034)

      Bug Fixes

• The Preferences-General-Custom Fields configurator was validating the supplied FLAC/OGG name for the APE field.
• Attempting to set an FLAC/OGG/APE Custom Field mapping to a name already mapped as an Involved People List Item would cause a crash.
• The new inline expression sequences were documented incorrectly as \\x(expression\\x.) and \\x(expression\\x) ... The correct sequences are \x(expression\x.) and \x(expression\x)

Version 4.7 (8033)

      Additional Component Installation

• This version of the application requires installation of a few components.
• When you run the application you will be prompted to install the components.
• There is a new menu item named Install Additional Components on the Yate menu. This is primarily to handle the case where internet connectivity may be down when you first run the application.
• To handle the case where you run Yate in a secure environment with limited or no connectivity, instructions are supplied in a new topic called Manually Installing Required Components which can be found in the main help file.
• This version is the first where the application is hardened and notarized by Apple.

      iTunes

• As is currently done when saving files, Refresh iTunes will now export library only settings enabled in Preferences-iTunes-Auto Export. This means if you made changes while not linked to iTunes, you can now link and do a Refresh iTunes without having to also do an export. This change is also implemented in the associated action statement.

      Dark Mode

• The online help now enables the new Safari dark mode support.
• The inline display of online help in an Action Editor Window will now change its appearance when the window displays in dark mode.

      Custom Fields

• You can specify that a Custom Field should be displayed as a Checkbox via the Custom Panel Editor and as a Yes/No value in an Export Set. Previously there was no method of specifying a Yes/No display when a custom field is associated with a main window column. In Preferences-General-Custom Fields you can now specify that an associated main window column is to be displayed and edited as a Yes/No (boolean) value.

      Main Window

• Columns which display a value of Yes or No, now display ✓ for Yes and empty for No. Double clicking on any of these columns allows you to select Yes or No for all selected files. When inline editing, you can enter Y, Yes, True, any non zero integer value and most Unicode check mark characters for a value of Yes. Any other value is treated as No. The entered value is case insensitive.
• The Audio Properties table in the File Browser and on the Audio-General panel no longer has an ID3 Version field. The field has been renamed to Tag Scheme and displays additional information.
• There is a new built in sort preset called Video Sort available on the table header's content menu.
• Additional help topics on column layout presets, column sorting and autosizing are available on the main help page.

      MusicBrainz

• There is a new Preferences-MusicBrainz setting called Always load Release Group. When this is set, a release group will always be loaded enabling the search for information which might not be present in the release. Currently this additional information includes Relationship URLs which can include a variety of interesting links to sources such as WikiPedia, lyrics, etc.
• Some tracks in a release have location/date metadata. This is of particular interest to people organizing classical music libraries. Roon is capable of reading the metadata. Four new normalized UDTIs have been introduced named: Recording Date, Recording Start Date, Recording End Date and Recording Location. There are four associated import items available in the wizard. Note that MusicBrainz returns the start and end dates. The Recording Date is included simply for completeness and if imported is always the same as Recording Start Time.

      MP3 Files

• When reading MP3 files which contain multiple tag constructs, the priority is ID3V2, APE, ID3V1.
• Note that APE tags are always tossed when an MP3 file is written.

      Overriding the Open Mode

• By default, Yate preserves its Open Mode settings. You can now override this behaviour in three different situations. You configure the functionality in Preferences-File List.

      Key Entry in Preferences

• In order to avoid errors when pasting keys into Preferences for APISEEDS and Fanart, the keys are now sanitized. After removing control characters and spaces, the first non empty line is retained as the key.

      Properties

• There is a new Ape Version property which is set for all files containing APE tags (including MP3).

      Action Statement Changes

• The Manipulate Artwork statement can now explicitly set a JPEG encoding to Baseline or Progressive. You can also now explicitly set the compression factor to the system default. Some options, previously restricted, are now available in more situations to avoid unnecessary manipulations.
• The Contents of Folder statement has a new option called Full paths. When set, full paths as opposed to filenames or folder names will be returned. A Choose button was also added.
• The Enumerate Tag Sets and Fields statement now inverts inverted Tag Sets before returning them.
• The Save statement's, Save MP3 files which have an ID3V1 tag option has been renamed to Save files with non standard tag containers. Essentially the semantics have been extended to force save any file which contains a non standard tag container. eg. APE or FLAC files with ID3 tags
• The List Count statement has a new option to save per file counts.
• The Exists statement now allows the specification of the set of fields to be tested as a list of symbolic field names which can effectively be specified at runtime.
• There is a new statement named Prompt for Fields. The statement can be used at runtime to choose fields. Full granularity is provided as to what fields are displayed and which are initially set.
• There is a new statement named Set Tag Set. The statement takes a list of fields and applies it to an existing tag set or automatically creates a new one. If there are no fields in the list, an existing tag set will be removed.

      Escape Sequences

• Numeric expressions can now be evaluated in escape sequences.
  • \x(expression\x) will evaluate expression as in the Evaluate Expression statement and may contain nested escape sequences. Note that the terminating sequence has a leading \ character. If the expression cannot be evaluated nothing is inserted. If the expression evaluation works, the inserted text will always be an integer value.
  • \x(expression\.x) will evaluate expression as in the Evaluate Expression statement and may contain nested escape sequences. Note that the terminating sequence has a leading \ character. If the expression cannot be evaluated nothing is inserted. If the expression evaluation works, the inserted text may or may not include a fractional component.
• If the Shift key is depressed when invoking the context menu containing the Yate Field and Yate Initial Field submenus, all fields as opposed to only those with a single or default item are displayed .

      Database Viewers

• There is a new context menu item called Display Column Mappings. The database's column mappings will be displayed in the Log Viewer. Essentially export set metadata will be displayed.

      Cosmetic Changes

• The [+], [-], etc. buttons under tables in various panels now display larger than in the past.
• The Discogs and MusicBrainz wizards' Release window now changes the size of both tables with Cmd+ and Cmd-. Previously only the bottom table was adjusted.
• Link controls on edit panels are now blue.

      Bug Fixes

• The Set Open Mode statement was not preserving a setting of Playlist mode.
• Preferences-General-Notifications-Remove Notification on Exit in Prefs-Notifications was never enabled. Introduced when Growl support was dropped.
• The Create Stubs and Set Action Test State from File Type statements were not properly enabling WavPack.
• The List Manipulate statement when performing Remove One/Match, was not properly handling empty delimiter fields. They should have been defaulted to \~.
• When creating databases and preserving the sidecar file, the test for equality was a little too lax.
• While not really a bug, the regular expression Return Ranges+ option was returning a ridiculously large number for a not found capture group. The length field was correct at 0. Simply for legibility reasons, a -1 will now be returned instead. ie. -1,0
• When searching for Variable 0 in an action editor, a Set Action Test State statement which was not using variables as a source, would be matched.
• The Category field when not associated with a list was displaying the same list components as Content Advisory.
• The Enumerate Tag Sets and Fields statement with the Create a list of all non simple text fields option was not returning the correct list.
• The Action Editor window's Find panel was not displaying the correct per-type choices.

Version 4.6.1 (7940)

      This is largely a cleanup release. However, there are still a few goodies thrown in.

      Safari and Mojave

• Safari has issues when being launched with a page contained in a application bundle. (such as Yate's online help). This only happens on Mojave and results in a 'Safari Can't Open the Page' message. Once Safari is open, subsequent pages load correctly.
• We've attempted to solve the issue by launching Safari, if not already open, and then after a delay telling it to open the page. While this seems to work most of the time, there is no guarantee that it will always work. The problem can always be solved by reissuing the help request once Safari has opened.

      File to Tag Templates

• An additional Optional qualifier is available. While Optional and Optional Once make a preceding token optional, Optional Stop makes all subsequent tokens optional.

      Preferences - Lists

• A new control is available to enable the copying and moving of list items between lists.

      Action Manager

• The Action Manager has a new column named Version. The column will display the value specified on a new Version statement embedded in the associated action.

      Action Editor Windows

• Statements can now be marked as being a favourite via the context menu.
• The list of statements panel has a new submenu called Add Statement which displays the favourites.

      Action Statement Changes

• There is a new statement named Version. This statement can specify a version number to be displayed in the Action Manager.
• The File to Tag From Content statement has a new option to save the results as a key-value list as opposed to applying the changes. There is also a new option to extract the template components. The action test state is now set so you can determine the success/failure of the function.
• The Prompt for Text statement now supports the setting of formatting requirements to control what is input.
• The List Contains statement has a new option to save all matching list indexes.
• The Test statement has been renamed Test & Run. The statement now requires that an action be specified. Existing uses where an action is not specified are automatically changed to the appropriate Exit or Stop statement.
• There is a new Insert Path context menu item in the source field of appropriate Set commands. The item prompts you to select a path to a file or folder to be inserted. At times this may be easier to use than dragging a path from the Finder.
• The Auto Search for Artwork statement is now valid when grouped. Note that this is far less efficient than when run stepwise.
• The Prompt statement can now be optionally suppressed when run through the Batch Processor.
• The Indexed Artwork statement can now be used to determine if an artwork item is a progressive JPEG. Note that the Manipulate Artwork statement can be used to convert a progressive JPEG to a baseline JPEG.

      Changes made to Deprecated Items

• The Replace statement no longer has a Set state option. State is always set.
• The Find & Remove statement no longer has a Set state option. State is always set.
• The Open URL statement no longer has a Set State option. State is always set. The Report/Set State options have been replaced with a new option called Silent.
• The Regular Expression statement no longer has a Set state option. State is always set.
• The Truncate statement no longer has a Set state option. State is always set.
• The User Defined Manipulation statement no longer has a Set state option. State is always set.
• The Transfer Metadata statement no longer supports the saving of properties to a named variable.

      List Sorting

• Yate has long used its own sort routine when issuing a sort where integers are relevant. This is typically called 'sort as in Finder'. This routine handled leading and trailing integers and avoided a few pitfalls in the standard Apple API. The routine has been completely rewritten to make it more classical friendly. It will now handle integers anywhere in the strings which makes it much better when sorting strings with multiple embedded integers.

      FLAC/OGG/APE/WAVPACK

• When reading files if multiple low level items are mapped to the same field, identical values will not be displayed more than once. eg. if YEAR and DATE are both mapped to the Year field and they both contain 2019, the Year field will display 2019 ... not 2019;;;2019

      Bug Fixes

• The File to Tag context submenu for Variables was labelled Variable 15.
• The File to Tag from Content statement was not being processed when executing an Export. This means that the template was not placed into the plist file.
• The Move statement was not clearing the Retained Path properties on entry. This means if you did more than one move on the same files and the second failed, the older values were not cleared.
• The Auto Size menu was being displayed in Preferences-Shortcuts on older OS versions where it should not have been displayed.
• The Test & Run statement with a combination of the Grouped, Once and Exit settings was not working. The Exit semantics were not applied.
• The Regular Expression statement's return Matches+ options was not working. It was working in the Regular Expression Tester.
• Multiple item highlighting was not working correctly in the Regular Expression tester for some modes.
• When saving property lists with the Transfer Metadata statement to a variable > 9, the data was not saved.
• Parameters in variables > 9 on the Run External statement were not passed correctly.
• Searching for a track variable in an Action Editor Window went into an infinite loop if the action contained a \A0 or \A1 escape sequence.
• Certain combinations of the Extract Replacement Set statement were not retaining the correct save-as value.
• v4.6 regression: The FLAC/OGG and APE preference mapping controller's F buttons were not working.
• The APE preference mapping controller's 1 button was not working.
• Files with APE tags were not properly merging multiple low level items mapped to the same field.

Version 4.6 (7879)

      New Audio File Support

• Monkey's Audio (.ape) and WavPack (.wv) audio formats are now supported.
• Yate will read ID3V1, ID3V2, APEV1 and APEV2 tags in .ape files. Typically only APEV2 tags are written, however you can elect to additionally write an ID3V1 tag.
• Yate will read ApeV1 and ApeV2 tags in .wv files. Only APEV2 tags are written.

      Preferences

• There is a new section called Ape Mappings used to control the mappings for .ape and .wv files.
• The Audio section has a new tab for APE settings. These settings apply to .ape and .wv files.
• New settings in Audio-Common to support the configuration of the BPM field to allow fractional values. These options control the display and writing of the values. note that for compatibility reasons the standard low level mapping will always contain an integer value. A fully managed second tag is used to store BPM values with a fractional component. In the UI you only see and edit the value with a (potential) fractional component.
• The File List section has a new option named Auto size column widths after loading files. Essentially after loading files an Auto Size All Columns Limited will automatically be executed. All columns except those that are excessively wide will be resized to a full display width.
• Tag Sets can now be specified as inverted. ie. Process all but the Selected Fields. When saving an inverted set from any list of fields, the new Tag Set will retain the inverted property.
• New Shortcut menu to access Auto Size functions.

      Auto Sizing Columns

• On windows that support the auto sizing of columns a new standardized submenu has been created.
• New limited modes are provided which are essentially an auto size followed by a downsize.

      Regular Expression Tester

• There is a new function mode called Return Ranges+. This is the same as Return Ranges, except that capture group ranges are also returned.
• The above functionality is also available in the Regular Expression action statement. Interfacing with the Regular Expression Tester is provided.

      The Multi Field Editor

• The Replace function now supports regular expressions.

      Action Changes

• Statements which directly reference audio file types now also support APE tags or .ape and .wv files.

      Combined Credits Editor

• Changes to the Known Credits table:
  • ~1000 MusicBrainz credits are now displayed and may be filtered.
  • ~250 of these credits are new to the table.
• Changes to the Track Credits table:
  • You can now swap the position of the Person and Credit columns by dragging a column header.
  • Simple credit items, eg (Artist), now sort inline ignoring the ().
  • All columns can be sorted.

      Query Databases

• Opening a Query Database will no longer fail if an associated sidecar file does not exist. The required fields from the sidecar file will be synthesized from the column headers. Note that a sidecar file will not be written when closing the Query Database. To auto generate a sidecar file, simply open the database in Yate and save it.

      Miscellaneous

• Audio File Health Check has been updated to process .ape and .wv files.
• The Repair Files from Audio File Health Check Log action has been updated.
• For users of Audirvana+, an updated template is provided which reflects the current version's extended fields.

      Bug Fixes

• Modifying a FLAC mapping associated with a Custom Field, in Preferences-FLAC Mappings, did not reflect the changes to the Custom Field configurator.
• The roles (credits) in FLAC Performer mappings now handle multiple levels of nested parenthesis.
• When FLAC tags were written, they were effectively being trimmed. This did not effect most users, however there are times when the exact format of a tag must be preserved.
• The 'current' main window filter was not being imported/exported.
• Main window and database viewer filter panels were not resizing properly.
• When displaying the Multi Field Editor via a field's associated function button, Process All but the Selected Fields was not being reset to Process the Selected Fields.
• The main window's filter editor was crashing when filtering on item types which contain a space followed by a left parenthesis.
• Fixed a crash in the Column Value List from Query Database action statement when caseless was selected.
• The iTunes Grouping Compatibility property's G flag was not cleared if required after saving a file. The appropriate changes were saved, only the display did not update.
• When importing data from a preview in a Regular Expression statement, the statement's display line was not updated until you clicked off the line.
• When adding to the staging playlist from a different database, duplicates could be entered.
• When modifying the Test Only setting in the Export Metadata statement, you had to click off the statement to view the change.

Version 4.5.0.1 (7750)

      Bug Fixes

• Regression: The FLAC mapping for Involved People List Item was not appearing in the list of available fields.
• When importing a Custom Panel: if a custom field was on the panel and its definition only differed from a existing custom field by index, the panel was not correctly adjusted to reference the existing field.

Version 4.5 (7744)

      General

• There is a new field named Category. The primary intent for the creation of this field was as a location to store the iTunes Category data.
• The iTunes Category field, which can be useful as an alternative to the Grouping field, is not directly editable in iTunes.
• The Category field takes part in the general mechanism used to synch iTunes library only metadata such as Ratings, Skip When Shuffling, etc.
• Category is on the More Info editing panel.
• Category is accessible as a main window column.
• Category is accessible from the main window's advanced filter
• Category is accessible via export sets.
• Category is accessible via the Compare iTunes Values panel.
• Category can be associated with a list in Preferences-Lists.
• Category is accessible in the Get iTunes Value, Export to iTunes, Fill Lists and Import from iTunes action statements.

      Shortcuts

• On macOS 10.13 (High Sierra) and 10.14 (Mohave), the Preferences Shortcuts panel now provides access to many items on the main window's function buttons, Database and Action Editor context menus.

      Other Preference Changes

• The iTunes preference panel now supports Category on the Fields of Interest, Auto Import and Auto Export tabs.
• The Database preference panel has a new field to enable the use of the Delete key to delete database rows.
• Default characters are now provided for Love columns as the characters exist in all supported OS versions.
• When the Staging Playlist Database Columns Export set is created it no longer has a Duration column. It was used for the timing display which is also provided by the Time column. The Duration column became redundant when the ability to provide timing from a Time column was added. You can safely delete the Duration item from an existing Export Set.
• A FLAC/Ogg mapping for Category is automatically created.
• The MusicBrainz preference panel has a new option to specify that only a single genre should be retained. Previously this was based on the Discogs setting of the same name.
• The MusicBrainz preference panel has a new option to provide more granularity when determining the source of genre metadata.
• The Export Set column named Bool has been renamed to Yes/No.
• An OOB item in an Export Set can be marked as being a Yes/No column.
• The Video preference panel has a new option to control how Musician Credits and Involved People should be sorted after an import from tMDB. Previously Credits and People were always sorted.

      Main Window

• When inline editing in the list of files, the context menu contains the Yate Transfomations submenu.
• Actions>Copy Metdata has a new item called Copy One to Many. This function copies metadata from the first (topmost) selected file to all other selected files. The set of fields which will be copied is specified in Actions>Copy Metadata>Copy Selected Metadata... which also provides access to the new functionality.

      Database Viewers

• If a database contains a Discogs Master ID, Discogs Release ID or MusicBrainz Release ID, you can now invoke the context menu anywhere on a row to access the menu items to launch the wizards. Previously you had to click on the relevant column.
• Empty rows can now be added to standalone databases.
• Empty rows can now be added to databases while the database is filtered.
• You can now remove, add and rename columns from the table header's context menu.
• The table's context menu item 'Remove Results Column' has been eliminated.
• The search panel can be expanded to enable additional search configurability and to enable text replacement. The expansion is done via the triangle control at the extreme right of the panel.
• When inline editing, the context menu contains the Yate Transfomations submenu.
• Double clicking on a cell in a Yes/No column will toggle the value.
• Double clicking on a cell in a Rating column will display a menu of rating values.
• Double clicking on a cell in a Love column will display a menu of love values.
• You can now run actions from a database viewer's context menu. An action is made available on the Run Action menu by specifying it in the Action Manager's Menu column. (new code of D). When run from this menu, the database will automatically be opened as a Query Database using the new grab option on the Open Query Database statement. The action will know which rows are selected. For more information see the online help for Database Viewers and the Open Query Database action statement.

      The Action Manager

• Actions can now be associated with the Database Viewer's Run Action menu.

      The Action Editor

• Action Editor Windows now have context menu items to enable, disable or toggle Debug statements.
• Action Editor Windows now have a context menu to toggle the enable/disable state of individual statements.

      Action Statements

• The Dump Variables statement has been renamed to Debug.
• The Close Database statement has a new Discarding Changes setting.
• The Open Query Database statement has a new option to specify that you would like to grab an open database. With this option you can have query database statements interact directly with a database open in the UI. Named variables are created to specify if the grabbing state was established and to describe which rows are currently selected in the grabbed database. See the online help for this statement for more nuances of grabbing.
• New action statement named Open Database Information. Named variables are created to describe all open databases and the current state of each database. More information is supplied in the online help.
• The LyricWiki Access statement is now deprecated.

      The Discogs & MusicBrainz Wizards

• The id fields on the respective search panels are now validated.
• The id field on the Discogs search panel can now contain an id in any of the following forms: #, r#, [r#], m#, [m#]

      Audio Files

• In Yate, the Track field is always an integer value. The application has long supported a Track Position UDTI or Custom Variable. When importing from Discogs or MusicBrainz, the automatic setting of this metadata is supported. The main window has a column named Position which displays the data and a Custom Edit panel named Info+ can be downloaded from the Yate Resources web page which does as well.
• When an audio file is read and the Track value is not an integer (eg. A1, A2, B2, etc.), the value will now automatically be displayed in the Track Position UDTI or Custom Variable. The next time the file is written, the moving of the values will stick.

      Bug Fixes

• Preferences-Shortcuts was displaying a meaningless Ratings row.
• The Show in Path Finder menu item was visible in the main window's context menu even if Path Finder support was not enabled.
• The Custom Panel Editor's panel builder was using a smaller font for checkbox controls than in the built in panels.
• Regression: The Credits Formatter was messed up unless Correct was specified.
• All Query Database action statements now add their identifying prefix to the Insert Query Database submenu.
• Apply Database Values to Open Files from an Album Database did not work if the album name changed ... even if a Yate Album ID was present.
• Display in File Browser was not working from the File menu, only from the main window context menu.

Version 4.4 (7666)

      Lyrics

• Access to a lyrics download service is now provided.
• There are a number of help pages describing how to get an API key and how to configure and use the service.
• The easiest way to start is by opening the new Preferences-Lyrics section's online help. Remember, so as not to mess with your current sort order, all new Preference sections are initially at the end of the list.
• When searching for lyrics, you can exclude tracks based on a variety of conditions including specific genre types, Skip When Shuffling and the presence of an Instrumental UDTI or Custom Field with a non zero value.
• You can easily check for database updates on tracks where a match could not be made with retry intervals such as 1 Month, etc. When looking for updates, no lookup will be performed unless the specified retry interval is satisfied.

      New Audio File Support

• Yate now supports Ogg containers for Vorbis and Opus streams. Note that files with multiple streams are not supported.
• Files with extensions .ogg, .oga and .opus may be loaded.
• Ogg files share their low level mappings with Flac files. There is only one preference section to define these mappings. Preferences - Flac Mappings has been renamed to Flac/Ogg Mappings.

      Custom Panel Editor

• User Defined Text Info items and Custom Fields can now be marked as requiring a checkbox display.

      Custom Field Editor Editor

• The Flac mapping field is now used for Flac and Ogg files.

      Preferences

• New Lyrics section
• The Flac Mappings section has been renamed to Flac/Ogg Mappings.
• Audio Section
  • The Flac tab has been renamed to Flac/Ogg.
  • A few new settings relating to Ogg files have been added.
• Actions Section
  • Action Statement List Background and Action Manager Background popup menus now have the same choice of colours. For those 10.14 users who missed the gray background for the old Window Background, gray has been added.
  • The Window Background colour choice has been renamed to System Default.
• Export Sets
  • There is a new column named Bool. User Defined Text Info Items and Custom Fields can be marked as being boolean. Yes or No. This affects the display of the column in Database Viewers.

      Main Window

• New toolbar button for lyrics searches.
• New toolbar button to save only selected modified files. The original Save button saves all open loaded modified files. Note that this functionality was always available on the File>Save Selected Files submenu.
• When looking at a value in a function button's Chooser, there is now a new Rearrange option which lets you drag and drop items.

      Databases

• Database views will now display durations on the status bar if the database contains a Time or Duration column. Previously a Duration column was necessary.
• Discogs and MusicBrainz referenced track databases will now use a Time or Duration column for track durations. Previously only Duration worked.
• Fields which default to boolean, such as Part of a Compilation, or are explicitly defined as boolean now coerce edited values to 1 or empty. 'empty' always has a 0 value but has some efficiencies in avoiding the saving of unnecessary tags to files.
• The tooltip for the context menu's 'This is an ... Database' menu item, displays the file's character encoding.

      Combined Credits Editor

• The closing Apply button has been renamed to Rebuild All Credit Fields & Close.

      Renaming

• Renaming is now done on a separate thread and progress is displayed.

      Action Statements

• The Build List statement is inherently stepwise so that a single list can be produced based on the content from multiple files. However, there are cases when you might want individual lists produced. For this reason a new Grouped option has been added.
• There is a new statement to get lyrics.
• Move statement previews now insert {field name} for empty Fields as opposed to reporting errors.
• Preferences-Lyrics allows you tp specify a list of genres to be excluded when looking for lyrics. The Preferences statement has a new individual setting which can be used to override the list.

Version 4.3.0.2 (7588)

      Bug Fixes

• Toolbar items containing more than one button could not be set to a smaller size and would not display correctly in the Toolbar customization panel. This only happened on macOS 10.14.
• The application could crash if successive changes to the size of the toolbar icons occurred. This only happened on macOS 10.14.
• The List Contains Test statement was not clearing the optional destination index and item on match failure.
• Regression introduced in v4.0.1: Removing characters from the end of a field using the Remove & Insert statement or the Multi Field Editor was messed up.
• Regression introduced in v4.3: The Combined Credits Editor was only splitting fields if the Advanced List Settings for a field was set to All. CCE should be acceptable.
• ...and while not really a bug, the application will no longer require accessibility privilege on macOS 10.14. Note that it still requires the Automation privilege.

Version 4.3.0.1 (7582)

      Bug Fix

• On macOS 10.14 if you edited a custom panel which has more rows than the default number of rows, the display was cropped at the top of the panel. Rendering outside the editor worked as expected.

Version 4.3 (7581)

Lots of changes including support for macOS 10.14 Mojave's dark mode.

      MacOS 10.14 (Mojave)

• The first time you attempt to access iTunes, you will be asked to grant permission to Yate. If you do not, iTunes interaction will fail. The permission can be re-enabled in System Preferences-Security & Privacy-Privacy-Automation. Note that without the permission, all iTunes functionality will fail.

      Preferences

• There is a new Preference section called Cue Sheets. This section has various settings to control importing metadata to single file cue sheets and the creating of multi file cue sheets. Remember that new Preference sections are added at the end of the section list in order to avoid changing your sort order. You can rearrange the sections by dragging or by sorting from the context menu.
• There is a new Preference section called Credits Editor. Settings for the Combined Credits editor have been removed from Preferences-File List.
• Preferences - General has a new configuration button for Dark Mode. The new panel lets you select a System, Always Light or Always Dark appearance for most windows. By default, every configurable window is set to System. Note that these settings do nothing unless you are running on macOS 10.14 Mojave.
• Preferences - General has a new field named Yate UID. If you have more than one copy of Yate and you want to be able to determine in an action which instance is running, this field is for you. The new escape sequence \YI will insert the identifier.
• File to Tag Templates now interpret \- (tab) and \n (newline) escape sequences. This is for use in the expanded File to Tag from Content statement.
• Preferences - File List now supplies more granularity when auto-updating databases. You can now choose to only update existing items.
• Preferences- iTunes has a new setting so that you can select which playlist gets written when the new Add to iTunes Playlist functionality is used.
• Rename Templates now support Sentence case.
• A new Rename Template named Force Latin-1 will have been imported. The template renames a track's containing folder and filename to be ISO Latin-1 without changing anything else.
• Preferences - Export has a new dedicated export field called iTunes PID. Used to create iTunes playlists from any track database containing the field.
• Preferences - Databases has a new setting to hide or show the 'Add to Staging Playlist' menu item if the database is not already open.
• Growl support has been removed. All supported OS versions have support for Notification center. If you had notifications configured to use Growl, you will be switched to Notification Center.

      Advanced List Settings

• These settings are shared by the Combined Credits Editor and all other functionality which can access preference lists. The settings can be accessed from Preferences - Credits Editor and Preferences - Lists.
• These setting determine the rules to split fields with delimiters other than the multi-value delimiter.
• There is also an option to enable the standardization of the representation of fields when typing in a field which auto saves to a list.
• There is a single set of alternate delimiters which can be specified for spliting and reconstructing fields.
• Every preference list can disable the non standard delimiters or enable them for the CCE or all editing functions.
• The settings can be used to improve the ability to add single items to preference lists.
• The non standard delimiters do not replace the multi-value delimiter which remains the only delimiter to be used when differentiating multiple items when reading and writing audio files.
• The default settings ensure the same functionality of preceding versions.
• The following functionality can be affected by these settings:
  • editing a field on an editing panel which is associated with a list.
  • editing a field which is associated with a list inline in the file list.
  • the Choose Value functionality.
  • manually adding an item to a preference list.
  • inline editing of an item in a preference list.
  • the Fill Lists action statement.
  • the Standardize Case of List Items action statement.
  • the Combined Credits Editor.
• Far more detailed information is available in the Advanced Delimiter Settings panel's online help.

      Playlist Staging Database

• It can be tedious to use the main window to accumulate tracks for a playlist. You might want to load various albums and preview tracks before adding them to a playlist.
• There is now support to easily add tracks to a staging playlist database. You can add tracks from the main window or from any Track dadabase.
• When all your tracks have been accumulated, you can save the playlist as an m3u file or as an iTunes playlist.
• Support has been added to the Database Viewer to randomize row order.
• The functionality is available on the Files menu and via a toolbar button.
• There is a new help topic called Playlists and Playlist Staging on the main help page.

      Main Window

• Lot's of menu reorganization has occurred. There is also a new iTunes menu which coalesces all of the various iTunes menu items. The Ratings submenu, now on the Edit menu, has been renamed to Edit Rating Values. The Database ID menu item has been renamed Yate Database IDs.
• The File menu has a new item named Create Cue File. This item creates a cue sheet which references all selected files.
• The Yate>Reset Built in Items menu has a new Reset List Mappings item.
• New Edit menu item to select a specific row in a database.
• Edit panel function button Choose Value functionality has been enhanced such that all fields associated with preference lists have the ability to successively add items from the list.
• Edit Panel preset buttons have a new context menu item called 'Help for Edit Panel'.
• Whenever a function button has an Add to List item, there will also be an Add to List Ignoring Alt Delims item.
• There is a new toolbar button for Add to Staging Playlist.
• There is a new Add to iTunes Playlist item on the File menu. All selected tracks will be added to an iTunes playlist specified in Preferences-iTunes.
• There is a new toolbar button for Add to iTunes Playlist.
• The File Browser will no longer be updated when the main window is 'locked down'. This is typically when the activity spinner is on. When the activity ends, the File Browser will be updated if necessary.
• Typically when you want to choose an item from a list for a field, you click on the disclosure button to the right of the field. This allows you to choose the desired list item. If you wish to see all list items containing the text in the field, you can use the new List Items Containing Text in Field menu item. The new menu item is available on a function button's menu and the application's Edit menu so that a keyboard shortcut can be applied. The application menu item or an assigned keyboard shortcut will only work while you are editing an appropriate field.

      The Multi-Value Delimiter, Fields and Preference Lists

• Various editing functionality such as autocompletes, list selection from a popup menu, etc. are now multi-value delimiter aware. This makes it far easier to add and maintain multiple items in fields. There is a new help topic with the same name as this section. The main changes are:

  Autocompletes

  When a field is associated with a preference list, only the text following the last multi-value delimiter sequence is autocompleted.
  
  

  Selecting a list item from a popup menu

  If a field contains a multi-value delimiter, any item chosen from a popup menu will be appended to the end of the field. A multi-value delimiter sequence will be inserted if required. The append mode can also be forced by holding down the Option key when clicking on the field's disclosure button. When the popup menu is displayed and in append mode, the field's text will display in green.
  
  

  List Items Containing Text in Field

  When applied to a field containing a multi-value delimiter, only the text following the last multi-value delimiter is evaluated and overwritten.

      Yate Transformations

• The Sort menu item is now available in all text fields describing audio fields which can contain multiple values. When used in a multi-line text field, a newline character is the item delimiter. When used in a single-line text field, the multi-value delimiter is the item delimiter.
• There is a new item named Sort Excluding First. This is the same as Sort with the exception that the first item is not included in the sort and always remains first.

      Case Transformations

• Support for Sentence Case has been added. Unlike the Capitalize First mode, Sentence Case is period (.) aware. The mode has been added to the following places:
  • The Yate Transformations menu
  • Rename Templates
  • The Case statement

      The Action Manager

• There is a new column named Priority. The column only serves to enable you to establish a specific sort order. The highest priority is 1, then 2, ... then 9, followed by the default (lowest) priority which is displayed as ·
• The Menu column can now be directly edited by selecting a single action and then by clicking in the column.
• The new Priority column can be edited for multiple items from the context menu. It can also be set for a single item by selecting it and then clicking in the Priority column.

      Action Statements

• There is a new statement named Create Cue File which creates a multi file cue sheet.
• There is a new statement named Embed Cue Sheet which embeds an existing cue sheet into a track's metadata.
• There is a new statement named Export Embedded Cue Sheet which saves an embedded cue sheet to the file system..
• There is a new statement named Rename Cue Sheet File which can be used to adjust the name of a cue file after renaming or moving a same named audio file.
• There is a new action statement named Copy Non Audio Files. Same interface as Move Non Audio Files.
• There is a new action statement named Is Database Open.
• There is a new action statement named Is Query Database Open.
• There is a new action statement named Lock / Unlock Database. The statement can also be used to test the lock state of an open database.
• There is a new action statement named Add to iTunes Playlist. The action statement differs from the UI variant in that a playlist can be named.
• There is a new action statement named Build Component List. The statement builds a list of components using a list of delimiters. The statement uses the same logic as provided by the new Advanced List Settings.
• The Open Database statement will no longer force a database window to the front if it is already open. There is also a new Silent setting which disables the reporting of errors through the UI.
• The Case statement now supports Sentence case. The statement can also now be configured to transform items in a list.
• The File to Tag from Content statement has a new 'Treat the content as simple text' option. This option disables the File to Tag path component handling.
• The Compare Numeric Test statement has four new validation tests which can be performed. The application typically treats integer values as whatever leading digits are available in a field. The new tests allow you to determine if a field actually represents a number, an integer, a negative integer or a positive integer. The statement also has two new convenience functions called Is True and Is False.
• The Update Database and Remove Items from Database statements are now valid when executing grouped.
• The Ignore files statement can be based on a variable being false as well as true.
• The Standardize Case of List Items statement has ben renamed to Standardize on List Items.

      Properties

• There is a new file property called iTunes Grouping Compatibility. This property only applies to MP3 and AIFF files. The return value describes the compatibility state of the file when loaded. It also describes the current state of the application level Maximim iTunes Grouping-Work Name compatibility option. This property can be used to determine if a file should be force saved. More information can be found in the online help for the Get Property action statement.

      Discogs

• The wizard now detects when a single file is selected and it has a corresponding cue file of the same name or an embedded cue sheet.
• The intent is that when you have an audio file which was ripped to contain an entire CD in a single audio file, you can now import metadata into the cue file which was produced at the same time.

      MusicBrainz

• The wizard now detects when a single file is selected and it has a corresponding cue file of the same name or an embedded cue sheet.
• The intent is that when you have an audio file which was ripped to contain an entire CD in a single audio file, you can now import metadata into the cue file which was produced at the same time.
• The wizard now honours the Latin Artist Names option, if set, when accumulating credits. ie. not just for Artist and Album Artist names.
• If a credit is described as 'other instrument' and a qualifier is available, the qualifier is used as the instrument name.

      Database Viewers

• Database files can now be locked. When a database is locked all updating and removing of items from the application's main window is disabled. When files are saved, no updating will occur regardless of the auto-update on save setting. The Open Database action statement's 'Update database values after opening' option is also disabled. The only means of modifying content in a locked database from an action is via the Update Database and Remove Items from Database statements. Note that locking a database has no effect on editing within the database. When a database is locked, a lock icon is displayed in the window's title bar.
• The View Options panel has a new option to override the application's default appearance for these viewers. You can select a Default, Always Light or Always Dark appearance. Note that these settings do nothing unless you are running on macOS 10.14 Mojave.
• If a database has a defined Duration column, the status bar will display the total time of the selected rows or of all rows (<= 1 row selected).
• If you hold down the Option key the table header's context menu item Saved Sort will change to Randomize.
• When the new Staging Playlist is open you can add tracks to it directly from any open Track database. ie. you do not have to load the tracks.
• Track databases containing the new iTunes PID column can directly create an iTunes playlist ... without linking.
• Track databases containing the new iTunes PID column can add tracks to the iTunes Staging Database ... without linking.
• The Position column is now editable.
• Various query database action statements return error messages associated with a particular row in a database. The Edit menu now has a Select Row Number menu item which you can use to locate the row in question.
• When you delete rows in a database, the row immediately before the first deleted row will be selected and made visible.
• There is a new context menu item called Apply Clipboard to Cells. Cells in selected rows in the clicked column will be set to the contents of the clipboard.

      Miscellaneous

• Much faster loading when lots of individual tracks are added at once especially with Open Path from Clipboard.

      Bug Fixes

• At some point the MusicBrainz wizard stopped displaying the correct disc counts on search results.
• If you had an Access Discogs or Access MusicBrainz statement which referenced a named import set, the set was not included if the containing action was exported.
• Name changes or deletions of Discogs or MusicBrainz import sets were not propagated through actions.
• One of the last updates in v3.x messed up some of the list mappings (Preferences-Lists). The converter to v4 preferences made the issue worse. It is possible that some fields are assigned to incorrect lists. For example the Composer field may be mapped to the Artist list as opposed to the Composer list. You can fix the issue and validate your mappings by looking at Preferences-Lists. Simply adjust any mapping which is incorrect. Alternately you can reset all list mappings to their correct out-of-the box settings via The Yate>Reset Built in Items>Reset List Mappings item. Anyone updating from version v3.x to v4.x from now on will have their list mappings reset.
• Autocomplete/list fields such Artist, Composer, etc. will no longer change the text to empty when dismissing the popup and mixed is displayed.
• Date/Time stamps were displayed with am/pm indicators for certain locales. This was not the intent as time stamps should always be YYYY-MM-DDTHH:MM:SS.
• The CCE was not allowing the assignment of credits to Conductor.
• Create M3U from within a Track Database was always producing files with absolute paths.
• The filter field in the Stop Action and Filter Files statement should not have been editable.
• If you opened and cancelled the Batch Processor and then started Batch Extract iTunes PIDs, the Start button was hidden.

Version 4.2.0.1 (7396)

      Bug Fixes

• v4.2 broke \? and \* sequences in File to Tag templates when the \. sequence was introduced.
• When creating a property list on the Transfer Metadata statement, the set of properties exported was messed up in a few places.

Version 4.2 (7394)

      Lists of Fields Presented in Tables

• v4.0 introduced support in the Multi Field Editor's Clear function and the Clear action statement to allow the list of fields to be interpreted as all but the selected fields. The Transfer Metadata action statement had similar functionality. This functionality has been expanded to all Multi Field Editor functions and with only a few exceptions, to all action statements which display a table containing fields.
• There is no longer a control to choose the mode in the Clear functionality.
• You change the mode by clicking on the button at the right of the table's header bar. The table's field column header displays the current mode.
• All Clear and Transfer Metadata action statements in existing actions have been modified accordingly.
• The first time you open the Multi Field Editor after updating, the mode will be Process the Selected Files. From that point on, the last used mode will be retained.
• Which mode you use is largely a matter of convenience. However, there are a few differences between the two modes. A link to a more detailed explanation can be found in the Multi Field Editor help or the help for any supporting action statement.

      Action Statement Changes

• The Enumerate Tag Sets and Fields statement has a new option to produce a list of all track variables.
• The Date Functions statement has additional settings to convert a date to a number of milliseconds and vice versa.
• The Pad statement now supports expanding tab characters in multi line data.
• The List Manipulate statement's Numeric function has been renamed to Integer.
• The List Manipulate statement's Remove function has been renamed to Remove All Matches.
• The List Manipulate statement has a new function named Remove One Per Match.
• The Stop Action and Open Files statement can now be configured to close all visible files without loading new ones.
• The Truncate Variable statement has been renamed to Truncate.
• There is a new statement named Preference List Add/Remove. This statement can be use to add or remove one or more items from a preference list.
• There is a new action statement named Ignore Files which can be used to remove files from consideration while the action is running. The online help has additional information on how the statement can be used.
• There is a new action statement named Restore Ignore Files which can be used to restore ignored files to consideration.

      Main Window Changes

• The Yate menu has a new item named Quit Discarding Changes. When this item is selected, all changes to audio files are discarded and the application will attempt to terminate. You will still be prompted if an open database file has unsaved changes. By default a confirmation panel will be displayed whenever this function is invoked and at least one audio file has unsaved changes.
• There are now ten Action # toolbar items.
• If you hover over the status bar when truncated, a tooltip will be displayed with the full content.
• The Help menu now has a Quick Reference submenu.

      FLAC Files

• Yate will read ID3 tags in FLAC files but previously the presense of ID3 information was only available via Log>Raw Data. The ID3 Version property will now be set so that you can test for this situation and possibly re-write the file. Note that the Audio Property display will show the ID3 Version when appropriate.

      Preferences-Audio

• Under the General tab, the Write padded track and disc values setting has been renamed to Write track and disc values as displayed which is more indicative as to what gets written.

      Preferences-Export Sets

• You can now automatically create an action which will build one or more databases. From the Export button (⇒) choose Export as an Action. Depending on the fields in the export sets, you will either create Album, Track or Stand Alone databases. If a Yate Track ID or Yate Album ID field is present in any of the selected export sets, a Database ID statement will be included to produce the referenced IDs if they are missing. Note that a prompt will be issued at runtime for each database name.
• When you create a new set, you can select All Unqualified Fields. The export set will be pre-populated with all fields except for the track variables, Unique File Identifiers, User Defined Text Items and User Defined URLs. This is useful if you'd rather remove than add fields.

      Preferences-File List

• You can now supply custom icons for the Action 1 through Action 10 toolbar buttons.

      Preferences-File to Tag

• You can now automatically create an action to provide the functionality of a file to tag template and map it to one of the Action # buttons. Select the appropriate template and from the context menu choose a Set as Toolbar Action # menu item. An action named File to Tag: template name will be created.
• File to Tag templates display spaces as centered dots for visibility reasons. If your filenames contain centered dot characters you can now represent them as \. in the template. The escape sequence will allow proper matching to occur. Any other escape sequence simply inserts the escaped character. ie. \\ will be replaced with \

      Preferences-General

• Under notifications, there is a new option to do nothing when a process finishes.
• There is a new option to suppress the warning issued when Yate>Quite Discarding Changes is invoked.

      Preferences-Rename

• You can now automatically create an action to provide the functionality of a rename template and map it to one of the Action # buttons. Select the appropriate template and from the context menu choose a Set as Toolbar Action # menu item. An action named Rename: template name will be created.
• Rename templates display spaces as centered dots for visibility reasons. You can now insert centered dot characters into filenames by representing them as \. in the template. Any other escape sequence simply inserts the escaped character. ie. \\ will be replaced with \

      Preferences-Search

• You can now automatically create an action to provide the functionality of a search template and map it to one of the Action # buttons. Select the appropriate template and from the context menu choose a Set as Toolbar Action # menu item. An action named Search: template name will be created.

      Database Files

• When opening a database file, if the operating system cannot determine the encoding, you are now presented with a list of potential encodings to attempt.

      Bug Fixes

• If a FLAC file had padded track or disc values in the file, the padding was not removed when rewritten unless the fields were set. The padding should always be removed unless the Preference-Audio-General 'Write track and disc values as displayed' setting is enabled.
• v4 broke the ability of the Stop Action and Filter Files statement to interact with the main window filtering system with track variables. Track variables are cleared when an action terminates and variables were removed from the list of filterable items. Variable fields are again in the list of filterable items. The Stop Action and Filter Files statement will now ensure that the Variable fields are retained until the filtering has been processed.
• Using the Rename Files statement, if you renamed a file to itself, the Retained Path 1 and Retained Path 2 properties were not set. There was no way to tell that an error had not occurred.
• If a file contained a negative track number and you created an album database with an Incomplete column, the application would crash.
• When looking for duplicates in a Track database, the Results column did not have the current font size when inserted.
• When exporting an action that contained a Stop Action and Filter Files statement, the referenced filter was not being exported.
• Fixed lots of minor display issues on Mac OS 10.14.

Version 4.1.0.3 (7316)

      Bug Fix

• Sometimes it takes two attempts to do a one line patch. Same patch as made in v4.1.0.2

Version 4.1.0.2 (7315)

      Bug Fix

• If a custom edit panel was imported which included references to new custom fields, not all the fields were displayed. The Custom Panel Editor had to be closed, reopened and the template imported again in order for it to work.

Version 4.1.0.1 (7314)

      Bug Fixes

• v4.0 Regression: The Multi Field Editor's go buttons were not aways being enabled correctly.
• v4.0 Regression: When a file's metadata was exported in a text only mode, the exported plist files were flagged as invalid when imported. The issue is not with the files which are valid.

As this was a quick patch after v4.1 was released, please read the release notes for v4.1

Version 4.1 (7313)

      Action Runtime Settings

• In the past if you wished to have retained settings for actions you typically placed them in a Replacement Set. These sets are read-only for actions and you had to manually set the options.
• There is a new item type called Action Runtime Setting which can be read and written from within an action. The data saved with the settings can be at most a single line of text. The information is persistent.
• The settings can be viewed and manually written in the UI via a new Runtime Settings button in Preferences-Actions.
• The value associated with a setting is inserted via a new \#setting# escape sequence.
• There is a new action statement named Set Action Runtime Setting which is used to write the values at runtime.
• The currently defined and all referenced action runtime settings are available on an action text field's context menu.

      Video Files

• MPEG-4 files which have a video track but no audio track will now be loaded.
• If for any reason you want to set any of the video fields, even when there is no video track, you can enable the new Preferences-Audio-MPEG-4-Always display video fields setting.

      Custom Panel Editor

• There is a new element called Comments/Thumbnail which is equivalent to the Comments display on the Info panel. ie. it can display the comments and a consistent default artwork item.

      Preferences-FLAC

• You can no longer remove mappings associated with Custom Fields. You must remove the FLAC value in a Custom Field in order to remove the mapping. This is to ensure that the FLAC mappings and Custom Fields are always synchronized.
• If you delete all displayed items the FLAC mappings will be reset to their out of the box values with Custom Fields applied. In fact if you do not have at least one non Custom Field mapping, a reset will be triggered.

      iTunes

• There is a new Preferences-iTunes setting to disable auto linking. When set, the Open Mode menu and toolbar items to change the auto linking state are hidden and disabled. This means the setting cannot be enabled in error.
• iTunes synthesized track ratings now always show as 0 stars when displayed. As you can determine if there is an explicit Album Rating, this will allow you to accurately determine what the real track rating is.

      Artwork Cropper Panel

• The panel now supports squaring by increasing the size of the canvas as well as by cropping to the smaller of the width and height. You can choose to do a transparent, white or black fill or to stretch the image.
• The panel can now also be used to force a re-encoding of the image to jpeg or png.
• There is now a Reset button to start over.

      File Browser

• You can now move files to the trash.
• You can now drag files in as well as out.

      Action Edit Window's Find Panel

• You can search for action runtime settings.
• The Text search now does a deep search of all text fields as well as an item's display.

      Action Statements

• You can now update and restore to the Editing State in actions. This may be useful when you want to preserve the potentially modified metadata in files without restoring to the initial values. The new statements are called Update Editing State and Revert to Editing State.
• New Set Action Runtime Setting statement.
• New action statement called On Cancel. This statement allows you to automatically do a revert to the initial or editing state when an action is cancelled on the panel displayed by one of the Prompt statements.
• New action statement called Pad. This statement lets you replace tabs with spaces (4 and 8 tab stops). It also lets you pad the length of an item to a specified length with any string. The original text can be left, right or middle justified.
• New action statement called List Numeric Functions. This statement can be used to sum list elements; find the average, minimum or maximum value.
• New action statement called Trash Item. The statement can move any file or folder to the trash as long as you have the required permission and the item resides on a volume supporting the trash folder.
• The Build List statement can now build key-value lists where the values are occurrence counts.
• The Build List statement can now build raw lists where empty and duplicate items are not removed.
• The Manipulate Artwork statement supports squaring by filling the background with white or black and by stretching. Previously only a transparent fill was supported.
• The Manipulate Artwork statement now supports an increase of the canvas size if certain conditions are met while squaring and the new scale to canvas option is set. See the online help for more information.
• New options for the Re-Encode statement to add and remove URL escaping.
• New escape sequences to insert the Action Test State. \a1 inserts 0 for false and 1 for true. \a0 inserts nothing for false and 1 for true. These sequences are available on the Insert Yate Escape Sequence menu.
• There is a new Audio Property called Has Audio. Note that it is only possible for this to be false in MPEG-4 files.
• Open File by the OS and Open URL now work while batch processing.
• List Manipulate has a new function which limits the number of items in a list.

      Bug Fixes

• The Contents of Folder statement could lose filter information when editing after the initial creation.
• Found a few action statements which were sorted incorrectly in their respective lists.
• When dragging artwork to the Finder, the data will be what is retained as opposed to the data as returned by the OS. ie. load than drag will result in identical data. Note that this is only true when dragging from an editing panel. When dragging from the stand alone Artwork Viewer the data is always extracted from the OS.
• Lots of help tweaks.
• The long elusive "Edit Panel labels get truncated" mystery has been solved.
• One of the new v4 picker controls was highlighting invalid selections when the menu was displayed. This was a visual only issue.
• The Test statement's Open/Create button was not always correctly enabled.
• Importing a Custom Panel could crash if custom field references had to be remapped.
• Fields on Custom Panels were using a font one point smaller than the built in fields.
• There were label display issues when adding UDTIs with a leading ; (special display flag) to a Custom Panel.
• Video Definition displayed incorrect values in snapshots.

Version 4.0.1 (7232)

      Action Editor Find Panels

• Previously you could only search for text in the displayed representation of each statement. You can now also search for fields, named variables, track variables, disabled statements and Dump Variable statements.
• You can also now specify that you want all matches to be selected.

      Renaming Files and Multiple Value Items

• When renaming files, inserted items with multiple values separated by the multi value delimiter had all values except the first removed.
• There is a new Preferences-Audio-Common setting named Rename Substitution which you can use to change the above behaviour. When the new setting is empty, the behaviour is as before. When the field is non empty, the specified text will replace occurrences of the multi value delimiter.
• There is a new rename template token named Multi Value Delimiter. This token can be used to override the Rename Substitution setting by specifying a replacement pattern or an empty string. This token can be used as many times as desired in a template to provide per field granularity.

      Bug Fixes

• If no search pattern was specified in an Action Editor Find panel, a soft fault occurred.
• Fixed a memory leak when displaying the Field or Initial Field context menus.
• Compare Numeric Test statements could corrupt their data when editing the content after creating. This only occurred if testing against a track variable.
• When updating from version 3.x to v4.0 the Multi Field Editor's Case statement might display an unexpected Optional Field Exception setting. If you have already installed v4.0 you can manually correct the situation.
• When updating from version 3.x to v4.0, a rename template which specified a case transformation could display an unexpected Optional Field Exception setting. To fix this you must manually correct the issue.
• The Multi Field Editor's new clear option, Clear all but Selected Fields, should have worked when no fields were selected.
• Regression: The Multi Field Editor Remove & Insert function wasn't inserting.

Version 4.0 (7224)

      Please Read This

This is the first version which does not support OS versions less than 10.9 (Mavericks). There are lots of internal changes in this release. It is strongly recommended that you backup before installing this version. You can easily do this via Yate>Export Preferences with all items checked.

Note also that the minimum supported version for importing purposes has been set to v3.10. Once v4 is installed you will not be able to import preference files produced with a version older than 3.10. Note that exported metadata files can be imported regardless of the producing version.

      Custom Fields

• There are now one hundred available Custom Fields.
• Custom fields display in lists sorted by their name. Unassigned Custom Fields are not displayed.
• Custom fields can be defined as being popup controls, much the same as Artist, Composer, etc. These fields can be associated with a list and set to auto-add and autocomplete in Preference-Lists.
• Custom field escape sequences are inserted by the same Insert Yate Field or Insert Yate Initial Field submenus. The displayed names are symbolic. The references are associated with a specific custom field. Renaming a custom field will change all referencing escape sequences.
• Custom Fields created previous to v4 will have been maintained. It is possible that some of the carried over fields are not actually used. In this case you can remove them in Preferences-General-Configure Custom Fields.
• New installs have no predefined Custom Fields.
• Rename and File to Tag templates now display the Custom Field names as tokens. The tokens are changed automatically if the name associated with a Custom Field changes.
• The Combined Credits Editor can access any of the Custom Fields and will only access those marked as being credits.
• Export Sets and Tag Sets display the symbolic names of custom fields.
• It is important to note that with few exceptions, custom fields are still accessed internally by their ordinal number. This is as it was before. The big difference is that is now hidden as much as possible. Custom fields now display everywhere with their symbolic name. Yate changes all symbolic names when mappings are changed automatically. This include tables, popup menus, action escape sequences, Custom Panels, Rename templates, File to Tag Templates, Export Sets, Tag Sets and the Multi Field Editor.

      Exporting Actions and Templates

• The export of actions, Export Sets, File to Tag Templates, FLAC mappings, Rename Templates and Tag Sets are now smart exports. When doing a smart export, all Custom Field accesses are exported in such a way that they can be conditionally remapped when imported. The custom field information included in the export file contains all the low level mappings associated with the Custom Fields. These smart exports, available from the associated preference panels and the Action Manager are the preferred means of exporting items for distribution. The menu based export of preferences should be used primarily for backup purposes.
• The ability to merge exported files has been removed as the typical usage predates the smart exporting of actions.
• All exporting in the Action Manager is now smart. The Smart Export and Export menu items have been replaced with a single Export item. When exporting in the Action Manager, you can now optionally specify a name of a folder to enclose the exported actions.

      Exporting and Importing Metadata

• The Export menu item now supports the exporting of more than one file's metadata at a time. When exporting a single file you are prompted for the destination folder. When exporting multiple files the metadata is saved to a subfolder named Exported Metadata. If you want to locate your exported files to a diferent location, use an action.
• When exporting metadata, smart information is automatically exported so that Custom Fields can be remapped when later imported. When importing this smart data, you will be prompted if custom fields are being imported or if a custom field already exists but with different low level data..

      Per Track Variables

• There are now sixteen per track variables numbered 0 through 15.
• All popup controls which specify fields and Variables, now display the variables in a submenu.
• Escape sequences which access track variables, \v#, \i#, \f#, \@#, \=#, \+# and \*# now treat # as an integer as opposed to a single digit. If you previously followed any of these sequences directly by a digit, you will have to insert a \b (break) sequence. eg. '\v11 song' which previously inserted the contents of Variable 1 followed by '1 song', will now insert the contents of Variable 11 followed by ' song'. The sequence can be rewritten as '\v1\b1 song'. As these types of sequences are highly unlikely, we are not handling the conversion automatically.
• Per track variables are now cleared when action processing terminates.

      Main Window

• The File and main window context Replay Gain menus have a new item called Calculate Sound Check. This can be used can be used to calculate iTunes Sound Check values based on previously calulated replay gain tags.
• There are ten columns called Custom Column 1 to Custom Column 10. These replace the previous Custom 0 to Custom 9 columns. These columns can be associated with any Custom Field. If they are not associated wth a Custom Field, they will not be displayed.
• The Mapping 1, 2 and 3 columns have been renamed UD Text Mapping 1, 2, 3. If any of these columns are not associated with a UDTI, they will not be displayed.
• The multi item editing panels, which have a default value, such as Comments, Lyrics (All), Terms of Use, etc. no longer display empty placeholders for the default values. Empty values can be created but they will eventually be removed from the multi panel displays.
• The Artwork menu has a new item called Auto Search then Search for Album Cover Fanart, CAA & Discogs.
• The Work Name field can now optionally maintain a list as can Artist, Album Artist, etc.
• The ISRC field's function button has a new item to remove all spaces from the field. The Yate Transformation Compress function will also remove all spaces for the ISRC field.
• The Sort fields are now available as columns.
• A Remove Duplicates menu item has been added to the Artwork menu and to artwork panels' image table's context menu. Two images are duplicates if they have exactly the same binary data. This was previously only available via an action.
• New Window menu item called Focus on File List. This is useful if you are in the File Browser or on an editing panel and you wish to focus on the file list without changing the selection. There is also an associated toolbar item. Note that there is no real requirement to ever do this.
• Older default keyboard shortcuts which used function keys have been changed to reflect the lack of those keys on most newer laptops.

      Snapshot Panel

• Multi item fields which have a default value, such as Comment, Rating, etc., now display the default values separate from any additional items.

      Preferences-General & File List

• The configuration of Custom Fields and Custom Column Mappings have been split into two configurators.
• The Custom Field configurator has been completely rewritten and has been moved to Preferences-General.

      Preferences-Lists

• There are new lists named Work Name, Custom 1, Custom 2 , Custom 3, Custom 4 and Custom 5.
• The Custom lists are available in case you want to associate a Custom Field with a non-standard list.

      Preferences-MusicBrainz

• On a per track basis in a release, MusicBrainz lists the artists associated with each track. Sometimes the artist as credited on the release differs from the artist associated with the recording. If the Prefer release artist names option is set, Yate will use the release name, when available, as opposed to the recording name. Note that this option is only available if the Use per track artist names option is enabled. In previous versions, the recording name was always used.
• On a per track basis in a release, MusicBrainz lists the titles associated with each track. Sometimes the title as described on the release differs from the title associated with the recording. If the Prefer release titles option is set, Yate will use the release name, when available, as opposed to the recording name. In previous versions, the recording name was always used.

      Preferences-Audio

• The Common tab has a new setting for Sound Check offset. This allows you to maintain different LUFS values for Replay Gain and Sound Check.

      FLAC Files

• High Sierra supports FLAC files at the OS level... although not in iTunes. This OS support, when available, is used when calculating ReplayGain values. There's no change in functionality it's simply quicker.
• Certain applications are writing artwork to Base64 encoded Vorbis comments. Yate will now extract images from COVERART and METADATA_BLOCK_PICTURE comments. In the past these items were exposed as UDTIs as any other unmapped FLAC comment. Unless you knew that they were there you could have had quite a bit of space tied up in useless data. The images, which might be duplicates are more obvious and can easily be removed if required. If the image data cannot be decoded, the data is tossed. Note that the images are always written the correct way when saving a file.

      Action Statements

• Added a new statement called Sound Check. The statement can be used to calculate iTunes sound check values based on replay gain tags.
• Added a new statement called Clear User Defined Items by Source. This statement can be used to delete all user defined items associated with one or more sources.
• Added a new statement called File Path Manipulation. The statement can perform a number of operations on file paths.
• Compare Test, Numeric and Data can now specify a property as the source.
• Enumerate Tag Sets and Fields has a new selection for Custom Fields only.
• Compare Fields and Compare Fields Test have been merged into a single statement. The statement now supports NOT, Set, AND and OR.
• Bitrate and Bitrate Test have been combined into a single statement.
• Exists and Exists Test have been combined into a single statement.
• The four Create Symbolic Link statements have been merged into one.
• The Issue Query Database statements's contains tests now have an additional reversed option. When using this option you can test if a pattern is contained in the database contents.
• The Build List statement can optionally only process files if a specified variable is true.
• The Export Metadata statement no longer produces files which are duplicates when running stepwise. Typically these duplicates were artwork files.
• The Save and Restore Variable statements have been redesigned to handle the new track variables. The information is now encoded as a single item for any one file.
• The Search for Artwork Test statement has been renamed Test Artwork.
• The Clear statement now supports inclusion and exclusion. Depending on the current set of Custom Fields, the number of displayed items can change.
• The Extract Preference Sets, Fill Lists, Preferences and Standardize Case statements have support for the new Work Name and Custom 1 through Custom 5 lists.
• The Ignore Errors option in the Run External Script statement is now completely silent. The contents of stderr, if any, are saved to the new External Script stderr Output named variable.
• The Transfer Metadata statement can now specify which fields are not to be transferred.
• The Prompt for Text statement now supports making the text field R/O and forcing the use of the picker menu. The index of the selected menu item is returned.

      Escape Sequences

• All sequences which process track variables now take a number after the sequence to specify the variable number. eg: \v15.
• New sequence \b. The sequence does not insert anything and merely acts as a break. This can be used in the unlikely case where you had a variable sequence which was followed by a digit. eg. \v1\b123
• The old means of accessing a custom field \c# has been removed from menu insertions. Previous instances will have been replaced with the correct symbolic representations. Custom fields are now accessed as any other field. The symbolic names are easier to use than cryptic \c# sequences.
• New sequence \p will insert the name of the calling action. Note that this can be an inline action.

      Multi Field Editor

• The Clear function now supports inclusion and exclusion. Depending on the current set of Custom Fields, the number of displayed items can change.
• Text fields no longer have escape sequences processed. The escape sequences were intended for within actions.

      Removed Deprecated Items

• The action test state mode is now fixed at Single Action Test State.
• You can no longer set the default UUID mode to the older Yate implementation. Any previously generated UUIDs with this format will continue to work.