V9 Release Notes

Version 9.2.2.1 (12700.12697)

All updates/patches to v9.2.x will be available for the old Mac build. In case you missed our last posted update, v9.2.x will also be the last supported build for macOS 10.13.

      Bug Fixes

• The Stop Action and Filter Files and Apply Filter statements had an extraneous control which should have been a label.
• Repeatably editing a small multi line item such as a UDTI might have caused some text to apparently be missing in the edit panel. Selecting the text fixed the issue. The issue was OS and data dependent.

Version 9.2.2 (12699.12697)

All updates/patches to v9.2.x will be available for the old Mac build.

      Action Statement Changes

• When using the Get Info statement to get a list of File to Tag, Rename or Search templates, you can now specify All, Hidden or Not Hidden.
• You can now specify a range on the Remove/Insert statement as an alternate to specifying a start index and number of characters to remove.

      Bug Fixes

• If the Container Viewer was open with a sheet displayed and the debugger attempted to open it ... things would get messed up.
• The multi line editor in the Container Viewer was not allowing text selection.
• When exporting a single item from Settings, if the item had a / in its name, it was not removed from the name supplied to the Save As panel.

Version 9.2.1 (12696.12694)

      Debugging Actions

• When configuring the Debug statement, you can now specify that you want the debug information to be displayed in the Container Viewer. Finding relevant information in this manner can be easier than sifting through large volumes of text in the debug panel.
• When the new option is enabled, you can also suppress the display of the debug information as text in the debug panel.
• If you do not want to this automatically, you can do it manually from the Configure button's context menu.

      Action Statement Changes

• The Set Action Runtime Setting statement can now bulk load settings from a key-value list.
• The File Path Manipultion statement has a new mode which returns the path to an application from a bundle identifier.

      Bug Fixes

• m3u files created within a database file were not honouring the ./ prefix setting.
• When opening images in a database file, a crash could occur if folder.jpg or cover.jpg had upper case characters. eg. folder.JPG

Version 9.2.0.1 (12686.12667)

      Bug Fixes

• Positioning to an edit panel from the All Tags edit panel failed if there was a custom edit panel with no assigned name.
• Patched to handle the relatively new 64 bit iTunes Store IDs.

Version 9.2 (12684.12667)

Please Read

It is with regret that we're announcing the dropping of support for macOS 10.10 - 10.12. Yate v9.2 will be the last release for the old mac version.

It is becoming increasingly difficult to get around the seemingly innumerable build issues; old certificate issues; the lack of support for modern SSL implementations; and last but not least the fact that our test Mac is on its last legs.

Using those OS versions on today's internet is really not safe!

Your purchased activation code is still valid and can be applied to any version of the application running on mac OS 10.13 or later.

Sorry folks, we've kept them supported for as long as we could. If you have any questions or comments you can reach out to us at support@2manyrobots.com

      Yate and the P Word Snippets

• If you have downloaded the Yate and the P Word Snippets and you are seeing repetitive messages to update them, do the following:
  • Manually delete all the Yate and the P Word Snippets in the Action Manager.
  • Either reinstall them from the web resource page or via Yate>Resource Actions Installer.

      The Action Updater / Resource Actions Installer

• The Update All button has been removed. Evidently even with a warning too many people were doing an Update All when they wanted to do an Update Checked Actions.
• You can easily select all the actions for update via the context menu and then hit Update Checked Actions.

      m3u Files

• Settings - m3u has a new setting Prefix relative paths with ./
• Some playlist manipulation tools which read m3u files require the prefix.

      Action Statement Changes

• The Get Info statement can return the value of the new Prefix relative paths with ./ setting.
• The Modify Application Settings statement can override the two m3u settings: m3u File Encoding and Prefix relative paths with ./
• The Prompt from Container statement:
  • When the panel is closed, the statement saves the first visible row to the container as a key named firstVisibleRow.
  • You can position the items in a panel by setting named variable Prompt from Container Position to Row to the number of the row to be the first visible row. If there are insufficient rows to fill the panel's display, the specified row will be visible but may not be the first.
  • You can pre-select a row to be highlighted by setting named variable Prompt from Container Select Row to the number of the row to highlighted.
• Test If Container Item Exists and Test Value of Boolean in Container statements can now test for true or false and can Set, And or Or the action text state.

      Databases

• Settings - Databases - Album and track database image source now has a .jpg File choice as opposed to folder.jpg.
• When the setting is enabled, databases will now fetch images from folder.jpg or cover.jpg files.
• The search priority is folder.jpg, folder.jpg (alternate case), cover.jpg, cover.jpg (alternate case).

      Roon & MPEG-4 Settings

• Previously when Use Roon encoding for Musician Credits and Involved People was enabled, the Multi value write method was ignored. Earlier versions of Roon did not support the Single Atom/Multiple Data and Multiple Atoms encodings.
• At this point, Roon parses the metadata regardless of how the multi value encoding is set.
• The Multi value write method will no longer be ignored when Roon encoding is enabled.
• Note that there may be subtle differences in how Roon parses the encodings. When the encoding is not Single Atom, Roon might treat artist metadata as representing single and joined artists.
• There is no need for you to change anything as Roon parses Single Atom correctly and that effectively is what was used in the past when Roon encoding was enabled.
• The only time you might want to change things is if you're using the same files elsewhere in an application whixh properly handles MPEG-4 multiple value encodings ... such as MinimServer.

      Resource Action Changes

• m3u Suite has been updated to honour Settings - m3u - Prefix relative paths with ./

      Bug Fixes

• The Create Album Database and Create Track Database statements were not registering named variable usage for the template field. This did not affect the statment's execution, only the display of the named variable list.
• The debugger could not position to a statement in an action which had a < character in it's name.
• The Create Move Action Wizard had a few menus and some summary text which did not change from Move to Copy when required. This was a only an appearance issue and did not affect the proper generation of the action.
• The Test if File Exists statement didn't like filenames with extraneous spaces.

Version 9.1 (12665.12644)

      Export Sets

• Attributes for read only and hidden can be preset.

      Action Statement Changes

• There is a new statement named Apply Filter. The statement can be used to apply a main window named filter to the current available files. Each file has a track variable set to true or false signifying the success or failure of the filter.
  
  
• The Get Info statement can now return a list of main window filters.
  
  
• The Include statement can use the \af escape sequence in a named item. \af refers to the current action's name. This makes it easier to include items for export or the batch chain based on an action which might be renamed.
  
  
• All settings in the Extract Bracketed Text statement can now be set at runtime.
  
  
• The Indexed Artwork statement's Copy and Compare functions can now specify the source is an Initial image.
  
  
• There's a new statement named List of Modified Items. It can produce a list of all modified fields, modified UDTIs or modified UD URLs. It can also return descriptive text for any modified field.
  
  
• The Multi Item Field List Enumerator statement can now enumerate initial values as well as current values.
  
  
• The Prompt from Container statement:
  • The multi line edit panel can now be opened when the value field is read only. The edit panel is opened as read only.
  • There's a new key named multiLineNoTrim. By default, the multi line editor will remove leading and trailing spaces on each row. When set to true, the trimming of each row is suppressed.
  • There's a new key named multiLineROValue. When the multi line editor is read only, alternate text can be specified to be used as opposed to the value text.
  • There's a new key named multiLineShowSpaces. When true, spaces will be displayed as centered dots.

      Resource Actions

• From 2014 through 2017 an action named Featuring Manipulation was provided to extract credits from featuring lists in the Artist and/or Title fields. The action has been completely rewritten and is now available again with the name Extract Featuring Credits.

      Resource Documentation

• The Yate and the P Word document and the associated action snippets have been updated.

      Bug Fixes

• The View>Log changes to functions could report incorrect path changes under certain circumstances.
• The \=# Value of Field in Track Variable sequence was missing from the escape sequence insertion context menu.
• The Indexed Artwork statement's Compare function did not always return a proper result with an invalid source index.
• Dragging an image to the Finder's Get Info drop panel would crash the application.
• Regular expression replacement templates were not accepting ${#} for capture groups. The text enclosed in { } was always treated as a named capture set. The ${#} sequence is useful for disambiguation purposes if numeric text can come after the capture group. eg. ${1}123 will insert 123 after capture group 1. $1123 will not work.
• The \ai escape sequence was not returning the correct started action when batch processing and in the Batch Start or Batch End action.

Version 9.0.0.1 (12643.12478)

      Bug Fix

• The introduction of a Replacement Set mode in Replace statements caused all periods to be removed when renaming files.

Version 9.0 (12642.12478)

      The Snippet Manager

• The Snippet Manager serves to store snippets which are functions performed by the Multi Field Editor.
• A retained snippet completely represents a Multi Field Editor function at the time it was executed. This includes the list of selected fields.
• Snippets can be supplied user specific names and can be exported back to the Multi Field Editor.
• Snippets can be exported to and imported from the filesystem.
• Any list of selected snippets can be used to automatically generate an action.
• The Snippet Manager can be displayed from the Multi Field Editor or via the Actions menu.
• The location of the snippets file can be changed in Settings - General - Advanced. This is to facilitate the sharing of settings.

      The Multi Field Editor

• The Replace function has a new mode to apply a provided replacement template to the selected fields.
• The Set function has a new mode named Set Using Rename Template. The mode uses a rename template to populate the selected fields. Only the filename portion of the template is used. ie. Folder Start sections and IfDup tokens are ignored. The test for characters invalid in Mac filenames is not performed. All other configurable template settings are applied.
• The Trim function now allows you to specify an other sequence when replacing sequences of the chosen character sets. Previously you could only specify a space or newline character.
• The MFE now interacts directly with the new Snippet Manager. The functionality can be enabled or disabled by the recording control.

      The Create Move Action Wizard

• The wizard has been completely rewritten to handle virtually all types of moves.
• Copy is now supported as well as move.
• Linking to an Apple App is now supported.
• Logging is now supported ... even when not batch processing.
• Additional folder validation is now performed.
• Folder validation and moving non audio files is automatically adjusted when moving to or from disc subfolders.
• Alpha tokens are supported with the ability to override the configured default settings.
• A produced action can support immediate mode, batch mode or both.
• Keep Both is now supported as a file already exists function. This requires that the supplied rename template has an IfDup and Dup # tokens.
• Different modes can be supplied for immediate and batch mode handling of a file already exists.
• A Wrapper action can automatically be generated to allow for extending the functionality.

      Album Ratings in iTunes/Music

• Apple Album Ratings are a mess. They can be synthesized and can change at seemingly any time in the application. Music can be closed and reopened and then display different synthesized ratings.
• The grey/black unwanted ratings appearing in the Ratings column can be annoying and distracting.
• Prior to this release the Settings - Apple Apps - Auto Export panel had a setting to clear the album rating. This setting was used by all exports. The setting only cleared the album rating if the Apple App identified that it had an explicit album rating.
• At least within the Music application, disabling synthesized album ratings works far better if every track in an album has disabled them.
• The issue with the previous setting was that it was conditional, so it was possible that not all tracks were modifed in Music when an export occured.
• The setting has been moved to the Apple Apps General panel as it applies to all exports.
• The setting when enabled, now has two possible values. Explicit is equivalent to the conditional implementation in prior releases. Explicit and Synthesized will unconditionally clear the album rating for all files which are exported. This method is potentially slower. If Explicit works for you, use that setting. If you're still seeing grey/black ratings in Music, switch to Explicit and Synthesized.

      The View Menu

• The View menu has new items to display and flush the database log optionally used by actions produced by the Create Move Action Wizard.

      Replacement Sets

• Replacement set items can now be regular expressions.
• +T replaces the + control and is used to create text replace items.
• +R is used to create regular expression replace items.
• Note that as of v8.3.5, the panel as ordered is now the order in which which the replacements are applied. The panel is no longer sorted and you can use drag & drop to rearrange the items.
• Case insensitivity is now available as a column in the table.
• Escape sequences in text replace items are now deprecated.
• Additional information is described in a topic called Settings - Replacements.

      Rename Settings

• If you want to disable multi value delimiter substitutions you can enter \m as the replacement field. This is equivalent to entering the multi value delimiter text.
• You can now install actions which are bundles of sample rename templates.
• Clicking on the 🌐 button will open the Action Updater. Actions containing rename template bundles will be listed, even if already installed.
• This is a quick means of identifying rename template bundle actions. These rename template bundle actions only purpose is to make it easier to install sample rename templates provided on the Yate web resources page.
• These rename template bundle actions are marked as Hidden in the Action Manager and will not appear on action selection menus. By selecting one of the actions in the Action Manager and choosing Resource Documentation from the context menu, you can easily see the online help for the templates.

      Rename Templates

• The Encoding control now supports Fold Unicode which only performs Unicode character folding.
• All Encoding control items now perform Unicode character folding. Previously Remove Accents did not.
• The advanced rename template settings panel has a new item named Apply transformations for Alpha. This is equivalent to the Apply transformations for IfDup settings but for the Alpha token. Transformations are applied before computing the alpha sequence.
• If you want to disable multi value delimiter substitutions you can enter \m after a Multi Value Delimiter token. This is equivalent to entering the multi value delimiter text.
• There is a new token named IfExpression which supports the construction of complex expressions based on the content of fields, properties, track variables, integers ans strings. Most If token types in the past, tested only for existence.

      File to Tag, Rename and Search Templates

• Each panel's context menu has new items to allow to to set multiple items as hidden or not hidden.
• The three template panels have a new filter button which allows you to display all templates, only templates which are not hidden or only templates which are hidden. The filter is automatically cleared when new items are added; and possibly when locating a template from a menu or an action statement's Show button. Not that changing a template's hidden status does not remove the item from the display automatically.

      The Action Manager

• The Log and Display Usage Information functions are now deep. ie. actions which are not selected but are called will automatically be selected.
• The same functions now identify actions called which are not defined. ie. they do not exist.

      The Action Updater

• When actions are installed by the updater, only actions are updated. Any other components associated with the actions are only installed if they are missing. This means that any customization you have made to rename templates, export sets, etc., will not be lost. Custom field definitions are always validated and confirmed if they differ.
• You can now force the refresh of all components by setting the Overwrite all preexisting components checkbox. When this setting is enabled, you will completely overwrite all components bundled with the selected actions.

      MusicBrainz

• All MusicBrainz extraction functionality now allows for the import of the Album Id and Album Artist Id.
• Enhanced the parse algorithm used in classical decomposition

      Main Window Filtering

• Added a filter named Artwork Mime Type.

      Search Yate Help

• Previously you had to manually create bookmarks to web resource page documents in the Help>Search Yate Help panel.
• This is now done automatically if you have Settings-General Automatically check for action updates enabled. New documents and updates will be bookmarked.
• The web page bookmarks now include the document version and the post date.
• You can no longer remove the resource page bookmarks. They are now grouped under a single expandable item.

      Field Lists in Action Statements

• Many action statement process a list of fields contained in a named variable. In the past these were always normalized field lists. ie. they specified the fields to be processed.
• Tag Sets can be normalized or inverted where they specify a list of fields not to be processed.
• Field lists can now be inverted by specifying a - as the first list item. -,Artist implies all fields except for Artist. Additional information can be found in the Field Lists topic which has been added as a bookmark to the Search Yate Help panel.

      The Batch Chain

• When an action is started in the Batch Processor, optional inline Batch Start and Batch End actions will be called.
• If the started action calls other actions which were designed to run directly through the Batch Processor, their Batch Start and Batch End actions are not called.
• There is a new methodology which uses the Include statement to create a batch chain which contains other actions where Batch Start and Batch End should be called.
• The methodology is described in a topic called The Batch Chain.

      Action Statement Changes

• The Compare Text statement has a few new path oriented tests and a new exact option:
  
  

  Contains Path At

  The source path must be a folder and both paths must exist. The function returns true if the source folder's path contains the second path.

  Contains or is Equal to Path At

  The source path must be a folder and both paths must exist. The function returns true if the source folder's path is the same as or contains the second path.

  Overlaps Path At

  Is equivalent to left Contains or is Equal to Path At right or right Contains path at left

  exact

  The statement by default ignores low level character encoding. If two text items being compared are identical except that one is encoded as UNFC and the other UNFD, the statement will return true. The strings have the same characters! The new exact option allows to override this behaviour when performing {in}equality tests.
  
  

• The Copy Files, Create Symbolic Links and Move statements
  
  
  • The statements now set a new property named Retained Status. The property offers additional information on a per file result. You can now tell if a file was skipped which is not indicated as an error.
  • The Move statement previously had a Runtime override setting which allowed you to change a Move to a Copy Files function at runtime. This is done by setting a named variable Override Move to Copy.
  • All three statements now have a control which when enabled allows you to override the what to do if a file exists handling at runtime. This is done by setting a named variable Override Move to Copy.
  • All three statement now have keep both functionality. The use differs when the statement is run in immediate mode and in batch mode. Keep Both is only available at runtime if a rename template is specified which uses an (IfDup) token.
  • The Move statement now also supports overriding the delete empty folders functionality at runtime. Named variable Delete Empty Folders Override is used.
  • The Move statement can now explicitly delete up to five levels of empty folders or all empty folders.
  
  
• All statements which support statement transformations now have a Fold Unicode function which performs Unicode character substitution. All encoding functions now perform Unicode character substitution. Previously Remove Accents did not. The affected statements are: Copy Files, Create Symbolic Links, Export Metadata, Import Metadata, Import Metadata from Audio and Move.
  
  
• The Copy Non Audio Files and Move Non Audio Files have additional runtime override capabilities.
  
  
• The Create Album Database and Create Track Database statements have a new setting. If Standalone, Create only and Preserve sidecar are all checked, a Preserve file control will be enabled. When Preserve file is enabled, an existing database file will be preserved if the sidecar can be preserved. If the sidecar file cannot be preserved as is, the database file, if any, will be completely overwritten.
  
  
• There is a new action statement named Create List. This is useful to create empty lists of a fixed size and to generate lists which contain numeric sequences.
  
  
• Enhanced the parser for the Decompose Title into Classical Metadata statement.
  
  
• The Export to Apple App statement now supports clearing album ratings as Explicit or Explicit and Synthesized.
  
  
• There is a new statement named Get Inclusion in Track List. The statement sets a track variable to true or false if the associated file's Disc-Track fields fall within a specified list. The list is formatted the same as in the Multi Field Editor's Credits panel.
  
  
• The Get Info statement:
  • There is a new setting to extract named export sets (which makes sense). The new encoding is extracted via Named Replacement Set. The older extraction methods (now deprecated) use Named Replacement Set (Legacy).
  • The Named Exception Set function can now optionally allow the extraction of an inverted set.
  
  
• The Include statement has a new item type named Batch Chain Action.
  
  
• There is a new statement named Insert Numeric Sequence. The statement mimics the Multi Fiel Editor's Insert Sequence function where the number being inserted is incremented only once per file.
  
  
• The List Manipulate statement has a new Normalize Field List function.
  
  
• The List Numeric statement can now return Minimum Length, Maximum Length, Index of Minimum Length and Index of Maximum Length.
  
  
• The Modify Application Settings statement can now modify the multi value delimiter.
  
  
• The Pad statement can now operate on lists.
  
  
• The Prompt statement's User Log mode has a new Per file setting. When enabled, one item is logged per file. The statement no longer trims leading whitespace characters.
  
  
• The Prompt for Fields statement can now optionally return an inverted field list.
  
  
• The Prompt from Container statement has a new key named disablePathIfStateOff. It hides a getPath icon if the same row's visible state checkbox is off.
  
  
• The Re-encode statement's Remove Accents functions now performs Unicode character folding.
  
  
• The Rename Files statement can now specify that a simplistic rename template should be auto generated to rename only a filename (with IfDup processing) based on the contents of a specified track variable.
  
  
• The Replace statement has a new mode which allows you to specify a replacement set which is applied to the effective source fields. Previously you had to use a Case statement which could apply a replacement set but it always uses the default set. This mode allows you to use any replacement set.
  
  
• The Run External Script statement can now optionally specify the script inline. This eliminates the need to write the script file to the file system.
  
  
• The Runtime State Stack statement can now push and pop the editing state values. You can now also compare the saved state at the top of the stack against the current, editing and initial states.
  
  
• There is a new action statement named Set Using Rename Template. The statement uses a rename template to populate variables or fields. Only the filename portion of the template is used. ie. Folder Start sections and IfDup tokens are ignored. The test for characters invalid in Mac filenames is not performed. All other configurable template settings are applied.
  
  
• The Substring statement can now formulate the alpha tag used by many as a folder name to make it easier to locate artist folders in the Finder.
  
  
• The Test if File Exists statement can now test paths across selected files in a track variable as opposed to the single file at a time.
  
  
• The Trim statement can now replace adjacent sequences with a specified sequence. Previously it only allows space or newline. The sequence is read from named variable Trim Replace Other Sequence.

      Escape Sequences

• There is a new escape sequence \as
• The sequence inserts the time in ms since 1970-01-01T00:00:00 that a running action or the batch processor was started.

      Release Specific Bookmarks

• A number of Search Yate Help bookmarks prefixed with v9.0 are automatically created when this release is installed.
• You can manually delete these bookmarks if you wish.
• The v9.0 prefix will be removed on the next release.

      Resource Documentation

• The Renaming and Restructuring Files and Folders document has been updated.
• The Yate and the P Word document has been updated.
• The Working with Apple Apps - The Basics document has been updated.

      Bug Fixes

• The Decompose Title into Classical Metadata statement's documentation omitted the cardinalNumber key.
• The Get Info statement was not being updated when a referenced rename template was renamed.
• The MusicBrainz Metadata for Release statement was not returning Single.
• The Prompt for Files statement's optional drag & drop panel was not working in the batch processor.
• The Prompt from Container statement's first time usage panel was not enabling link markup.
• The Replace statement's 'as list' control was not properly connected.
• The Test if File Exists statement was cancelling grouped execution depending on the statement's configuration.
• The Yate Database IDs statement was processing all files, even in grouped execution mode.
• Yate's execution modes have been described as batched and immediate or interactive. All documentation and UI now use Immediate.
• The Non Standard Delimiters field in Settings - Lists - Advanced Settings, was not always displayed properly. It may have had to be scrolled to refresh the display. This issue was OS dependent.
• The Create Move Action Wizard was not updating the Actions menu after creating an action.
• The function button menu for the AAC Kind, Video Definition and Content Advisory fields was incorrectly displaying the Enable/Disable only show Explicitly Supported Actions menu item.
• The Classification field was missing as a rename token.
• Making the Settings - Search token editor wider would mess up the display of the controls.
• Fixed various tooltip errors in the MusicBrainz and Discogs settings.
• Control-I in the rename template token editor did not display compound menus starting with I.
• When the only change to a field was its low level character encoding, a change would not be reported. This could only happen after re-encoding to UNFC or UNFD. When viewing changes, if the before and after representations appear identical, an encoding change has occurred.
• Clicking in a multi line edit field will no longer stop playing previews.
• If the runtime settings of an action was edited in the Action Manager and the action name contained contiguous spaces the runtime set was not correctly mapped.
• The Scanner action statement, when using track variables, was not properly retaining the save state to track variable control.