Improvements in this release are mainly around playlist handling.
We've improved playlists when tracks are unsynced. Before, each track would be shown as "Unsynced". Now, we show the full path, but with an "Unsynced" badge:
In addition (and this was a bug really) unsynced files weren't playable from the playlist. This is now fixed.
The idea with these improvements was to make playlisting give value whether storage has been synced or not.
In addition, behind the scenes we're now required to undergo a vulnerability assessment to continue integrating with Google Drive. As a result we're updating a bunch of dependencies which present theoretical vulnerabilities.
Other things:
Support cursored folder retrieval for Dropbox team accounts (allowing greater than 500 folders to be listed).
Happy New Year! (For those that follow the Gregorian calendar).
This build continues our work on library browsing, and there's some other small bits.
Fixed syncing large libraries where, after traversing the folder structure, the files would not be added.
To better support larger libraries we've added track pagination to the album, artist, genre and other library pages (except playlists, for now).
Fixed the album filters on /band/ pages.
In other news, which impacts our development work...
Before Christmas we received notice from Google that we would have to pass a rigorous verification process to ascertain that software, like ours, which connects to Google Drive is not vulnerable to a host of varied security vulnerabilities. If we chose not to undergo the process we would be limited to one-hundred connected users, which is obviously not enough to support all users of Astiga.
Google assigned a short deadline on this of mid-February which, with the development work added to a period of interview is very, very tight. We have requested an extension, but in the meantime it seems prudent to get this work done as soon as possible to avoid any break in our Google Drive integration.
Most of the development work is not actually in our code, but in updating dependencies which either have known vulnerabilities (although in practice aren't actually exposed) or in turn have their own dependencies that have known vulnerabilities.
This is why some new developments have had to be delayed, while we work on these changes. On the upside, it has improved our processes in that we now perform extra build checks for security vulnerabilities and static code checking.
Back into the New Year swing now! Our work on authorisation with Google Drive is continuing (we've also been granted an extension until mid March). But in the meantime we've been busy on useful stuff you can actually use!
This release contains the first iteration of song sorting for the Web interface. On the album, artist, band and genre pages you can now sort the songs in the song list:
These should be fairly self explanatory, but just to explain one thing: By album appears on all non-album pages and sorts the songs so that all songs on an album are together and in position order. On the album page you'll notice this is renamed to By position because, obviously, the songs you see on that page are only for one album anyway.
Next release we'll be honing a few of the edges around filtering, adding filters for albums and I hope to be releasing an updated roadmap, replacing the 2023 roadmap.
This release adds a new release date filter to album filters (still just visible under artists for now):
This filter inspects the YEAR field in your tracks' library and selects only those albums whose tracks' YEAR fall within the lower/upper bounds.
Other stuff:
Changed our cookies so that they are configured to be SameSite=Lax. We don't use SameSite=Strict to support OAuth redirection when authorising storage connections.
Much of this past three weeks has been taking refactoring some of our code to remove duplication and make things faster going forward. Here are some small improvements we made:
On an /artist/ page, don't show the songs on albums for which the artist isn't explicitly marked as the artist, unless there's no artist and the artist is marked as the "album artist" (band).
We've implemented some more improvements to sorting/filtering this week. The album filtering UX you see on genre, artist and band pages has been changed to work a little differently:
You'll notice a quirk or two in the styling - we'll fix that next release, and we'll also incorporate the same UX for song filtering.
Plus:
The album "date released" filter maintains tab focus going from "from" to "until".
Allow albums to be sorted by play count.
Allow additions to playlists from other playlists.
Handle some edge cases in PayPal IPN notifications, and be generally more verbose about reporting payment/subscription update problems.
Big changes this week to sorting and filtering! We've updated all UX so it looks and behaves the same. We think it's much easier to filter, sort and enable/disable filtering this way.
Sorting can now work ascending/descending for all sort fields. The filter button now works as a dropdown, and the button updates when a filter is chosen with an "X" next to it to remove the filter.
Plus:
Implement track pagination on playlist pages.
Escape forward slashes in artist names for links to artist pages.
Comments
Build 20231219
Improvements in this release are mainly around playlist handling.
We've improved playlists when tracks are unsynced. Before, each track would be shown as "Unsynced". Now, we show the full path, but with an "Unsynced" badge:
In addition (and this was a bug really) unsynced files weren't playable from the playlist. This is now fixed.
The idea with these improvements was to make playlisting give value whether storage has been synced or not.
In addition, behind the scenes we're now required to undergo a vulnerability assessment to continue integrating with Google Drive. As a result we're updating a bunch of dependencies which present theoretical vulnerabilities.
Other things:
Build 20240110
Happy New Year! (For those that follow the Gregorian calendar).
This build continues our work on library browsing, and there's some other small bits.
In other news, which impacts our development work...
Before Christmas we received notice from Google that we would have to pass a rigorous verification process to ascertain that software, like ours, which connects to Google Drive is not vulnerable to a host of varied security vulnerabilities. If we chose not to undergo the process we would be limited to one-hundred connected users, which is obviously not enough to support all users of Astiga.
Google assigned a short deadline on this of mid-February which, with the development work added to a period of interview is very, very tight. We have requested an extension, but in the meantime it seems prudent to get this work done as soon as possible to avoid any break in our Google Drive integration.
Most of the development work is not actually in our code, but in updating dependencies which either have known vulnerabilities (although in practice aren't actually exposed) or in turn have their own dependencies that have known vulnerabilities.
This is why some new developments have had to be delayed, while we work on these changes. On the upside, it has improved our processes in that we now perform extra build checks for security vulnerabilities and static code checking.
Build 20240124
Back into the New Year swing now! Our work on authorisation with Google Drive is continuing (we've also been granted an extension until mid March). But in the meantime we've been busy on useful stuff you can actually use!
This release contains the first iteration of song sorting for the Web interface. On the album, artist, band and genre pages you can now sort the songs in the song list:
These should be fairly self explanatory, but just to explain one thing: By album appears on all non-album pages and sorts the songs so that all songs on an album are together and in position order. On the album page you'll notice this is renamed to By position because, obviously, the songs you see on that page are only for one album anyway.
Next release we'll be honing a few of the edges around filtering, adding filters for albums and I hope to be releasing an updated roadmap, replacing the 2023 roadmap.
Build 20240209
This release adds a new release date filter to album filters (still just visible under artists for now):
This filter inspects the
YEARfield in your tracks' library and selects only those albums whose tracks'YEARfall within the lower/upper bounds.Other stuff:
SameSite=Lax. We don't useSameSite=Strictto support OAuth redirection when authorising storage connections.Build 20240221
Smallish items this week:
bandis set.Build 20240312
Much of this past three weeks has been taking refactoring some of our code to remove duplication and make things faster going forward. Here are some small improvements we made:
Build 20240326
This week we added track sorting by added date (that is, the date they were added to your collection):
Plus:
ALBUM ARTIST) in the /artists/ list, even when there's anARTISTin the same file.Build 20240411
We've implemented some more improvements to sorting/filtering this week. The album filtering UX you see on genre, artist and band pages has been changed to work a little differently:
You'll notice a quirk or two in the styling - we'll fix that next release, and we'll also incorporate the same UX for song filtering.
Plus:
Build 20240423
Big changes this week to sorting and filtering! We've updated all UX so it looks and behaves the same. We think it's much easier to filter, sort and enable/disable filtering this way.
Sorting can now work ascending/descending for all sort fields. The filter button now works as a dropdown, and the button updates when a filter is chosen with an "X" next to it to remove the filter.
Plus:
bandbut inconsistentartistfields.