This package contains release notes about Pat Farrell's MusicUtil. It addresses major changes, which will require changes in the setup and installation, or major functional changes/improvements.
March 19, 2007
Very old release notes from 2004, included for ancient history
Properly ignore .txt, .jpg, .gif, and .png files in the song directory, as they are unlikely to contain good ID3 or Ogg tags.

Feb 06, 2004: Convert one pixel .GIF files to the proper extension, even though we asked for a .JPG file.

Feb 20: properly parse critical fields from ID3 Version 2 format tags. Remove extra printout (left over from debugging).

Feb 21: properly parse critical fields from ID3 Version 2 format tags in both "revision 2" and "revision 3" data..

Feb 24: skip directory (and slow fetch of cover art) if there is a file called asin.txt in the directory. Fix handling of very short ID3V2 data blocks

Feb 28: Fix Ogg/Vorbis parser to read Ogg files properly.

Mar 3: Add logic to detect one-pixel gif files returned from Amazon, if so, delete the appropriate file, and write into asin.txt. Cleanly handle MP3 files with no ID3 tags at all.

Mar 4: add "noonepix" command (no one pixel file) that will do a search and destroy mission on one pixel files. Many of these may have been created by earlier versions of this utility.

Mar 7: add "--safe" option to MusicUtil and AmazonCovers programs, which will not overwrite existing .jpg files.

Mar 13: fix parser so "--safe" option doesn't cause MusicUtil to die ugly and painful deaths.

Mar 14: Add "findsmall" command, which locates music files that are too small to be proper. Fix scan and dup functions that were broken in some intermediate version. Fix read past end of file bug in FetchURL. mostly visible on Mac OSx.

Mar 20: Add defensive code to XML parser, trying to reduce complaints when Amazon is slow.

Mar 21: add "--c" switch to AmazonTest and AmazonCovers. Add list command.

April 11: minor bug fixes.

April 19: explicitly ignore GEOB block. Try to handle frame sized specied by RealAudio properly, altho they violate the ID3 standard specs.

May 26: teach Ogg/Flac parser how to read and understand UTF-8 encoded Unicode. We now properly pass the extended characters to Amazon. Note, this does not fix the problem with the SlimServer and SqueezeBox not handling non-US-ASCII in tags for display.

June 1: put in structure to allow testing of Jakarta HTTP client code.

July 19: remove Jakara HTTP client code. Add "flactest" command that will test all flac files in directory tree with the specified external command. Add debugging log printouts. Documented in configuration section.

July 20: added DebugProgressCounter so that periodic dumps can be made.

Sept 21: Change to match new Amazon aws-beta service. Beta quality release.

Sept 27: fixed defaulting on missing LogLevel parameter in musicutil.conf

Sept 28: don't require : "LogFileSpec" and related field in musicutil.conf file. Default rationally. Still todo, fix Lots o data problem.

Oct. 17: try to be nice about case in musicutil.conf file. We can only do so much...

Oct 31: finally implement code to use new Amazon webservices model. Change parser to use a real XML parser. Added appropriate XML package files to distribution. This is still pre-release code

Nov 6: first fixes of user-found bugs in new code.

Nov 7: don't assume that /var exists and is writable. Use system temp directory.

Nov 13: fix null pointer exception when Amazon didn't find any records. Fix Null pointer when amazon didn't have all three image sizes. Write dump file to /tmp/musicusilyyyymmdd file rather than naming it only for the date. Note: if you don't have a tmp or temp definied, it may try to write to your root.

Nov 15, 2004: fix still more null pointer problems. Thanks SB...