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Change Log

All notable changes to this project will be documented in this file. This change log follows the conventions of keepachangelog.com.

Unreleased

Added

  • A new embedded web server configured to flexibly support overlay templates for OBS Studio, for creatively enhancing streamed mixing sessions.

Fixed

  • Incorporated new version of Beat Link which fixes the handling of Unicode strings when working with downloaded database export files.

Changed

  • Updated embedded version of Carabiner to 1.1.4 to support versions of macOS back to 10.12 (and get updated versions of the Ableton Link and gflags libraries).

0.6.2 - 2020-05-10

Fixed

  • Fixes to the Beat Link and Crate Digger libraries allow them to work properly with new formats for data that rekordbox 6 sends. We may find more problems in the future, because testing with this new version has been limited, but it is already working much better than it did at first.
  • Added support for playlists built with track titles and comments, #96.
  • The colors assigned to ordinary memory points and loops are now displayed correctly (previously this worked only for hot cues). Thanks to @ehendrikd for discovering how.
  • Incorporates a number of other fixes and improvements to the underlying Beat Link, Crate Digger, and Beat Carabiner libraries.
  • Updated the Track Loader window to forewarn you that the XDJ-XZ can't be told to load tracks without rekordbox on the network, or to play/cue under any circumstance.
  • Use larger downward-pointing triangle in cue Library menu button on Windows. It looks uglier than the small one, but that glyph is not available in the Windows font, so a big triangle looks way better than the “missing glyph” box.
  • Added type hints throughout so the Clojure compiler could avoid the use of reflection, which will improve performance, #95.

Added

  • Player Status window now distinguishes between players that are in full Sync mode and those that have degraded to BPM Sync mode because the DJ did a pitch bend (e.g. by nudging the jog wheel).
  • You can create folders in the Cue Library of a Show to make it easier to work with large numbers of Cues.
  • By holding down the Shift key when bringing up the Track context menu, you can now copy the contents of one track (configuration, expressions and cues) and paste them into another. This can be especially helpful when you have made changes to a track in rekordbox (such as fine-tuning the beat grid) and want to reconnect your show to it.
  • The Beat Link library now fully implements the startup and device number assignment phase of the protocol, so if you attach Beat Link Trigger to a port on a mixer that is dedicated to a particular channel, it will correctly be assigned that channel number.
  • The Beat Expression now gives you access to the current beat number even though the protocol itself fails to include that vital information in beat packets! This works as long as the TimeFinder is running, which is almost always true since the creation of Crate Digger.
  • The user guide now has a network troubleshooting guide for people who are having trouble getting connected to their players.
  • The user guide now has a search feature, making it easier to find content even if it is on a different page.
  • Navigation in the user guide is much improved, taking advantage of several new Antora features, which also allowed it to be split into more reasonably sized pages.

Changed

  • The macOS build process now creates HFS+ (MacOS Extended) disk images rather than the default APFS filesystem that it was previously using. This allows them to be opened on High Sierra (10.12) and earlier.

0.6.1 - 2020-02-09

Fixed

  • The program could get stuck in an unresponsive state at startup if there were multiple copies running (thanks for the report @drummerclint), or could fail in subtler ways if rekordbox was running. Both are now gracefully reported.
  • The File→Exit menu option apparently never worked on Windows or Linux, I only discovered this when I started working on deep-dish-pi, my planned custom Raspberry Pi distribution with preconfigured BLT, Carabiner and other goodies... I wish someone had told me!
  • When pre-nexus players are on the network, the waveform no longer jiggles around near the first beat, because Beat Link now realizes that it can never get track position information from those players. To make it even clearer what is happening, the Time and Remain sections for such players in the Player Status window now display "[Pre-nexus, no data.]"
  • No longer run the going-offline expressions in the case where the user tried going online from an offline state but failed. This would lead to exceptions because the expressions would (naturally) assume the came-online expressions had been run before them.
  • If the user chooses to quit during a failed attempt to go online, save their state and give them a chance to save any modified expressions they have open.
  • The expanded waveform windows created from the Player Status window did not save their new size if you resized them without later moving them. They now open in the size and position where you last left them regardless of how you moved or resized them.
  • Incorporated several fixes in the Beat Link and Crate Digger libraries to handle track data in formats that were slightly different than we believed, so metadata will load more reliably. Please continue to report issues on this front, especially if you can share packet captures and problem files from your USB sticks!
  • Triggers-mode syncing was broken in the conversion to the external library version of Carabiner integration; a :manual mode needed to be added to beat-carabiner in order to support it. (I doubt anyone is actually using this, but I can still imagine situations in which it might be useful.)

Added

  • BLT now embeds copies of Carabiner for all supported platforms, and will automatically run the appropriate one for you when you try to connect to Carabiner if you have not installed and run it separately. This makes it much easier to work with Ableton Link.
  • BLT now detects the loss of the DJ Link network when you had been online, and tries to reconnect automatically in case the network environment has changed. This is especially important for long-running headless operation, which is being explored with VNC on the Raspberry Pi 4.
  • A new feature implemented the CoreMidi4J library allows the user interface to update automatically when MIDI devices are attached or detached even if you are not using a Mac.
  • Documentation of the show, track, and cue structures that are available to expressions running inside them.
  • An integration example using an Orange Pi to generate SMPTE linear time code.

Changed

  • The process of attempting to go online can now be interrupted at any time to either continue offline or quit, rather than having to wait for ten seconds for the attempt to fail. After twenty seconds, a troubleshooting window replaces the animated searching window, but the attempt to go online will continue until stopped by the user.
  • Most release assets (cross-platform Jar, Mac and Windows native installers) are now built automatically by GitHub whenever changes are pushed to the master branch of the project. Thanks to @Kevinnns for improving the Windows MSI build process to retain features that had been previously offered by his hosted build server.

0.6.0 - 2019-11-24

Added

  • Support for the new XDJ-XZ, thanks to patient and detailed reports, experiments, packet captures, and videos from Teo Tormo.
  • The User Guide now contains and explains a Show that can be used to control the On-Air display of CDJs when working with a Xone:96 mixer by responding to its MIDI messages.
  • There is also an example Show that can take over the players and perform simple mixes when the DJ needs to take an urgent break.
  • Clicking on the scrolling waveform detail in the Player Status window now opens an independent, resizable window containing that scrolling waveform, in case you want a larger view (for example to use as an overlay in a live stream).
  • Expression editors have been greatly improved, with new features in the context menu, and a new menu bar:
    • They now allow you to load or insert files into the expression text, or save the text to a file, where you can edit it with a full-featured Clojure IDE.
    • An Edit menu makes it more apparent what kinds of editing have always been available in the context menu, and shows their keyboard shortcuts.
    • Rich Find and Replace support has been added in a Search menu.
    • You can jump to a line number, also through the Search menu.
    • Code folding in the context menu allows you to collapse sections of the code you aren't working on, to better see the outer structure.
  • The Triggers and Show windows now allow you to edit shared functions for use by any expression, in the form of ordinary Clojure code that is ideal for working with in an external IDE. Most extensive development should be done in these shared functions, and trigger expressions can be small, simply calling the functions.
  • You can now start an nREPL server so that when you use a Clojure IDE to exit expressions you have saved to files, it can connect to Beat Link Trigger, and offer full-featured code completion, popup documentation, and expression evaluation.
  • There is a new mechanism your expressions can use to download and use new libraries that enable you to build your integrations.
  • Shows' Came Online and Going Offline expressions now have access to information about the show itself.
  • All expressions have more convenient shortcuts by which to access important Beat Link Trigger namespaces.
  • A new helper function beat-link-trigger.show/require-version can be used to display an error to the user and close a show file when it is opened in a version of Beat Link Trigger that is too old to run it correctly.

Fixed

  • Changes in the Java 13 API were inadvertently backwards incompatible with the way that BLT opens Show files, causing shows to be unusuable in Java 13 (attempting to open them crashed with a NullPointerException inside the bowels of the Java JDK).
  • Adding cues from the library was not compiling their custom expressions, so the expressions would not work until the show was closed and reopened, or the expressions were edited.
  • Shows' Global Setup Expressions are now compiled before any Track expressions, so that they can define values for the Track expressions to use.
  • The Edit Track Cues gear was not updating its filled-in status to indicate the presence or absence of cues except when a show was initially loaded. It now updates immediately when the first cue is created or the last cue deleted in a track.
  • Shows can be created and used on computers that lack any MIDI outputs (previously the Track would never Enable, because no MIDI output could be found for it. Now, that is considered fine, as long as the Track is not configured to work with a particular MIDI device, which will always be true if there are none to choose). Thanks to @jongerrish for raising this issue.
  • Some Show expression help was improved to add missing parts, clarify details, and remove instructions that did not actually work. More still needs to be added to the user Guide, as described in Issue #79.
  • When an attempt to inspect your locals or globals fails, an error dialog is now displayed explaining what happened.
  • It seems that some versions of rekordbox create extended cue entries that are missing color bytes, which was causing Crate Digger to crash when trying to parse the track's EXT file. This should now be handled more gracefully.

Changed

  • Communication with the Carabiner daemon is now performed using the new beat-carabiner library instead of its own code, so that features and enhancements are shared between this project and others like Open Beat Control.

0.5.4 - 2019-09-06

Fixed

  • MIDI devices names were sometimes unavailable, making the devices unusable, when running in MacOS (especially in the standalone application bundle) due to a problem in the embedded MIDI library.
  • Media names were not being displayed in the Player Status window if the media was mounted after the window was already open, because we were not waiting long enough after being told the media had mounted for the VirtualCDJ to request and receive the media details from the player that had mounted it.

Added

  • New versions of Beat Link and Carabiner allow us to display the comments DJs have assigned to their memory points and hot cues within rekordbox in the scrolling waveform, as well as hot cues beyond C, and any custom colors assigned to hot cues.
  • Tooltips over the cue/loop markers in the track preview of the Player Status window showing a description of the cue or loop, including the DJ-assigned comment if one is available. Hot cue colors are shown in the preview as well.
  • New Trigger Global expressions, Came Online and Going Offline, which can be used to take actions like opening Player Status or manipulating Carabiner, which can only succeed when BLT is online, and which you want to happen every time it goes online or offline.
  • The elements in the Carabiner window can now be controlled from custom expressions, to make the Came Online expression even more useful in creating turnkey setups.
  • New values available in Trigger expressions, next-cue and previous-cue which return the CueList.Entry object corresponding to the upcoming (or most recent) hot cue, loop, or memory point in the track being played by the player being tracked by the trigger, if there is one.
  • The value track-time-reached can now be used in any trigger expression and will have a meaningful value if it can be calculated for the corresponding player.
  • The Trigger expression globals can now be accessed from Show expressions if you need to share any information or resources with your shows.
  • It should be possible to browse menus of CDJs that return track titles with BPM information embedded in them (a response format that we had not previously seen).

Changed

  • No longer display "(no metadata cache)" next to media names in the Player Status window, because there is no reason for people to use metadata caches now that we can use Crate Digger to reliably obtain metadata on demand.

0.5.3 - 2019-05-30

Fixed

  • Stop occasionally stuttering show cues at the end. Thanks to Minnesota for noticing and helping pin down this problem: It turns out that if CDJs send a status packet shortly enough after a beat packet, they don't always update the beat number in that status packet, even though they have updated the beat-within-bar number. This was causing BLT to think the cue had been re-entered after the beat packet exited it, until the next status packet with the correct beat number arrived.
  • When the DJ used Cue Play (holding down the Cue button) to preview a track, the resulting beat packets would trick the Show interface to thinking the track started playing as each beat was reached, and then immediately think it had stopped as soon as it received the next status packet from the player. The Show interface now remembers when a player is in Cueing mode, and ignores beat packets in that condition. (It is still possible, if a beat packet is the very first packet received when a DJ starts cue-previewing a track, that BLT will briefly believe it is playing, but there is no way to avoid that, and as soon as a status packet is received from that player, it will know what is happening.)
  • The expression variables that were supposed to tell Show Track expressions which players had the track loaded and were playing it were always empty. They now report the correct sets of player numbers. Thanks to @jonasbarsten for pointing this out.
  • If a track became enabled while already sitting inside cues (for example because it had an On-Air enabled filter, and the player started reporting being on the air), BLT would send the cues' messages twice.
  • If a track became enabled on the same beat that a cue ended, BLT would report ending and exiting the cue even though it had never reported starting it. Those extra reports have been removed.
  • Some very subtle issues involving tracking and responding to the state of Show tracks when they unload or Beat Link Trigger goes offline and back online have been resolved.
  • The Expression Editor is now automatically opened if you set a Show track's Enabled filter to Custom and there is not yet an expression defined for it.
  • Updated the Antora UI used by the User Guide to incorporate upstream security patches.

Added

  • A new default option for Show cues' Started Late Message menu, Same, which means to send the same message as if the cue had started on its first beat.
  • A new Simulate submenu in the Trigger, Show Track, and Show Cue context menus which allows you to pretend that an event has occured so you can set up and test MIDI mappings in other software (or your custom expression code), even when you are offline and don't have a CDJ available. Thanks again to Minnesota for the suggestion.
  • A warning when you are running a version of Carabiner older than 1.1.1, which fixes the parsing (when running in Windows) of timestamp values sent by Beat Link Trigger.

Changed

  • The User Guide is now created using Antora, which produces much nicer output and formatting.
  • The MacOS version is now bundled with Amazon's Coretto 11, a free, long-term-support distribution of the Java OpenJDK, instead of Oracle's short-term version.

0.5.2 - 2019-03-10

Fixed

  • A variety of places inside the show interface were assuming that imported tracks would have non-nil artist metadata. This has been corrected, and any nil metadata keys should now be handled gracefully and even informatively.
  • When editing global show expressions, even though the new code was being compiled and run properly, it was not getting saved to the show in the right place, so it would not appear when edited again or when the show was reloaded.
  • Custom expressions were being run in the clojure.core namespace even though they were being compiled in (and expected to be run in) beat-link-trigger.expressions.
  • The build process would not work for new clones of the repository because an empty directory needed by the lein-v Leiningen plugin was missing. A dummy file was added to the project to make sure that directory gets created.

Added

  • Shows now have a Cue Library that makes it easy to share common cues between tracks. Thanks to Jan Vermeerbergen for the great idea.
  • You can access the context menu for a cue by right-clicking (or control-clicking) on the cue in the waveform within the Cues Editor window.
  • The Cues Editor waveform is scrolled if necessary to make a new cue visible when it is created.
  • The confirmation dialog title for deleting a cue shows the cue name.
  • More of the Beat Link classes which might be useful to work with inside user expressions are imported into the namespace in which those expressions are compiled and run.

0.5.1 - 2019-03-05

Fixed

  • The SignatureFinder would crash trying to calculate signatures for tracks without artists, and trying to import such tracks from offline media into shows would also fail.
  • When loading tracks on a player using the dbserver approach (which is still done when loading from rekordbox), the Genre menu was not implemented correctly, and genre filtering would be lost after the top level of the menu.

Added

  • The MenuLoader now supports loading tracks from the Label, Bit Rate, Original Artist, and Remixer menus.
  • Track Metadata now includes bit rate, when applicable.

0.5.0 - 2019-02-23

Added

  • The new Show interface, which is the most significant new collection of user interface and capabilities ever added, allowing people to paint cues onto track waveforms to send events when those regions are played, without writing any code at all. You can create shows, import tracks, and edit cues on them while offline, by reading the tracks from your USB or SD media when you don't have any CDJs available to work with.
  • Takes advantage of Beat Link's new Crate Digger library, which allows us to get rekordbox metadata even when there are four CDJs in use. Because this is now so much more flexible, and metadata is so important, we no longer even ask the user if they want metadata. We always try to get it with Crate Digger and, optionally, if you are using a standard player number, with the older dbserver protocol.
  • Since there is now useful information for up to four players, the Player Status window will switch to using two columns whenever there are three or more players on the network. This will make it easier to work with on smaller screens.
  • Beat Link is now able to obtain and display the full-color versions of track waveforms used by nxs2 players and rekordbox itself. BLT will preferentially use them when available; you can change that by changing the WaveformFinder property colorPreferred. In other words, call 
    (.setColorPreferred (org.deepsymmetry.beatlink.data.WaveformFinder/getInstance) false)
    in your Global Setup Expression if you want the older, less-informative waveforms.
  • Double-clicking on a track in the Load Track interface is now a shortcut for clicking on the Load button.
  • When you try to close a show or quit (including by closing the Triggers window), if there are unsaved changes in any editor window, you are prompted to confirm that you want to discard them, giving you an opportunity to veto the close or quit operation until you have a chance to save them.
  • Window positions are now remembered and restored when you reopen the windows, even between runs of the program, so they stay where you like them (although if they would be off the screen, they will come back in a default position).
  • The Color, Filename, Time, and Year menus are supported for media that has been configured to contain them when loading tracks, thanks to reports from Ramon Palmieri and J C.
  • When going online, if no DJ Link devices can be found, a list of network interfaces and their IPv4 addresses is displayed to help with troubleshooting.
  • Even if going online was successful, warnings are shown if there are problems with the network, such as more than one interface connected to the DJ Link network, or devices found on more than one network.
  • You can use the command-line argument -o or --offline to start immediately in offline mode, without spending time searching for a DJ Link network. This will not even start the Beat Link DeviceFinder until you choose to go online, so it will work even if you have rekordbox running on the same machine and want to work on a Show without talking to CDJs.

Fixed

  • A longstanding issue in the Beat Link library could cause events from players to stop being delivered (the most obvious symptom would be the Player Status window locking up) until BLT was taken offline and back online. Even then, there would be a thread stuck in an infinite loop which would be wasting a core of a CPU until the program was quit and restarted. This was finally tracked down thanks to some thread dumps supplied by @Kevinnns.
  • When a track is loaded, even if it has no artwork and we are transitioning from no track or another track with no artwork, update the generic image to better reflect that there is a track and where it came from.
  • Don't crash the initial drawing of the Player Status window if it opens before a status packet has been received from one of the players.
  • The Load Track on Player interface now shows rekordbox and rekordbox mobile collections for any linked computers and phones, allowing you to explore them and load tracks from them.
  • The Beat Link library previously could be tricked when a player was powered off and back on into reporting stale metadata and waveform information.
  • The memory point and hot cue markers disappeared from the waveform previews in the Player Status window at some point between adding color waveform support and support for multiple simultaneous player playback positions (for the show interface). They have been restored.
  • Some spurious warnings that could pollute the log file were eliminated with the help of some more logs and Wireshark captures supplied by @Kevinnns.
  • The preferences writing code takes measures to ensure that Clojure's *print-level* and *print-depth* variables do not inadvertently truncate large trigger lists.

Changed

  • The Triggers window's File menu now lets you Save the triggers manually. (It has always saved them when you quit the program normally, but if you are worried about a crash causing you to lose significant work on your triggers, you can periodically manually save your progress this way.) The former Save option has been renamed "Save to File", and Load has become "Load from File".
  • The new Player Status window layout can no longer support different sized sections for each player (this is incompatible with being able to grow to a 2x2 grid), so it no longer makes sense to offer the option of showing waveform details for individual players. This has become a setting for the entire window, which defaults to having them shown. To change that, call 
    (beat-link-trigger.players/show-details false)
    in your Global Setup Expression before the Player Status window is opened.

0.4.1 - 2018-10-28

This is a small release to get a few fixes and improvements out there before I embark on some major changes to the foundations in Beat Link in order to support a major new way of organizing cues for tracks that will be a lot easier to manage than low-level triggers, and use much less CPU if you have cues defined for a large number of tracks. They will also embed all the metadata information they need to work even when four CDJs are active on the network.

Added

  • Metadata caches now store information about the media from which they were created. This allows easier and more reliable attachment (both manual and automatic) to media used during performances.

Fixed

  • Triggers will no longer be tripped by a CDJ that is pre-loading hot cues but not actually playing a track. (You can still see it moving around the hot cues in the Player Window as it does this, but Beat Link no longer reports it as Playing in this state.)
  • The warning dialog about non-rekordbox tracks potentially missing their Title and Artist information when Send Status Packets is not active was being displayed twice.

Changed

  • Triggers that generate MIDI clock now use the Electro metronome to time the clock messages. This leads to a cleaner, simpler implementation with easier jitter avoidance. It also uses busy-waiting to work around limitations in Thread/sleep as a timing mechanism. It is still much better, however, to use Ableton Link instead if at all possible.

0.4.0 - 2018-10-07

The most feature-packed release yet, with quite a few fixes as well! Next step is building a Mac (and possibly Windows) application bundle for people who don't want or need a separate Java runtime environment, and then work can begin on separating the UI from the engine, which will enable a ton of very compelling new use cases!

Added

  • Support for running under Java 9, 10 and 11.
  • Beat Link Trigger can now become Tempo Master on the Pioneer DJ Link network, and can synchronize the tempo and beat grid of CDJs to Ableton Link in both directions.
  • The Carabiner window now lets you control which device is the Tempo Master and which devices are synced to it.
  • When Ableton Link is the tempo master, the Carabiner window also lets you nudge the Link tempo up or down, or type in an exact tempo value you want to set it to.
  • Triggers configured to control Ableton Link can now use Link v3 Start/Stop Sync (transport control) to start Link playback when the trigger activates, and stop it when the trigger deactivates. (Of course this works only when Carabiner's Sync Mode is set to Triggers. In other modes, your expressions can call the start-transport and stop-transport functions directly, as long as they first check that Carabiner is active using either active? or sync-enabled? if they care about being synced.)
  • There is a new interface for picking a track from a player's media slot, and telling it (or another player) to load it. Players can also be stopped using this interface, and (as long as they are stopped at the cue point) started. This is useful for playing tracks during a pre-show from Front of House before there is a DJ on stage.
  • There is a new Playlist Writer window for ease of use by radio stations and others wanting to be careful about royalties.
  • Can now display metadata for non-rekordbox tracks, including audio and data CDs, thanks to dysentery and Beat Link updates.
  • Player Status window shows a distinction between players with no track loaded, and with no metadata at all (which is now rare).
  • The Online? option in the Triggers menu now shows the player number that Beat Link Trigger is using once it is online, to help people understand how it is operating.
  • Icons are now displayed when no album art is available for a track, providing information about where the track was loaded from, or an indication that there is no track loaded.
  • A new Help menu with options to open the User Guide, project page, Gitter chat, and to compose emails to report issues with pre-populated version details, or simply say "hello" as a new user.
  • An embedded copy of the User Guide will be served by an embedded web server when you access it from the Help menu, so you can read it even if you do not have an Internet connection.
  • The About window now shows Java version information, and all version information can be selected and copied, if useful in discussing issues.
  • The log files now include Java and operating system version information at the top.

Fixed

  • Can now get metadata from Windows rekordbox; previously we were running into a rekordbox bug when sending dbserver messages split across more than one network packet. The Beat Link library now takes pains to prevent them from being split.
  • The SD slots were showing up as mounted in the Player Status window even when they were emtpy.
  • If we had trouble communicating with a player's database server when first trying to get metadata from it, we would not ever try again, even if taken offline and back online. Now when we go offline, we shut down the ConnectionManager, clearing out that state so the next time we go online we can try again.
  • The Player Status window would sometimes not show the correct (or any) remaining time information, when it should have been available.
  • Make the Player Status window show up in the right size to not require scroll bars.
  • The Player Status window display when no players were found was huge and lacked suitable borders. It looks much better now.
  • The error dialog that was displayed when we did not hear the right response from a Carabiner daemon after connecting was not being displayed on the correct thread, and so was completely unreadable.
  • If multiple messages were sent rapidly to or from Carabiner they might get grouped into a single network packet, and the later ones would be ignored. This release, along with a newer Carabiner release, process even later messages grouped in the same packet. This version will warn you if you need to upgrade Carabiner.
  • Protect against race conditions reading and writing preferences from different threads, now that they are split across multiple nodes.
  • Deep-linking to headings in the new User Guide will scroll the browser to the correct place (the problem was the browser not knowing the image sizes during layout, so its guess about where to scroll would get knocked off as they filled in).

Changed

  • On Windows, the About window is now accessed through the new Help menu (which is more consistent with Windows applicaton standards), instead of the File menu.
  • The Open Logs Folder option has moved from the File menu to the new Help menu so it is right next to the options where you might need it.

0.3.8 - 2018-06-17

Fixed

  • An infinite loop reporting that Carabiner could not be found if you tried to connect to it when it was not running.
  • The Carabiner Connection window could show a connected state even after Carabiner had terminated.

Added

  • For very special situations, you can configure MIDI Clock and Carabiner tempo sync to ignore the actual track BPM, and sync a fixed tempo value adjusted by the player pitch.
  • Provided a safe entry point for expression code to make sure the Player Status window is showing.

0.3.7 - 2018-03-26

Fixed

  • Setup expressions are now always compiled before other expressions, so the context they set up is guaranteed to be available even at compile time when Beat Link Trigger is initially launched.
  • The Beat Expression is now fired only when beats are received from the player being tracked by the trigger (which is controlled by Watch Menu, as well as the Enabled Filter if Any Player is chosen). This makes the Beat Expression far more useful, and an example of synchronizing light shows driven by the Ableton Live timeline locked to actual track positions became practical. I plan to add that example to the Wiki and/or the User Guide shortly after this release.

Added

  • You can now access track album metadata using the track-album convenience variable within expressions that work with CDJ status updates (the omission of this was an oversight, prompted by an oversight in the Beat Link library itself).
  • If you would like the Player Status Window to be always on top of other windows, you can arrange for that by creating a global variable entry (using the Global Setup Expression) with the key :player-status-always-on-top and the value true before showing the window.
  • The Beat Link MetadataFinder is now imported into the namespace used by the expression compiler, so it is easier to use from your expressions.

0.3.6 - 2017-11-30

Fixed

  • When looping a track that has audio data that extends well past the final beat in the beat grid, players sometimes report playing a beat that does not exist in the beat grid. This previously caused an exception in the log, and the reported playback position would keep growing without bound as long as the loop continued. The Beat Link library has been updated to handle this better by interpolating missing beats at the end of the beat grid, so there is no exception and the looping of the player is properly reflected in the Player Status window.
  • In Windows, the MIDI environment sometimes throws exceptions trying to find or open devices which do not get thrown on the Mac. These were interfering with trigger display and event delivery, now they are more gracefully treated as a missing device, although they still will get stack traces in the log.

Added

  • Now displays the build date in the About box, to make it easier for people who are kindly testing pre-release versions keep track of which one they are running.
  • Also shows the build date and version number at the start of the log to help remote troubleshooting.

0.3.5 - 2017-10-08

Fixed

  • The embedded CoreMidi4J library which is used to communicate with MIDI devices on the Mac has been upgraded to improve stablity and to better handle working with multiple devices of the same type.

    ⚠️ Unfortunately, this causes most devices to show up with different names than they used to, so when you upgrade to this version you are going to need to go through all of your triggers that are configured to talk to MIDI devices, and reconnect them to the new device name if it has changed. See the CoreMidi4J project for details.

    If your device name has changed (and, again, this only affects the Macintosh platform), instead of seeing the Enabled section at the bottom right end of the trigger, you will see “Not found.” in red, just as you would see if the device was unplugged:

    Missing Device

  • The embedded Beat Link library which communicates with the Pioneer network has been updated to handle creating metadata caches from playlists that contain more than one copy of the same track. (This would previously fail with an exception when trying to create a duplicate entry in the ZIP file that holds the metadata cache; now extra copies of a track are simply skipped.)

Added

  • Taking advantage of the new TimeFinder class (which supports the Time and Remain fields in the Player Status window), expressions that run in response to player status updates can use a new convenience variable, track-time-reached, which will contain how far into the playing track has been reached, in milliseconds. (This value will only be available if the TimeFinder is running, otherwise track-time-reached will have the value nil. The easiest way to make sure the TimeFinder is running is to open the Player Status window.)

0.3.4 - 2017-09-05

Fixed

  • If you created too many triggers, or your triggers got too large because of complex expressions, they would fail to save because of exceeding the size limit for an entry in the Java Preferences. Even worse, this would happen silently (unless you happened to look in the log file). Now they will be split across multiple entries if needed, and if anything does fail, an error dialog will be displayed.

Added

  • A menu item which lets you view the contents of a metadata cache file, so you can work on triggers when you don't have a player or the actual media handy.

0.3.3 - 2017-08-08

Added

  • Log more details of the process of going online, to better support people who are reporting issues with metadata.

Fixed

  • Provide more specific guidance when turning on metadata requests, based on the actual number of physical players detected on the network, and stop offering the unreliable metadata option if there is only one real player, since it cannot be used in that situation.
  • Stop logging stack traces on each beat if we are offline but configured to align the master player with Ableton Link.
  • Found one more (albeit extremely unlikely) path where trying to create a metadata cache could fail silently, and added an error message there.

0.3.2 - 2017-08-08

This is a small release to fix some issues found by the much wider audience that has been introduced to Beat Link Trigger through the DJ TechTools article.

Fixed

  • If there was a problem retrieving metadata when the user asked to create a cache file (for example, if they did not have Request Track Metadata turned on, and there was only one player on the network), it would silently fail with a somewhat cryptic entry in the log file. It now gives a nice error dialog explaining how to fix the situation. It also gives a general error dialog if something else unexpected blows up the process.
  • The explanation of the timestamp value inside trigger expressions incorrectly stated they were millisecond values. In order to be compatible with Ableton Link, Beat Link switched to using seconds in its packet timestamps.
  • Added information about the status value available in the documentation for all triggers where it is present (some were previously missing this important detail).
  • Improved wording and variable name in grandMA2 example, thanks to suggestions from Alex Hughes.

[0.3.1] - 2017-07-22

This is a small release primarily to make it easier for people who discover Beat Link Trigger through the DJ TechTools article to find the correct version, with on-air indicators and SMPTE integration support.

Added

  • On-Air indicators for players in the Player Status window. If you have the players configured to track and report this, it will be reflected right above the beat phase display.

  • A new version of Beat Link which adds hooks needed to allow triggers to generate SMPTE timecode synced to the track position (with the help of an external daemon).

  • Beat Expressions can now check whether the player sending the beat was on the air by simply looking at the value of on-air? as was already possible in Enabled and Tracked Update expressions. (Even though the information is not part of the beat packet itself, Beat Link Trigger will look it up from the last status packet received from the same player.)

  • It is now possible to reconfigure the maximum log file size and the number of backlog files by calling, for example:

    (beat-link-trigger.logs/install-appenders 1000000 4)

    This would allow the log files to grow to a million bytes each, with five backlog files kept. The default maximum size has been doubled to 200,000 bytes, and the default backlog file count remains 5.

0.3.0 - 2017-06-25

Added

  • Some major new features taking advantage of the incredible advances in the Beat Link library over the past month. The most visible are found in the new Player Status window, available in the Network menu, providing a detailed view of what the player on the network are currently doing.
  • This also provides the foundation for upcoming work to generate timecode, now that we can keep track of detailed playback location when a player is playing normally.
  • There is a whole new infrastructure for creating, attaching, and using metadata cache files for performance settings with four players all linked to a single media library, which makes requesting metadata difficult.

Changed

  • Now that metadata has become so fundamental to so many features in Beat Link Trigger, the user guide assumes that you will be working with it turned on. You can also make use of the extensive new metadata cache file mechanism to cope with performance environments in which requesting the metadata from a player is difficult.

Fixed

  • File management is much improved, adding standard file extensions for configuration and trigger export files, filtering on those extensions to make it easier to see the right files, asking for confirmation before overwriting an existing file, and still letting you load a file with the wrong extension (such as one you saved before this release) by choosing "All files" in the Open dialog.

0.2.1 - 2017-03-18

Added

  • You can now request track metadata from the CDJs, display it in the trigger windows, and use it in your trigger logic.
  • You can take Beat Link Trigger online after starting it in offline mode, or go offline when operating in online mode, at will using a new Network menu.
  • A sample integration with The Lighting Controller, also known as ShowXpress, QuickDMX, and SweetLight, a widely-used DMX lighting control package.
  • An example of how to automatically create a playlist logging all tracks played.

Fixed

  • The BeatListener was not being started, so Beat Expressions would never be run.
  • Previously an extra closing parenthesis in an Expression would cause anything after it to be silently ignored. Now it will properly cause a parse failure due to an unmatched delimiter.
  • Parse errors are also now identified with the trigger number and expression type, as well as proper line and column numbers.
  • Runtime exceptions within triggers are now also logged with the trigger number and type description, with better formatting, to help track them down.

Changed

  • The Carabiner connection is now configured through the new Network menu.

0.1.4 - 2016-11-20

Added

  • You can now tie an Ableton Link session's timeline to the beat grid being received on a trigger (setting its BPM and aligning either at the level of individual beats full bars), with the help of carabiner.

0.1.3 - 2016-10-02

Added

  • Thanks to new beat-link features, expressions can now determine the rekordbox ID number and source (player number and slot) of a track being played.
  • In describing tracks, triggers show the rekordbox ID when available in preference to the simple playlist position, as well as the source player and slot.
  • User expressions can override how a track is described by storing a custom description string under the key :track-description in the trigger locals map.
  • A Media Locations window to help keep track of media library locations so that triggers can identify tracks by their rekordbox ID regardless of where the DJ ends up needing to insert media during show setup.
  • A new, separate Tracked Update expression to use for relaying status updates about the tracked player to other systems, simplifying the purpose and use of the Enabled Filter expression
  • An example of how to control Pangolin BEYOND laser shows.
  • Takes advantage of beat-link's new slf4j integration to redirect any log output that beat-link produces into the beat-link-trigger log file.

Fixed

  • An exception which occurred trying, and failing, to clean out any previous local bindings when editing a trigger's Setup Expression.
  • Triggers were not being properly cleaned up (including leaving open now-orphaned expression editor windows) when replacing the entire trigger window, for example by opening a different trigger file.
  • Creating a trigger expression using the expression editor window that was automatically opened when you chose Custom as a Message or Enabled option for the trigger was not updating the state of the gear button.
  • Spurious exceptions could appear in the log file when triggers had Tracked Update expressions because they were being called during window creation without an actual status update. These expressions are now only called when a status update has been received.

0.1.2 - 2016-06-05

Added

  • A comment field for keeping notes about each trigger.
  • In addition to the former yes/no values (now renamed Always and Never), the Enabled setting of a trigger can be set to On-Air (enabled when its player reports being on the air), and Custom, which allows you to evaluate a Clojure expression on the player's status report and decide however you want.
  • A graphical indicator to summarize the trigger's enabled and tripped state.
  • A general framework for editing Clojure expressions to customize the application, including a large variety of convenience variables to simplify the task, and built-in help about the expressions and variables.
  • Support for sending MIDI Beat Clock.
  • A visible button to let people know about the trigger contextual menu even if they don't think of trying to control or right-click on it.
  • Errors and other important events are now logged to a log file, which is available for inspection via the File menu.
  • A user guide.

Fixed

  • The About box and the Searching for Devices box would appear in the top left corner of the screen momentarily before jumping to where they belonged.
  • Newly created trigger rows had a blank choice at the bottom of the MIDI Output menu.

0.1.1 - 2016-05-20

Added

  • A status summary of the selected player is shown after the menu.
  • The trigger can be enabled or disabled with a checkbox.
  • You can specify the channel on which the MIDI message should be sent.
  • You can now open multiple trigger windows using the new Window menu, and have each watching a different player and sending a different MIDI message. Closing the last window quits.
  • Support for offline operation when no DJ Link device can be found.
  • The list of triggers is saved when the application exits and restored when it starts.
  • You can save or load the configuration to a text file of your choice.
  • Triggers can be deleted by right-clicking on them as long as there is more than one in the list.
  • A first-stage loading process which checks the Java version and presents an error dialog if it is too old to successfully load the rest of the application, offering to open the download page.
  • The beginnings of an informative and attractive About box.

Changed

  • The MIDI Output menu now reformats names so you don't need to see the CoreMIDI4J prefix even when it is in use.
  • The Player menu stores its choices in a format that is more efficient for comparing with the incoming player packets.
  • The Player menu always lists Players 1 through 4 as choices, and reports when you have chosen one that is not currently visible.
  • Switched to a dark UI theme to fit in better with the kind of software this will be used with, and the dark environments in which it will be used.

Fixed

  • Identified a source of potential and unpredictable latency in the upstream beat-link library, and fixed it.
  • Moved all interaction with UI objects to the AWT Event Dispatch thread; we were trying to get the current output menu selection on the MIDI event thread, which was causing a ConcurrentModificationException within AWT.
  • Keep track of MIDI outputs as we open them, so we can reuse the same instance rather than creating new outputs every time. Clean them up when they disappear from the MIDI environment, like Afterglow does.

0.1.0 - 2016-05-13

Added

  • Set up initial project structure.
  • Selector to choose MIDI output as trigger destination.