Peerless Player News

November 2024 - What's New

Release Date: 19.11.2024

Minor update to fix a few bugs, mostly in accessing data from external servers such as Musicbrainz and Spotify, to improve search functions and error handling.

Recommended playlist bug fixed where if only 1 recent genre or mood found caused a database error and a recommended playlist not being created.

September 2024 - What's New

Release Date: 08.09.2024

On the left hand menu, the Database Functions have been removed. The Add New Music button has been moved to the Music Library and the other functions can now be found in the Player Functions.

The artist Discography page is now linked to Spotify and any albums can be clicked on to listen to in full in the Spotify web player.

The graphics for genres, playlists and the player control buttons have all been updated.

The left hand menu can be closed and reopened using the X and hamburger button. The previous Close buttons across the app have been replaced with an X in the top right hand corner of the relavent screen.

An extra function has been added to the Pi-Player menu to check the network connection between the app and Raspberry-pi.

June 2023 - What's New

Release Date: 05.06.2023

Two bug fixes in the build process from release 0.5.0. Both bugs were in the new Pi-Player functions. The node ssh2 module, for sending Shell commands to the Raspberry-pi, was not included in the local node-modules directory of the development app. The json file for sending track data to the Raspberry-pi was included in the app instead of using the userData path.

May 2023 - What's New

Release Date: 29.05.2023

The Peerless-Pi-Player project has been completed and Peerless Player has been updated to connect to a Peerless-Pi-Player so you can view album art and track details of the current playing song in Peerless Player on a remote screen, such as your flat-screen TV or remote monitor using a Raspberry Pi. For more details please see the Pi-Player page of this website.

The number of songs on the artist's album page above the biography button has been linked to display a table of all the artist's songs. This table can be sorted and filtered as required.

There have been a few bug fixes and small changes. A bug while fetching album information from Wikidata has been fixed. There has been a small redesign of the main top menu and when editing the database, the cancel button will now take you back to the artist's album page instead of the home page.

Security updates. Sqlite3 bumped from 5.1.4 to 5.1.5 and http-cache-semantics bumped from 4.1.0 to 4.1.1.

April 2023 - Coming Soon

Under Development

I had been looking for a Raspberry Pi project for some time and saw that both Spotify and Sonos had an API, which allowed you to display the current playing song album artwork to a remote screen. People have used these APIs and a Raspberry Pi to display album artwork to flat screen TVs or Raspberry Pi screens.

Over the past couple of months I have been thinking about how to do the same for Peerless Player. I have bought my first Raspberry Pi and I am now writing the code to make all the magic happen. See the Pi-Player page for more details.

May 2022 - What's New

Release Date: 01.05.2022

After an absence of a year the Music Recommendations function is back using the Spotify database api to recommend albums and singles based on an artist. From an artist's page, click on the Recommends button at the top of the page to see a list of music recommendations. Click on a recommended album to listen in full on the Spotify webplayer (a free Spotify account is needed to do this).

A new function to display the latest popular New Music Releases has been added. To see a list of the latest releases from the menu on the left under Player Functions, click on the Show New Releases button. Alternatively from the Menu at the top of the screen, click on Player - New Music Releases. Click on a new release to listen in full on the Spotify webplayer (a free Spotify account is needed to do this).

A Back To Top button has been added to the bottom right corner of each page once it has been scrolled to quickly return back to the top of the page as well as smooth scrolling.

A new animation has been added to displaying large album artwork.

There has been some minor bug fixes in the playlist and search functions. Error handling code has been added to ajax calls to remote servers to report errors if a request could not be served.

Security updates have been installed for minimist 1.2.5, plist 3.0.5, nanoid 3.1.31, electron 16.0.6, ajv 6.12.3.

January 2022 - What's New

Release Date: 18.01.2022

Minor update to improve metadata search functions when adding/editing an album. During final testing, metadata was found for 90% of the albums. Of the remaining 10%; 4% had no track metadata, 2% had no album metadata and 4% had no metadata at all.

Further analysis showed that of this 10% of failures; 60% had no data in the various databases searched and the remaining 40% had data, but could not be found by the algorithm.

This effectively now gives the album metadata search algorithm a 96% success rate.

Album artwork is now searched for on 2 databases to increase the success rate for searching for artwork. During final testing 96% of the album artwork was found.

Some minor bug fixes on page layouts.

December 2021 - What's New

Release Date: 13.12.2021

Minor update to fix bugs and update dependecies to latest versions.

Fixed expired certificate error when importing music.

Updated jimp to 0.16.1, sqlite3 to 5.0.2, electron-builder to 22.14.5, electron to 16.0.4

July 2021 - What's New

Release Date: 15.07.2021

Display of back cover artwork now implemented when displaying album cover artwork.

After changes in data relationships in the Wikidata database, causing the Biography function to fail, the code has been rewritten using new relationship identifiers.

Bug fixes from the latest main release 0.3.0 from June 2021 implemented.

June 2021 - What's New

Release Date: 08.06.2021

The main update has been rewriting the code for importing and editing music since the termination of the Gracenote Free Open Developer Program. There will be some small changes in the process of importing or updating metadata in the database now using the Musicbrainz and Spotify APIs.

Unfortunately, I have had to remove the Recommendations function since the termination of my Gracenote licence. Don't worry, this will return in a future update.

Support has been added to now play hi-def lossless FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec) files.

A new algorithm has been developed to determine the most played albums. Currently the algorithm is very simplistic and just counts the number of track plays per album. The new algorithm uses the following formula: (album track plays/no. tracks) * (1 + album length / 2700), which adds a weighting for the length of the album to give more accurate results.

The search function is being rewritten using SQL FTS5, which will deliver a list of results based on most relevant results to the search query.

The album sort is being updated to include sorting by album Release Date and the sorting will apply globally across the app wherever a list of albums is displayed.

As well, there are numerous small bug fixes, which are listed in the release notes under the Help menu in the app.

April 2021 - Gracenote Terminate My Licence

Since 2013, when I first started building this app in python3, I have been using the Gracenote Free Open Developer Program, which allowed developers to use the Gracenote web API to query their database and retrieve music metadata and album artwork.

In mid April I suddenly began receiving error messages whenever my app contacted the Gracenote servers. Upon investigation of the error code sent back, I found out that my licence had expired.

At first I thought that this was an oversight on my behalf, as I have always received an annual email from Gracenote for me to log into my account and renew my licence. I went to their website to log in, but my account details were no longer valid. I checked my emails, but there were no emails from Gracenote.

Upon contacting Gracenote I was informed that the free Open Developer Program had been discontinued and that they now only licence access to the web API for a monthly subscription, starting at $3,500 a month.

So, after 8 years I had to sit down and research where to get music metadata from. To the rescue came the Musicbrainz and the Spotify web API's, which is now being incorporated into release version 0.3.0.