Rompr 1.0

It's been a while. But I've been busy. There are a lot of updates in this release and a couple of important things to mention so let's watse no more time:

Important Changes
The first thing to mention is that, because I've done a lot of work on making the album art side of things work better, the first time you load the new version of rompr it will have to update all your albumart and your database to reflect the changes. This will take some time and the page will appear to be not loading. Do not refresh it. Be patient, monitor the process with 'top' if it makes you feel better. eventually it will load.
If you're on a slow machine and your browser times out, wait a bit longer. Retrying the page won't hurt much but a little patience will do you better. It will get there eventually. I don't have a slow machine on which to test so I'm afradi I'm as in the dark as you are.

Secondly, this release come with an important change to the license terms. Unfortunately I have come across a few unsavoury individuals modifying rompr, removing the name, and selling it for profit. This is not nice, and nor was it part of the plan. I have changed the license terms in the hope of preventing this. it won't affect most people but if you're a packager or the like you might want to take a look and if you think it prevents you doing what you do, get in touch. I'm not trying to prevent sharing of the software, just trying to prevent unscrupulous use.

So what's good?
Right, that out of the way. There are some good things in this release. Some new themes, a lot of under-the hood improvements, and some great new toys for Mopidy-Spotify users.
Firstly, thanks to a bug report raised about rompr not being good at handling large playlists, I went back and had a look at the core collection code. This was the very first bit of rompr I ever wrote and I confess I was a bit scared of it because I'd forgotten how it worked. Some head-scratching and examination later and I can happily say that I've rewritten it so it's way better. Playlist updates now proceed at a much batter speed and use virtually no memory in comparison to before, and on my test system building the Music Collection is twice as fast and uses half the memory. So this is good news for everyone.

Also there's other things like the metadata backup is now useful, and takes much less time.

The Last.FM library importer has made a comeback. However, Last.FM is dying slowly, it's new API hasnt' been finished and the best I can do with the new importer is rather a palse shadow of the old one. It does the same things but it takes FOREVER. It has to go through your entire library - every single scrobble, one request at a time. If you've scrobbled thousands of tracks, forget it.

For user of Mopidy-Spotify there's even more fun.
I've done some hard work on making Spotify's random search results a little more useful. Those old occasions when it used to return an album with only one track have been caught and handled sensibly. There should be no more 'No individual albums returned by search' messages.
Secondly there are a whole bunch of new 'Personalised Radio' playlist generator thingies. I really need a better name for them.
The first is the Spotify Create-Your-Own playlist generator which uses the power of Spotify's database to create on-the-fly playlists based on a heap of parameters like genre, danceability, happiness, energy, instrumentalness, acousticness, and even BPM.
The second will please Last.FM users. Last.FM killed off their radio API some time agao and it is sorely missed. I've managed to use Last.FM's new API to generate reccomendations for tracks and artists based on your listening habits and then go off an search for those tracks on Spotify and play them. So it's like a return on Last.FM Mix radio. YAY!
There's much more too - the wishlist viewer is now useful, for one.

Go and Play!