What’s New with innuOS 2.4

For innuOS 2.4 we have started a new phase to improve the innuOS 2 experience with better features to manage the local music library, integrating more streaming services and refining the UI to provide more consistency and usability. Here’s a quick summary of the new features available on this update:

  • Artist View
    • Rename Artist
    • Select and Merge multiple Artists
    • Artist Filters
  • Album View
    • Additional Sort options on Albums: By Added Date and By Date
    • Additional Filter by Compilation
    • Play actions on selected Albums
    • Select multiple albums and mark as Compilation
    • Select multiple albums and mark as Multi-Format
    • Split Album tracks
  • HighResAudio Streaming Service
  • Additional MQA features

New features on Artist View

As detailed on the Feedback Zone, on version 2.4 we will now have the ability to change an Artist name and be able to merge two or more artist entries and consolidate them into one. For those of us who manage a local music library, we know that metadata present on the files can be very inconsistent. Until now, if we had music files from “beatles” we would have to edit album by album to change the name “beatles” to “The Beatles”. Now you can simple click the artist and select the rename option. This will go through all your files having the artist “beatles” and changing them to “The Beatles” instead. This changes the metadata both on files and the music database so that other systems like Sonos or UPnP will benefit from the change as well as exporting to a USB drive to listen in the car for example.

You can change the Artist name in the Edit Artist option. Please note though this option is available only for artists with local tracks – either in the internal storage or a connected NAS. At this stage we do not make any changes to artists on the Music Library with only streaming services files.

If you actually have two or more variations, you can now multi-select artists and merge them into one. This is helpful if you have already have some music with the right artist name and all you want now is to merge others with incorrect names to that one.

Finally we have also introduced Artist filters. This now enables you to list artists filtered by one or more tags, just like the Albums view. If you want to list Album Artists within Classical, Rock or any other tag, now you can.

New features on Album View

Similarly to the Artist View, the Album View benefits now from further options to explore and organize your music library. The first one is the ability to sort your albums by Added Date, meaning by the date that album was first added to the library. This will list albums from most recent to least recent. Additionally, you can also sort by album date, again listing from most recent to least recent. Album filter now lists an additional option to filter compilations. Now you can filter your compilations and further refine by tag to explore or create mixes easily based on your compilations.

The Album View now has the possibility to select multiple albums for a number of possible actions. Click the multi-select icon on the top right corner to enter selection mode. If you select two or more albums, you now have the following options for playback available:

  • Play Mix – You can now play a mix based on tracks just from the selected albums
  • Play – Place all tracks from the selected albums in the queue and start playing in order
  • Play Next – Place all tracks from the selected albums after the current song
  • Add to Playlist – Add all tracks from selected albums into a chosen playlist
  • Add to Queue – Place all tracks from the selected albums at the end of the queue

We can now also aggregate compilation albums that spawn “duplicate albums” for each track – this happens when the files are not tagged with the Compilation flag appropriately. Previously, you had to edit album by album and set the Compilation flag. Now all you need to do is to select all the album entries from the same album and select “Set as Compilation”. This will automatically group the album together under a Various Artists album.

Similarly, if you have the same album split in two or more due to different file formats, you can now easily select all and choose “Set as Multiformat”.

Note that these two features, in order to prevent any accidents, will only work if the album name on all selected albums is the same on all selected albums.

Finally, you can now also do the inverse operation. If you have tracks that are together in one album and actually belong to separate albums (ex: two different albums versions from the same artist with the same album name) you can now use the split album to separate them. To use split album, edit the album first then check the options on the top right corner. Click on Split Album. The system will now provide you with the list of tracks aggregated by the folder where they are stored as it’s likely if they are 2 different albums that they are actually in two different folders. This should help to easily select the all files from an album.

The next step is to choose a new album name and edit any additional metadata for the album or tracks. Once saved, you will now have two separate albums on the music library.

New streaming service: HIGHRESAUDIO

innuOS 2.4 will now include support for HIGHRESAUDIO (HRA) as a streaming service that you can browse, search and play directly on innuOS. HRA contains a vast catalogue of music all in high resolution Flac files with fantastic sound quality.

You can browse the HRA’s curated content such as Dashboard, Charts, Genres Labels and Playlists as well as access your favorite playlists, albums and tracks. You also have access to your Virtual Vault to stream music purchased on HRA. HRA is also integrated in innuOS Search so that you can get results from your music library and all streaming services in one place.

At this stage, we provide only the ability to browse the HRA catalogue, search and play music from HRA. Contrary to TIDAL and Qobuz, we do not have your favourite albums integrated in the Music Library and it’s not possible to add HRA tracks to Sense playlists at this stage – we expect to add this in a future update. You can, however, create HRA playlists directly or add to HRA Favorites on Sense,  which will be stored within the My Library area on Music > HighResAudio. See the video below for a tour of the HRA interface.

Additional MQA Features

Last but not least, we’ve added a couple more features to integrate MQA compatible DACs. innuOS now checks the capabilities of the DAC (whether it has No MQA Support, Renderer or Decoder) and automatically enables/disables software decoding based on those capabilities. This makes the connection of MQA compatible DACs a plug and play affair.

What’s coming next?

While we were testing innuOS version 2.4, the team is busy developing innuOS 2.4.5 so we can provide a quick peek of what’s coming on the next software release:

  • Browse Music Library by Tag – A much requested feature from our users. You will now have a Tags section with Music to enable browsing by tag. Each tag will have a directy Play Mix button so that if you want to play a Rock Mix, you can simply click the play button on the Rock tag. Tags can be sorted alphabetically or by number of albums so that tags with the most music will show first.
  • Ability to Merge Tags – This is a feature we believe will breathe a new life into your music library. Features like album or artist filters become limited if the genres or tags on your files are inconsistent, not only because of typos but also because the tags coming on the files may not be relevant to you. Merge tags allows to select multiple tags, choose a target one and the system will go over every track to harmonise the tags. This should enable to have a consistent set of genres/tags to your exact taste with very little effort
  • Deezer – We expect to finish Deezer certification and enable it in 2.4.5 with a similar UI to the HRA service.

Hope you enjoy these new features! We’ll be busy at work further developing the innuOS platform to make it as simple and great sounding as we can.

If you are coming to Munich High End this year, I’ll be there together with a large Innuos team on Atrium 4.1 room E125. Do come and say Hi, we’d love to meet you.

Best,

Nuno

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