Welcome back to InnSights everyone, I trust you are all having a good Autumn!
With the public beta of 3.1 released very recently, I thought I would post our usual update blog as a preview ‘taster’ just before the full public release of the update which will come imminently. Thank you to the beta participants who gave feedback on some of the features and helped direct a lot of the internal development during the testing period.
The main topics and features to cover in Sense 3.1 will be:
Internet Radio overhaul
Podcast overhaul
TIDAL and Qobuz improvements
Music Library improvements
Full changelogs including bug fixes will be published on the day of full release. But for now, let’s take a closer look at what’s new!
Internet Radio
In Sense, we will be leveraging a completely new source for Internet Radio. The two most immediate and obvious benefits of this will be no more commercial announcements from TuneIn, and much more refined navigation/browsing experience.
Browsable categories will now be better defined, including a specific section for High Quality stations that have higher than average bitrates.
The main Radio page will now include your saved presets within a widget, with the ability to rearrange the order of these presets and even rename the station.
The search function within radio will now be much more coherent, giving you more relevant results and no longer conflating with individual broadcast episodes or podcasts.
Individual stations will present you with a greater amount of information including language, location, station description and any other associated networks.
If the station or network happens to also have any past or present podcasts, these will also be displayed.
When browsing stations through the 'Directory', you will be able to filter by Language, Location, and Genre to help refine your results.
So for example, you could begin by browsing through location to narrow down to United States -> California - Los Angeles. This will present all internet radio stations from the city, but you could then apply filters to narrow down by Genre (I have chosen Classical for the image below), or even a specific language (where English and Spanish are options for LA).
This can be quite a useful tool for discovering new stations based on specific areas, genres and preferred languages around the world.
Podcasts
Podcasts will now receive their own dedicated section within Sense. The experience of this will be broadly like Internet Radio in terms of browsing by category, language, location, a search facility and so on.
It will also include a new dedicated widget for the home page, designed just for favourited podcasts giving you quick shortcut access to your main preset podcast stations.
Podcast shows will be listed like radio stations, with an overall ‘bio’ description of the podcast show and further detailed information for each episode.
This should be a significantly better experience when looking to enjoy podcasts through your HiFi via Sense.
TIDAL and Qobuz improvements
As of 3.1, Sense will now identify when TIDAL and Qobuz music was saved/added as favourite on that respective streaming service and this will be reflected in the New Music and date added areas of Sense. This should resolve the chronology errors affecting some users after the recent ‘Qobuz sync’ issue.
Within Sense, a TIDAL Artist page will now allow you to filter releases between Albums and Singles (or both), and sorting by alphabetical, release date, or by popularity.
Music Library improvements
Some suggestions that were placed over on the feedback zone will also be introduced on this update.
The Search bar will now show your recently searched terms, showing up to 5 most recent entries, after which the oldest entry will be replaced by newer ones.
That covers the main new features in Sense 3.1, work is already underway on update 3.2 which will aim to add Idagio classical music streaming amongst other features!
Enjoy the update, and please share your feedback on the forum!
With the public beta of 3.1 released very recently, I thought I would post our usual update blog as a preview ‘taster’ just before the full public release of the update which will come imminently. Thank you to the beta participants who gave feedback on some of the features and helped direct a lot of the internal development during the testing period.
The main topics and features to cover in Sense 3.1 will be:
Internet Radio overhaul
Podcast overhaul
TIDAL and Qobuz improvements
Music Library improvements
Full changelogs including bug fixes will be published on the day of full release. But for now, let’s take a closer look at what’s new!
Internet Radio
In Sense, we will be leveraging a completely new source for Internet Radio. The two most immediate and obvious benefits of this will be no more commercial announcements from TuneIn, and much more refined navigation/browsing experience.
Browsable categories will now be better defined, including a specific section for High Quality stations that have higher than average bitrates.
The main Radio page will now include your saved presets within a widget, with the ability to rearrange the order of these presets and even rename the station.
The search function within radio will now be much more coherent, giving you more relevant results and no longer conflating with individual broadcast episodes or podcasts.
Individual stations will present you with a greater amount of information including language, location, station description and any other associated networks.
If the station or network happens to also have any past or present podcasts, these will also be displayed.
When browsing stations through the 'Directory', you will be able to filter by Language, Location, and Genre to help refine your results.
So for example, you could begin by browsing through location to narrow down to United States -> California - Los Angeles. This will present all internet radio stations from the city, but you could then apply filters to narrow down by Genre (I have chosen Classical for the image below), or even a specific language (where English and Spanish are options for LA).
This can be quite a useful tool for discovering new stations based on specific areas, genres and preferred languages around the world.
Podcasts
Podcasts will now receive their own dedicated section within Sense. The experience of this will be broadly like Internet Radio in terms of browsing by category, language, location, a search facility and so on.
It will also include a new dedicated widget for the home page, designed just for favourited podcasts giving you quick shortcut access to your main preset podcast stations.
Podcast shows will be listed like radio stations, with an overall ‘bio’ description of the podcast show and further detailed information for each episode.
This should be a significantly better experience when looking to enjoy podcasts through your HiFi via Sense.
TIDAL and Qobuz improvements
As of 3.1, Sense will now identify when TIDAL and Qobuz music was saved/added as favourite on that respective streaming service and this will be reflected in the New Music and date added areas of Sense. This should resolve the chronology errors affecting some users after the recent ‘Qobuz sync’ issue.
Within Sense, a TIDAL Artist page will now allow you to filter releases between Albums and Singles (or both), and sorting by alphabetical, release date, or by popularity.
Music Library improvements
Some suggestions that were placed over on the feedback zone will also be introduced on this update.
The Search bar will now show your recently searched terms, showing up to 5 most recent entries, after which the oldest entry will be replaced by newer ones.
- Tags displayed on albums are now interactive, meaning you can now click/tap on a tag on an album page and this will show you all other music in your library connected to that tag.
- We also took measures to help albums from being ‘split’ during the import process. This would sometimes happen with compilation albums if they were missing the required ‘compilation’ metadata and would also happen with albums containing tracks of differing formats or resolutions.
Now on import, Sense will identify if the tracks within the same folder will belong to the same album if they all share the same album title, and make sure to keep them all as one listing in the library, rather than splitting into separate albums. This should save time on having to manually merge these albums that would otherwise be split up for the above reasons.
That covers the main new features in Sense 3.1, work is already underway on update 3.2 which will aim to add Idagio classical music streaming amongst other features!
Enjoy the update, and please share your feedback on the forum!
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