Version 4.20 (latest release)

  • Features added:

    • New songs can now be created by just drag-n-dropping files (PDFs or image files) on an existing PlayList.
    • Added clipboard cut/copy support.
    • PDF-based songs can now be converted to JPG-based songs. This saves each PDF page as a JPG and creates a new song from the JPGs. Since some PDFs render very slowly, this change can significantly speed up working with PDF-based songs.
  • Bugs fixed:

    • Re-ordering of songs in a PlayList using the "Move Up/Down" context menu was not working properly (the UI was not updating to reflect the move).
    • When creating a new song while a MusicPage was selected, the song was added to the Default PlayList instead of the current PlayList.
    • The status bar was brought back.
    • A few other small bugs.

Version 4.01

This is a minor release to fix some issues on Mac OS X.

  • Improvements or bugs fixed:
    • Fixed an issue on Mac OS X where the mouse would move to the menu bar while in live/performance mode and cause the mouse click for the "next page" to open a menu instead of move to the next page.
    • Added F2 as a default shortcut for renaming items on all platforms.

Version 4.00

  • Features added:

    • The ability to attach tags to songs and playlists, and to view the sonts and playlists belonging to a tag.
    • Added statistics collection/logging.
    • Prevent the screen saver from starting while playing.
    • Revamped the documentation.
    • Added a DMG installer for Mac OS X.
  • Improvements or bugs fixed:

    • Upgraded to NetBeans 8.0
    • Upgraded to ICEpdf 5.0.5
    • Fixed handling of moved files for the case when they were moved to a different drive on Windows or to a different mount point on Linux.
    • Fixed the page turn animation when the NextPage key (ex: space bar) is pressed twice quickly. Before this fix, on occasion, part of the previous page was always left on the screen until the song was restarted by pressing 1.
    • Added the ability to move back in the live screen by pressing the Left Arrow (to accomodate keyboards that don't have PgUp/PgDn).

Version 3.20

  • Features added:

    • Better support for Windows 7
    • When closing the application, the user now has the choice of saving some or all of the modified contents.
    • PlayLists can now be tagged (from the "Properties" window)
    • New toolbar button allows the user to quickly toggle the scrolling amount from 100% (a full page) to 50% (half a page at a time). This comes in handy when one image contains two music pages side-by-side (ex. when copied from a book). Toggling the scroll amount to 50% results in music pages being scrolled one at a time instead of two at a time.
    • A secondary PDF renderer was added and is now being used for some types of PDF files that used to show gibberish with the original renderer.
  • Improvements or bugs fixed:

    • Better handling when the music repository is moved to a different drive or different location on the same drive.
    • Upgraded to NetBeans 7.1.2
    • Upgraded some of the external libraries used by VirtMus
    • Errors and notifications are now shown in the bottom right corner of the application window
    • In some cases, adding new annotations to a page already containing some, and then saving the song, would make the new annotations disappear (even though the file on disk contained the new annotations). This should be fixed now.

Version 3.00

  • Features added:

    • Added the ability to undo annotations.
    • A double-click, or a right-click on the thumbnails now displays them in the annotation window.
    • Multi-threaded some operations to speed things up.
    • A portable version of the app is now available. See http://portableapps.com for more details, and download the "VirtMus Portable" installer from http://sourceforge.net/projects/virtmus/files/ by looking for the file that ends in *.pdf.exe.
  • Improvements or bugs fixed:

    • PDFs that have different resolutions in the X and Y direction are now handled properly.
    • Improved the display of help in Linux.
    • Fixed rendering of rotated PDF pages.

Version 2.62

  • Features added:

    • As you get to the end of the song, VirtMus will start caching the first pages to make a return to the beginning faster. This was a feature requested by a user.
  • Bugs fixed:

    • A few annoying bugs that were introduced in the rush to release v2.61 were fixed. An exception when bringing up the Options dialog box, and when changing the song and/or playlist path. In some cases the application would stop displaying new pages in the live view.

Version 2.61

  • Features added:

    • Basic annotation tools (line, rectangle, freehand) are now available right in the annotations window (no need to use Inkscape for simple edits).
    • Playlists with stale songs (missing or moved) show up in bold. The missing songs are shown in the IDE log.
    • Added File->Open Music Folder menu option
  • Bugs fixed:

    • Improved error handling for PDF documents.
    • Improved handling of thumbnail reordering. This issue was especially prominent when the thumbnails were in a single column. Moving a thumbnail to the left used to be interpreted as a request to place the moved thumbnail before the previous one.
    • Improved re-painting of the annotations window where sometimes the unused region was not properly cleaned up.
    • Fixed an exception on Linux when displaying the Options
    • Fixed crash when drawing on null music page
  • Other changes:

    • Upgraded to NetBeans 6.9
    • Upgraded ICEpdf from 3.0 to 4.0.1
    • Handle filenames with spaces.
    • Made annotations tool bar better
    • Updated documentation on bilila.com products to refer to Git instead of SVN

Version 2.51

  • Bugs fixed:
    • Pages from a PDF document can be annotated using an external SVG editor now.
    • Updates made using an external SVG editor show up right away now.

Version 2.50

  • Features added:

    • Pages from a PDF document can be added to a song (as music pages).
    • The property sheet now has an option to add tags to each song. There are plans to make use of tags more extensively in future versions.
    • Page names in thumbnail view are now shortened by removing the middle part instead of truncating. In previous version the page number ended up being truncated usually making it difficult to identify the page.
    • Thumbnails are now updated when annotations are drawn in the annotations window.
  • Bugs fixed:

    • Not really a bug, but the file format of song and playlist files became kind of messy. Should be cleaner now.

Version 2.00

  • Features added:
    • A MS-Windows installer that can be used instead of the zip distribution
    • Improved start-up for large collections
    • Improved rendering of page transitions in the live window (in come cases the improvement is quite dramatic). See AcceleratedGraphics for more details.
    • Songs can now be copied or moved between playlists
    • Songs can be re-ordered a number of different ways
    • Modified Songs or PlayLists are shown in italicized font
    • Property sheets have been added for Songs and PlayLists
    • PlayLists, Songs and MusicPages can now be renamed in place
    • Added clipboard support and Edit menu entries
    • Added memory usage graph in the tool bar
    • A new script was contributed by one of the users to ConvertFromPdf directly to a song.

Version 1.01

  • Features added:
    • The major change in this version is MusicPageAnnotations.
    • Smoother animation for page flips in the live window
    • Directories are searched recursively for Song and PlayList files.
    • Added installation instructions for JavaAdvancedImaging to improve performance.

Version 0.53

  • Bugs fixed:
    • In the previous version, when a song was saved after changing the names of some of the music pages, the new names were not being saved. This is now fixed.

Version 0.52

  • Features added:

    • Added a Help Contents help menu option that launches the default browser and brings up the HTML file you're reading now.
    • Added an About VirtMus help menu option with the VirtMus home page address and version.
    • When opening or saving a song/playlist, the dialog box now also shows directories by default.
    • To a limited extent, songs (along with their associated music page images) and playlists can now be moved around on disk. You will need to re-save the songs (or playlists) after a move so that the new file path is recorded or else they will always appear as modified. This feature works as long as the song file is in the same directory as the music page images, or in any of the shallower directories (directories closer to the root of the file system).
  • Bugs fixed:

    • Fixed the problem that required the user to first select the Thumbs or Annotations tabs before the selections in the PlayList window would be reflected in those tabs.
    • Hopefully also fixed the occasional AbstractLookup exception thrown during start-up.