Download Kodi 16.0 Beta 3

The third beta release of Kodi version 16.0 has come out. This cross platform media center software is developed for Windows, OS X, Linux, Android and iOS. Version 16.0 includes the transition from DirectX 9 to 11, support for 4:3 Non-linear Stretch has been added and Kodi appearance settings are now stored separately and no longer together with the other system settings. In addition, functions can now be assigned to remotes when a button is long-pressed and improvements have been made to the add-on manager. The changelog for beta 3 can be found below.

Music library improvements
Well not exactly new but certainly something that got overlooked a lot is getting your music scanned to library. For videos it’s quite obvious there’s a library where you can scan in all your movies and tv show from your local or remote storage. Setting this up is relatively straight forward because when you add a source it immediately asks if you want to add it to the library. For music this was anything but obvious. You add a new music source which contain all your music files and that was it. Although that was how it seemed. Somewhere hidden in the context menu (which you pull up with right or using “C” key) there was an option scan to library. This magically started scanning your music files and reading all the tag data which contain artist, title, year and whatever more in a nicely organized library. Time to make it more obvious.

After you added a new music file source it will now ask you if you want to scan all the files in that folder using the tag data in those files and organize it for you.

Caveates to music library:

• Your music needs to be properly tagged. For example with ID3v1, ID3v2.3, ID3v2.4, Vorbis Comments or APE
• If not properly tagged Kodi can’t properly organize it and things might be completely misplaced.
• Properly tagging music files can be a tedious job however there are several tools for assisting on that: MusicBrainz Picard, Mp3Tag, TagScanner and so on
• Scanning these files could take quite a while before it’s finished depending on the amount

Advantages to music library:

• You will get an awesome looking library view just like for movies and tvshows
• You can search your music files
• Library splits up the music in sections: Genres, Artists, Albums, Singles, All songs, Years, Top 100 (based on your playback), Recently added/played albums, Compilations
• You can split everything up even further using smartplaylists
• You can rate your music and filter based on that
• Since Kodi also acts as UPnP server you can share them over you home-network if the clients support this
• You can scan for additional information like artist biography or album review/synopsis (right click or C key in album or artist library)
• This can be enabled by default in settings -> music -> library -> “Fetch additional information during updates”
• You can change the default language for online information by going to settings -> addon-ons -> my add-ons -> Information providers -> Album or artist information -> open the universal album or artist scraper

Although music library is not yet at the same level as movies or tv shows, there is certainly work being done in this area to make it better. Stay tuned for next version.

Fixes done in this beta 3:

• Fixed: non-working touch input in file manager
• Fixed: workaround for MySQL 5.7.x query optimizer changes
• Fixed: remove broken musicvideo scraper
• Fixed: don’t show “sync playback to display” option on Android as it’s not supported
• Fixed: fix codepage for Korean language input
• Fixed: added workaround for triggering repository updates during playback
• Fixed: fix crash in PVR calling the context menu
• Fixed: show OK dialog instead of empty list clicking on the update button in add-on information panel
• Fixed: several coverity and cppcheck code analysis problems
• Fixed: time sometimes jumped backwards on playing bluray m2ts files and fixes stutter on switching files
• Fixed: several issues regarding music library
• Fixed: timer and EPG handling in PVR
• Fixed: crashing on cleaning up events
• Fixed: don’t show brightness/contrast controls when using Android MediaCodec (Surface)
• Fixed: dont invalidate art for addons that are new or not updated since last fetch
• Fixed: Android stylus devices don’t respond on input
• Fixed: segfault when ADSP is enabled in settings
• Fixed: missing art when playing something from a music add-on
• Fixed: variety of cleanups and problems for AMLogic chips
• Fixed: fixed possible directory traversal bug due to insufficient url checking
• Fixed: handling of media key on Android
• Changed: add support for pre-gzipped addons.xml in repositories which should considerably reduce repository traffic
• Changed: remove “add source”from Programs section