Time sure does fly when your busy programming. It’s hard to believe that CMC has now been in development for over 3 years. To mark the occasion, CMC v3.6 has just been released with the latest and greatest improvements.
As far as new releases go, v3.6 is on the smaller side. This is primarily a bug-fix release with a few new features, in prep for our planned v4.0 release which is coming very soon.
One of the most notable v3.6 changes is the ability to set unique default sorts for each Media Types. For example, now you can have your Movies sort by Year Descending, and TV Show sort Alphabetically Ascending, and still have All Media Types sort by most recently added. It only takes a minute to configure (Settings > Startup & Logging Options), and will save you a lot of time and frustration going forward.
Another notable change is CMC now has an official Privacy Policy. A new notification in CMC will appear upon first-time startup v3.6, and any time we change the policy (should be a fairly rare event). The main reason we added a Privacy Policy is to be compliant with the Google API, which let’s CMC connect to your Google Photos albums for use in CMC Slideshows. Though I do admit, now that I’ve published the Privacy Policy, I realize that CMC should have had one long ago. The new privacy policy covers both CMC and this website, including the Forum. You can access it directly here, or from the CMC menu above under “Support”.
There are also a couple new options that actually disable some of the advanced features of CMC. TV Series Season Banner Images can now be disabled if you prefer the more consistent look of CMC generated text buttons. And the Enhanced TV Series view can be disabled if you prefer the legacy Box Set view to browse TV Series as discs. While we personally love and enjoy these great features, we understand not everyone shares our viewpoint, so we strive to make customer requests come true.
CMC v3.6 also has 6 important bug fixes that make using CMC more trouble-free than ever.
We have also upgraded the CMC Metadata Exporter to v2.0. The big change for CME is actually under the covers, and you probably won’t notice unless you pull out your stopwatch. We have improved export speed by about 10% by replacing the default XML parser with a high-performance XML parsing library. This brings CME in line with CMC, which received the same enhancement back in v3.1 last December. This was an important development for us as we are releasing a new product soon that will merge some of the features of CMC and CME together, making it critical that we used the same toolset in both products.
To read up on all the new features, improvements and bug fixes, head over to the Download page for the full changelog.
CMC v3.6 is a free upgrade for all users. For current users, if you’ve granted firewall access then CMC will let you auto-update to the new version the next time you run your current copy. Otherwise, you can manually download and install v3.6.