Hi all,

We've been busily working away on the next major Airtime release (2.6.0) and here's a sneak peek at what's to come:

- A reworked library page that makes it easier to find your playlists and smart blocks.
- An improved smart block builder with improved support for combining AND/OR operators, the ability to pick tracks by relative date/time (search by last played, etc.), and play count.
- A brand new preview player inside Airtime (the popup is gone!)
- Tagging your media and smart block rules for tags
- An improved "Add Media" page, which shows you the status of recent uploads and lets you know if ingestion failed for any of them.
- Tons of bugfixing to all of the features mentioned above.

Other stuff we've been working on that you probably won't notice are:
- A massive refactoring of all the audio library tables in Airtime and many parts of the codebase, which will make it really easy for us to implement tagging, better smart blocks, and other features in the future. We're laying the groundwork for a lot of cool features. :)
- A better file ingestion and background processing architecture (airtime_analyzer), which may end up replacing media_monitor. This is particularly useful for managing software updates on large numbers of Airtime installations (like we do with Airtime Pro).
- A REST API for media in Airtime. You'll be able to fetch information about audio files stored in Airtime and even upload new files to be ingested. We've actually built this hand-in-hand with airtime_analyzer and the improved Add Media page, which are using our Media REST API already. (This API will be a great way to hack new ways to ingest files into Airtime...)

What we also hope to accomplish is:
- Intelligent scheduling of tagged audio files, through smart blocks and/or "clocks" - eg. Play 15 minutes of jazz then 1 advertisement.
- More advanced listener statistics

We've been working on designing both of these last two features but we're not yet certain of the timeline for getting those into a release. At the very least, the refactoring project and tagging and both prerequisites that make even better smart blocks or "clocks" easier for us to do. So although we're not directly writing code for those features yet, we are making progress towards them.

Next, we've been steadily improving our Airtime Pro service. From our new Pro plans, to better reliability, to faster updates, we've improved nearly every aspect of the service in the last two months and will be continuing to bring about even more changes in the coming months. These changes have been going hand-in-hand with an overhauled development process that's allowing us to deliver bugfixes and improvements to Airtime Pro users faster than ever before.

Lastly, we have a couple of bugfixes that deserve a 2.5.2 update, and I hope to be able to start planning that release next week. It should be a painless upgrade for most users and primarily solves the last few scheduling bugs that were found in 2.5.x series of releases.

Thanks, and happy broadcasting!
Albert