July.1, 2008 - CQC Version 2.4 has now been posted for download. This is technically a minor release, stepping up from the previous 2.3.3 formal release. But it includes almost 150 fixes, changes, and improvements. Some of the more important ones are listed below. But the extensive number of medium sized and smaller fixes and improvements really do add up in this release. There were also some substantial internal architectural improvements made, in preparation for new features in version 2.5.
Encrypted Drivers
CQC's drivers are mostly written in our own proprietary CML and PDL languages. These drivers are shipped as source in the product and compiled on the fly as used. However, some companies will not allow us to distribute drivers like this so we've not been able to support or fully support their products. To deal with this we now allow for the creation of encrypted CML driver packs, which can be used to distribute these types of drivers. They cannot be shipped in the product still, but can be made available as separately downloadable driver packs that can be imported into CQC.
Interface Based Events
Previously, only the Event Server could be configured to respond to the events sent out by those fields marked as triggers changed their values (so that the Event Server can do something on response to the change.) This has been extended to the Interface Viewer now, so that touch screen interfaces can also react to such events in useful ways. This feature will be further elaborated on in subsequent releases.
Playlist Management
Previously, some of our media renderer drivers allowed the target device to manage the playlist of files queued up on them. But this made for some inconsistencies since they would sometimes not support the features that other of our drivers provided (those that managed the playlist themselves.) They have all been changed now to manage the playlist in the driver and just feed files to the players one at a time. This way all of them can be consistent in playlist management features and interface.
Progress Bar Widget
A new user interface widget has been provided, the Progress Bar. This is a very flexible and powerful widget that can display progress of various types of operations in many different graphical ways. Often used for song playback progress, tank level indicators, thermometers, and so forth.
Media Architecture
Substantial internal changes were made to the media architecture, to set the stage in the next release for support of Media Center and iPods as standard CQC media repositories. Some immediately useful changes are support for searching by artist, which was not previously possible. And the addition of year information in the displayed text when sorting by year, and improvements in sorting of titles.
New/Improved Drivers
A number of new drivers are available in this release, including the Advantage Air, Nuvo T2, Brightan CAN, Cinema11, Centralite, XMRadio, Tandberg MXP, and Denon blu-ray players. The upgraded drivers are Russound RNet, Radience XD, Barco CRT, J.River, Lexicon MC-1, Extron Crosspoint, File Tag media repository, iTunes media repository, Grand Concerto and Essentia, Zoom Player, TheaterTek, Barix ExStreamer, Lutron Homeworks, JVC HD2K, and the Weather Channel driver.
The Elk and Omni drivers have received significant improvements in this release. There is a new driver for Omnis with the 2.16 or later firmware, which uses TCP/IP instead of UDP connections and provides more functionality via the control protocol. The old Omni driver was not replaced, so it will still be there for those who haven't upgraded their Omnis. Instead a new driver was created for the new protocol.
The RTI RP6 driver was basically a generic driver for responding to incoming ASCII strings and invoking a CQC action. So it was actually made fully generic and able to accept incoming strings from either serial port or socket connections. This allows you to train CQC to respond to any device that puts out ASCII strings, where a full fledged driver for that device isn't warranted. The RP6 driver is now just implemented in terms of this more generic driver.
Driver Initialization
Previously, in certain failure scenarios during system startup, a driver could fail to initialize, usually because some other system service it required wasn't started yet (the drivers run in a service and load early in the overall system startup.) This could cause the driver to be dropped from the list. This has been fixed and now driver initialization is like any other driver activity and is retried until it succeeds.
A complete list of bug fixes and features implemented in this release is available in the release notes in the main directory of the installer.
You can download the new version via the Try/Buy menu item above, and try it out for 30 days. So you can know for sure whether it meets your needs before you commit to a DIY or professional installation.