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Amulet Devices have been in touch to let us know that they have released a new Amulet beta release – version 2.18.17.
The Amulet Remote is the controller Windows Media Center owners have been waiting for. Access all your media instantly using simple voice commands and gestures. No more complex key sequences to remember.
- Select media by name (Channels, Artists, Songs, Movies, TV shows, photos)
- Multiple speaker profiles, selectable by voice (“This is Pete”)
- Audio responses to questions (“This is ‘Videotape’ by Radiohead from the album ‘In Rainbows’)
- Navigate TV guide by voice (“Record ABC Next Tuesday at 7 PM”)
- Flexible operation – use voice or buttons for most operations
- Instant access to video timeline (‘Skip to 1 hour and 10 minutes”, “Skip over ads”)
- Infra-red learning – teach Amulet to control any of your other audio visual equipment
How it Works?
- You pick up the remote and speak a command such as “Play Artist Rolling Stones”.
- The built-in microphone transmits your voice to the Amulet software in your Windows Media Center.
- The Amulet remote includes advanced position sensing technology, which means that Amulet only listens when you talk to it, not when you’re chatting with friends or family. Amulet understands your commands and ignores your conversations
Here is what Amulet have said:
Since completing the new MyMovies support is taking a little longer than anticipated, we’ve decided to release an interim beta addressing some of the recent issues you’ve reported, along with a couple of handy new features. You can download the new release here:
- Download Release Notes
- Download 32-bit release
- Download 64-bit release
As always, please let us know how you get on by posting feedback here in the forum.
Now, here is a summary of changes since the previous releases, Beta 2.18.14 and Beta 2.18.16:
GENERAL ENHANCEMENTS
- When there is only a single episode of a TV show, it now appears in the top level TV Shows menu rather than inside its own submenu
- The number of items displayed for Recent Movies, Recent TV, etc is now configurable under Settings / Extras (default 100 items)
- PLAY SOME MUSIC / PLAY ALL MUSIC now select music from your entire collection (essentially a genre that matches all tracks)
- New experimental feature: FIND SONG <name> builds a music playlist containing all songs matching <name>, where <name> is a full or partial song or album name. Longer names result in better quality matching. This feature is disabled by default, but can be enabled under Settings / Diagnostics; it may be problematic with large numbers of songs (>20,000 items). If you enable it, say UPDATE MUSIC after saving settings to rebuild the needed song index used by the search.
SUPPORT FOR VISUALLY IMPAIRED USERS
- If the Amulet screen is not easily visible, you can now use the new READ command in most places where a SHOW command would work. For more information, see the section about Read in the release notes.
- Some examples: READ RECENT TV, READ COMEDY MOVIES, READ ARTIST DAVID BOWIE, READ SONGS, READ ALBUMS, READ SOMEONE ELSE, READ GENRES, READ MENU, READ RESULTS, etc.
- New commands to control reading: READ MORE, READ AGAIN, READ FROM START, READ NUMBER <n>, STOP TALKING
- Settings / Talker now allows the number of items to read at a time for the READ command (default 10 items); READ MORE continues reading the next 10 items.
BUG FIXES
- Settings / About page now correctly shows the TV Channels count again (broken in 2.18.16)
- EPG guide data is no longer updated every hour, only when a scan reveals it has changed (broken in 2.18.16)
- SHOW GUIDE now works correctly again (broken in 2.18.16)
- Media Centers with no TV configured no longer crash during Amulet initialisation (broken in 2.18.16)
- PLAY ARTIST, SHOW ALBUM, PLAY SONG <name> where <name> was on original artist playlist but not the album playlist no longer results in the displayed playlist being out of sync with the currently playing songs
- Improved exception handling in Amulet.Music to catch a few UI exceptions that could cause the app to crash
- Amulet TV & Movies no longer displays a running time of “0 seconds” when the length is unavailable
- Amulet TV & Movies spoken descriptions (verbose mode) are now more natural sounding
- TV episodes listed under TV Shows are now sorted in reverse date order if no season & episode information is available; this provides consistency with the same shows listed under Recorded TV
