Concerto 3.0.0 - rc2

Just a few months after our first release candidate, I’m excited to announce that 3.0.0.rc2 is now available.

While RC1 focused on getting the fundamentals right, RC2 addresses many “quality of life” bugs and missing features reported by Concerto users. Thanks for all the great feedback!

Portrait Support

One of the major gaps in our initial release was support for vertical screens. Whether it’s a kiosk outside a meeting room or a sign on your campus, portrait orientation is common.

In RC2, we’ve gone all-in on portrait, adding support for portrait templates, screens, and content. Concerto is now smart enough to handle graphics and videos in vertical layouts without awkward stretching or letterboxing. If you’ve got a screen rotated 90 degrees, Concerto 3 is ready for it.

Native PDF Support

We’ve all been there: someone sends you a beautiful flyer as a PDF, and you have to open it, export it as a PNG, and then upload it. No more! You can now upload PDF files directly as Graphic content. Concerto will handle the heavy lifting of rendering it for the screen.

Sound On (When You Want It)

Concerto has always been a “visual first” medium, but sometimes videos need sound. We’ve added a per-video audio opt-in setting. By default, videos stay quiet, but if you’ve got a featured video that needs sound, you can now flip the switch. One tip - screens are still beholden to the browser audio playback gods which block autoplay audio in many scenarios. Consider installing the PWA player or clicking in your screen to pacify them.

Search, Faster

As your signgage system grows, finding that one piece of content or a specific feed can get tricky. We’ve integrated global search to search across content and feeds all at once.

The Little Things

We’ve also spent a lot of time on “fit and finish”:

• Dynamic Clocks: The clock component now automatically scales its text to fit whatever field size you give it. No more cut-off numbers on tiny tickers!
• Better Scaling: Graphics now fill their containers more intelligently, making sure your content looks its best regardless of the screen resolution.
• Reliability: We’ve squashed a bunch of bugs, including some pesky production upload issues and error messages that were a bit too aggressive.

Try it out!

As with RC1, this is available as a Docker image and is ready for you to kick the tires. Check out the installation guide to get started, or head over to the demo site to see it in action.

We’re getting closer to a final 3.0.0 release every day. If you find a bug or have a suggestion, hit us up on the Issue Tracker or join in the discussion.