Manual: Setup/Update

Update tab of the settings dialog

OpenMPT is being developed constantly and new versions are released every few months. Thus, if you are using OpenMPT on a computer that is connected to the internet, you might want it to check for new versions automatically. If an update is found, it is never installed automatically, so you can decide on your own if you want to upgrade or not.

Check for Updates

• Install Updates automatically: If checked, new OpenMPT versions will be installed automatically if possible.
• Update Interval: Choose an update interval that suits your taste from this list. It is recommended to check for updates weekly, but if you are running OpenMPT on a machine without internet access, you can completely disable automatic update checks here. In that case, you will have to look out for new updates by yourself. ;-)
• Check Now: Performs an update check using the current settings.

Privacy Settings

In this section, you can decide whether a unique (but anonymous) ID should be sent together with some basic system information with every update check or not. This information is merely used to get rough statistics about the number of people that make use of this feature and the distribution of the different OpenMPT versions and hardware setups. However, the ID cannot be linked to you or your computer in any way, as it is completely random. OpenMPT only sends the currently used version number, Windows version and build type as well as supported hardware features to the update server – no personal data is sent along. We only use this information to determine which types of computer systems we should focus OpenMPT development on.

Update Channel

Here you can change what kind of OpenMPT builds will be checked for. You should not change this address under normal circumstances. However, brave and eager testers may want to change this setting to receive development test builds. Please note that it is generally not recommended to use test builds, as it is not guaranteed at all that they are stable (data loss cannot be excluded) or that they behave the same as final versions - for instance, pattern effects might be treated differently (buggy) in a test version but not in a final version. In that case, the buggy behaviour will not be emulated in future releases. When creating modules using a test version, it is thus a good idea to verify that your modules sound identical when using the latest stable version.

There are two flavours of development builds:

• Next: Reflects the changes in the upcoming minor OpenMPT update, which are typically bugfixes and small improvements. For example, if you are on OpenMPT 1.29.05.00, this is a preview of the changes that can be found in OpenMPT 1.29.06.00.
• Development: Reflects the current state of the next major OpenMPT update including new features as well as major and possibly disruptive changes. For example, if you are on OpenMPT 1.29.05.00, this is a preview of the changes that will be found in OpenMPT 1.30.01.00.