Bookshelf Apps

SongBook iPad

January 28th, 2010 0

As you would expect, we will have an iPad version of SongBook ready for release before the iPad is available for purchase. In the long run we plan on the iPad version being a mix of the features of SongBook Mac and of SongBook touch, but the initial release will build mainly on the user interface features of SongBook touch.

iPad400.png

We have looked at the developer documentation, and there is the possibility of building a ‘universal’ application, which means a single application that runs on the iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad. This will have the advantage of allowing existing users to migrate to the iPad using their existing SongBook license. The actual SDK for this has not been released yet, so we cannot see all the details, but at this stage,it is the path that we plan on going down. It also means that new users can purchase a single license and run SongBook on their iPad and iPhone.

The iPad brings exciting new user interface capabilities to the platform, but this will require a rethinking of the SongBook user interface. The most obvious improvement will be to reduce the usage of the list view for browsing music and move to a view similar to the SongBook Mac album art view. Full screen CoverFlow will also be worthwhile having. As time progresses we will firm up our plans for the new user interface ready for the release in about 60 days.

Upgrading Twonky Mac

January 20th, 2010 0

I just completed an upgrade from Twonky 5.0.68 to 5.1.2 on a Mac Mini server. It turned out to be quite a difficult task, in fact I gave up a few days ago and only now got back to it.

The first try failed with Twonky going a bit weird on me. I couldn’t consistently update the web interface, and it seemed very busy. Later on I found out that it was creating a lot of files in it’s database, perhaps getting stuck in a loop.

What I did, that finally worked, was to delete all Twonky files and re-install. This is probably the safest way to install twonky, but it does mean that you need to re-enter your license and set up your paths again.

You need to not only delete the Twonky app (in /Applications), but also all the files in [home]/Library/Application Support/TwonkyMediaServer. In my case this folder contained over 120,000 files, I guess that was something to do with what was going wrong. It took quite a while to delete these files.

So now it’s all up and working again. Quite a hassle for a small update. I suggest that you don’t upgrade your Twonky install unless you have a good reason to, especially as newer releases do sometimes introduce new bugs. 5.0.68 did seem to be quite stable for me. I’ve had a report of a problem with 5.1.2 and very large music collections, that is why I upgraded, just to test for any bugs.

Anyway, I’ve got Music again, which is a relief.

Development Builds of SongBook Mac

December 31st, 2009 0

It’s a hard line between stable releases and getting the latest fixes and updates out to people. In the early stages of SongBook development it was important to get updates out as quickly as possible, but now I think that stability is the most important factor.

To make this easier to manage we now have multiple downloads of SongBook Mac. There will be the latest stable release (2.0.1 as of the writing of this post) and newer releases will be available from the build page.

The automatic updates will only notify users of updates to the stable release, so these will be less frequent. Users that want to try the latest developments, or who have particular issues that are solved in development builds can download a release manually. You can have multiple versions of SongBook on your Mac at the same time without issues.

The build page has notes on what has changed for each release, these will be useful to see if you do want to download a new version. It will enable us to push releases out quickly without disturbing users of the stable release. The development builds may be less stable than the current stable release.

SongBook Mac 2.0 available for download

December 21st, 2009 0

SongBook Mac 2.0 is out. For existing users this is a free upgrade. We normally charge for major release updates, but this one’s free to say thanks to the users that supported us in the early days of SongBook.

In order to provide a complete solution for Mac users, SongBook now includes a high quality CD ripping function. This uses AccurateRip to ensure bit-perfect CD extraction every time. Extraction is tailored to UPNP MediaServer requirements and supports lossless formats such as FLAC and Apple Lossless. Album art can be embedded, or stored as a Folder.jpg file specifically for use with Twonky servers. At the last minute I realised that this is not ideal for Naim Uniti users, who could probably use this feature, but they need to encode in MP3 format. We’ll be adding MP3 format support soon, it was always on the roadmap, but now it’s more important.

We’ve added a lot of user interface improvements too. There’s a volume slider in the Mac menu bar now, available any time SongBook is open. Some things have moved around from older versions, but still should be easy to find.

My favourite new feature is the flexible song selection. You can select and album and add it directly to the playlist (either with drag and drop or with the toolbar button) and all the tracks will be added. If the shuffle switch is pressed these will be added in a random order. You can Command-Click to select more than one album, choosing your favourite from a Genre for example, and then add all the tracks, all shuffled together. That’s impossible to do any other way.

We’ve also worked more on device support. There is Naim HDX and Uniti support in this release, and improvements in the UPNP support. We now support the Roku SoundBridge as well.

Quick Note: SongBook not compatible with older Twonky servers (4.4.6 or earlier)

December 18th, 2009 0

We’ve had a couple of users let us know that they are having trouble with SongBook and older Twonky server installs. Reports so far have been for version 4.4.6 and 4.4.4. We only test with Twonky going back to version 4.4.9 so we did not catch this issue during release testing.

The quickest solution is to upgrade your twonky install. We recommend 4.4.9 as a version that has fewer bugs than other 4.4.x versions, but of course you could consider going up to Twonky 5.

We will fix this issue, but with Apple’s approval process, and Christmas, it will be a few weeks before a fix will be available, that is why upgrading is the quickest solution.

SongBook Mac and network problems

December 14th, 2009 0

This is mainly for future reference, and will not be of much interest to users who are not interested in technical details, but I did spend a lot of time tracking down this particular issue, so it is worthwhile making a note of it for future reference.

SongBook needs access to a particular network address to discover network devices. On a Mac there may be other applications that also make use of that address. Applications can share the address for listening, but at least a couple try and grab exclusive access (EyeConnect and Twonky 5). This means SongBook cannot access the network functions that it needs and therefore will not discover any network devices.

The problem is that it is hard to tell what other application is preventing SongBook from running. You can tell though with is command line:


lsof -i4udp@239.255.255.250:1900 +c0w0 -Fc

This will print something like this:


p921
ctwonkymediaserv

That tells us that process 921 is the culprit, and that it is Twonky Server.

The trouble is that this makes it difficult to run a MediaServer and SongBook on one Mac at the moment. This is not an ideal configuration anyway, but it is something that some users want to do, and it may be a good way to get started trying out digital streaming without spending any money on new hardware. We will keep this in mind for future product development and see if we can make this configuration work better in future.

SongBook is the most popular third-party Linn DS controller

December 3rd, 2009 5

Earlier this week Linn ran a survey of DS controllers, and this is the result:

LinnSurvey.png

If you exclude KinskyDesktop, which is Linn’s free software bundled with the DS, you can see that SongBook is the most popular choice for Linn users, in fact it’s not that far behind KinskyDesktop.

It is also very clear that the iPhone and iPod touch are the preferred controller for networked audio, with a 47% percent share (SongBook and PlugPlayer).

I do know that a lot of SongBook users also own PlugPlayer, so it is a bit of a pity that the survey only allowed one choice. At the price PlugPlayer is a bargain, and I do know that a lot of SongBook users buy it just to try it out. Of course, SongBook is in a price range where you want to be confident that it’ll work for you, but with a full 25% of Linn DS owners using it as their primary controller you can be confident that it is a good option.

As an interesting aside, we thought our market share was even higher than this based on user count. It looks like the Linn DS range has been selling very well lately.

You can see the results on the Linn web site at this page:

And what about SongBook Mac? Well, it’s also popular, but not to the same level as SongBook touch. We’ve got a new release coming very soon though that we think will change that, there’s some very exciting new features almost ready to go.

SongBook touch 2.2 available

December 3rd, 2009 0

This time the review period was not too bad, 8 working days. Sure beats the 45 days of the last version.

This version is mainly a bug fix update, it’s main update is to remove the issue that caused some users to see albums listed twice in the library view.

We also took the opportunity to test the wake from sleep process, and did indeed find a bug that allowed SongBook to wake up too soon (it saw the 3G connection and thought it was OK to proceed). So we have improved this too. There is now no need to wait for the WiFi to become active before unlocking your iPhone.

And as usual we made some small speed improvements. Just about every release has updates like this.

And finally, one new feature, by user request we have added the buttons to the end of the volume slider in the horizontal view.

As always you can update using the App Store app on your iPhone/iPod, or from within iTunes.

A new strategy from Apple?

December 3rd, 2009 0

SongBook hasn’t been rejected in a review for a very long time, in fact there was only the first release and then one other that did get rejected, and the second set of rejections were based on misunderstandings on Apples part, so rejections have been very rare. SongBook has been out for about a year now.

With the latest release though we got an interesting e-mail. It informed us that SongBook was violating the Apple guidelines, and was quite correct in what was stated, but the interesting part was that we were not rejected, we were asked to make an improvement for the next release. A few hours later the update was accepted. That’s a huge change in attitude from the old process where rejections could happen for any small reason.

For those that are interested the issue that was identified was that when SongBook wakes from sleep with no network present it doesn’t respond until a network is available. This was deliberate, but of course feedback in the form of a message informing the user what is happening would be useful. We will be adding this for the next release. Apple does thoroughly test apps when they are in review, it continually surprises me how much effort they do put in.

What this means is that the new version of SongBook is now out, with the old process we would have been rejected, and would have had to wait another two weeks for a new submission to be accepted.

This is a huge improvement and is really appreciated.

Bookshelf Apps Community Forums

December 1st, 2009 0

We’ve been asked quite often about community forums for SongBook, and I know there are active discussions on other forums as well. So in order to provide a place for SongBook users to discuss their issues, suggestions and experiences we have created our own forum on this site.

You can access the forum by following the ‘Community’ link at the top of every page.

At the moment the forum system does seem quite susceptable to spam. We don’t want to make it harder for legitimate users to register, so we will monitor this and see if it is an issue. At the moment we are just deleting the spam messages as they come up.

I guess the forum will be a bit quiet for a start until users discover it and a few posts build up. Over time we do hope that it will become a good resource for people searching for information about SongBook and digital audio in general.

Oh, and one more thing. The fastest way to get an issue resolved is to send an email to . By doing that we can track the issue through to a resolution, any other communication will hopefully get noticed, but is not formally tracked like a support request is. We can also match issues up to specific releases in the issue tracking system, which makes it a lot easier to get an idea of what issues are affecting many users, and therefore need a higher priority.