Bookshelf Apps

SongBook 1.1 for iPhone Released

December 22nd, 2008 4

The new features include:

Many updates to the Library browsing, including sorting and filtering. Sorting is alphabetical by default. In albums though the sorting is by track number. You can switch sort modes with the toolbar button.

Adding a track to the playlist now does not switch tabs, this makes adding multiple tracks easier.

Added user hints to help users understand what they can do on each tab.

Automatic source selection on startup has been removed. This was causing problems for some users, especially that wanted to use SongBook to control volume for sources other than their DS.

Some users were setting their iPod/iPhone to never sleep. The iPhone would still turn the network off after 30 seconds of inactivity, which would cause the network events to be ignored. This most often showed as missed track transitions. A fix for this has been implemented.

More work on device discovery. Fixes for older Linn firmware.

Added optional network logging to help with debugging.

Fix for source naming bug. This would cause sources to be incorrectly named.

General reliability improvements and small fixes.

You can download the update either in iTunes or directly on your iPhone or iPod touch.

Sending in iPhone Crash Reports

December 16th, 2008 1

Sometimes there are bugs in iPhone apps that cannot be reproduced easily in a test environment. This is normally because the bug in some ways is specific to the environment that it occurs in, this may be due to network or hardware configuration (I don’t have one of every Linn product for example), or due to data (unexpected characters in a Secret, overly large image etc). In cases like this a crash report is essential to determine what the problem is.

A crash report file contains information on the state of the application at the time of the crash. Most usefully it contains a trace that tells me the line of code that the failure happened on. There’s a bit of detective work involved and sometimes guesses at the cause, but more often than not I can create a code modification that avoids the bug. If I’m not certain of the fix I can send out a special release of the code that adds extra debugging information.

The crash reports are saved on your iPhone at the time of the crash, when you connect up with the sync cable the reports are copied to your computer. The location of the reports depends on your operating system:

On Vista “Application Data” maybe hidden, so you may need to show hidden files.

There are two types of files stored here, .plist files and .crash files. I only need the .crash files. The files will start with the name of the application, MobileSongBook or MobileSecretBook for example and contain a date stamp.

You can right click (or Control-click) on the crash file and send as an email attachment.

Once I have the crash file it should not take long to analyze it and get back to you.

Album Art

December 16th, 2008 1

I get a lot of questions about Album Art support in SongBook. Mostly the Album Art is dependent on your MediaServer, and unfortunately Twonky MediaServer is a bit difficult to set up with Album Art. Here are some hints to help get your Album Art working correctly with Twonky.

In each Album folder you should have one image file for your Album Art, this file should be called Folder.jpg (or folder.jpg). I think PNG will work as well, but I don’t have any PNG album art at the moment. I have had problems when you have other image files in the folder, so it is best to remove any other image files.

Twonky has a bug that causes it to fail to send Album Art if there is a space in the path to the image file. I have verified this on Mac OS X but not on other platforms, but assume it is the same. The way around this is to turn off image scaling. This is also useful for getting better quality images to SongBook. You can turn off image scaling in the Twonky web admin interface.

For SongBook you are best having an image size of 320×320 or greater. This is the size of the large image in the Play tab. SongBook downloads the image and then scales it, so if you have a very large image file (many megabytes) this may cause SongBook to run out of memory and quit, so don’t go too large. I suggest that if you are importing your images fresh you import at 600×600 just to remain future-proof. You don’t want to have to go though this process again later.

SongBook does seem to get quite a few network errors when requesting Album Art, it does retry three times but still sometimes the art file does not load. This is what is happening if you normally see an art file but occasionally do not. If all you art files disappear at once this is SongBook reducing it’s memory usage. When memory gets low SongBook removes anything that is not essential, and Album Art falls in to this category. You should not see this happen very often at all but it could happen.

Other media servers may have more reliable and usable album art in the near future, this should improve the situation. I am also working on other features in SongBook to improve album art.

Travelling

December 5th, 2008 0

From tomorrow for the next week or so I will be traveling and will not have consistent internet access. Normally I try to respond to support emails within a day or so. I know that lately the volume of emails has been really high and it has taken a while to reply, but that has only been for short periods of time and it seems to have settled down a bit now.

For the next week it may take a few days to respond to emails, and if I need to test or fix bugs for you it may take even longer. I’m actually going to be in New Zealand for about a month but should have reliable internet access there. I’m taking a Linn Sneaky DS on holiday with me so I can test, I know that is a very strange thing to take on holiday.

SongBook discovery issues

December 1st, 2008 2

Some users have been reporting errors with SongBook startup. This has been narrowed down to users that do not have the latest Linn firmware, so the fastest solution is to upgrade your firmware (using LinnConfig) to the latest Linn version.

I do think that SongBook should be compatible with all firmware within a particular compatibility family though, that seems reasonable unless there is a serious bug in a particular firmware release that meant you were better off avoiding it. So in this case I do consider this to be a SongBook issue that should be resolved.

I have found and fixed the discovery problem with old firmware, but there is also another bug with adding songs to a playlist. To solve this one I need to downgrade one of my Linn DS’s to older firmware and test. I’m working on this now.

There will be a new release as soon as I have sorted this issue out. It contains a number of small improvements as well as these fixes.

SongBook back on App Store

December 1st, 2008 1

A late announcement here, but as some people may have noticed I have been very busy lately.

Apple have approved the latest SongBook iPhone release. I was rejected 3 times because SongBook would not play music, which, of course it was never designed to do. In the end I resorted to changing the code to pop up alerts at appropriate points to inform the user/tester that you couldn’t play music without a Linn DS. Probably a useful thing to have anyway, but I did think it was kind of obvious.

Of the 3 rejections one did come up with a legitimate bug, attempting to play a movie file caused SongBook to crash. I’d never tested this as Linn only make music players, but a crash is a crash, so at least Apple did find something.

There is a bit of version numbering confusion out there at the moment too. The first version I submitted to Apple was version 1.0.1. For each Ad Hoc version I sent out I incremented the version number until we came to version 1.0.5. The problem is that once you submit an update to Apple you can submit new code, but you can’t change the version number. Now that I know this I will be more careful with numbering Ad Hoc releases.