Bookshelf Apps

MediaTomb support for SongBook

February 20th, 2009 0

I’ve had a number of people ask me if SongBook will support MediaTomb. I’ve been doing some testing and have made some progress.

I installed MediaTomb from source on a Mac OS X Server, it is considerably easier if you have a linux machine, you can just install the packages with your package manager.

Depending on where you install from you may need to edit the config.xml file. I’m not going to go in to great detail here, I assume that if you are wanting to play around with MediaTomb you have enough technical skills to do what is required.

My config.xml had a mapping for flac files missing. In the mappings section under extension-mimetype I added this line:


<map from="flac" to="audiovideo/x-flac"/>

Also I removed this line:


<transcode mimetype="audio/x-flac" using="oggflac2raw"/>

Then I recompiled with taglib support, but you probably don’t need to do that :-) . I then rebuilt the MediaTomb database too.

That got me further, I could now browse the music tree with MediaTomb. I couldn’t play a track though. That turned out to be a bug in SongBook. I was not entity-escaping the URL sent to the DS. That doesn’t matter with twonky because there are no & characters in the URL, but there are in MediaTomb URL’s. Simple one-line fix though.

End result is that with the next version of SongBook, version 1.2 you will be able to use MediaTomb if you want.

Sharing SongBook on multiple iPhones/iPods

February 16th, 2009 0

I’ve just come across an interesting blog post that leads me to believe that you can purchase one copy of SongBook and install it on multiple devices. This is useful if you have more than one iPhone in your house, especially if one user is only an occasional user of your audio equipment.

The trick is that iPhone Apps use the same DRM as protected iTunes music. You can authorise up to 5 computers to play music purchased with your account, and it seems that Apps are the same.

The simplest way to do this is to share one iTunes account between both users.

What you need to do is to go to the Store menu in iTunes and select “Authorize account…”. Enter the account information that you used when purchasing SongBook.

Now you can either go to the iTunes Store and purchase SongBook again, or copy over the application data file from the computer you used to purchase SongBook. The store will recognise that you have already paid for SongBook and will not charge you again.

Remember that you can only authorise up to 5 computers, and you need to give out your account information, so this is not a useful mechanism for piracy, you need to know and trust the other user. Where this works really well is where you want to share SongBook with your wife or other members of your household.

So is this legal? It appears so according to the Apple service agreement.

http://www.apple.com/legal/itunes/us/service.html

Section 9(b) of the agreement contains “Usage Rules” for content purchased from the iTunes Store, and its relevant provisions are as follows:

…
(iii) You shall be authorized to use the Products on five Apple-authorized devices at any time, except in the case of Movie Rentals, as described below.

(iv) You shall be able to store Products from up to five different Accounts on certain devices, such as an iPod or iPhone, and Apple TV at a time;
…

Apple allows developers to add their own licensing terms in addition to this, for SongBook I have not added any additional licensing restrictions, so it appears that legally you have the right to do this.

I haven’t tried this myself, so if someone does have success with it please post a comment here to let us all know that it works.

Apps back on App Store

February 16th, 2009 2

After a much longer delay than I expected (unfortunately over the weekend too) SongBook and SecretBook are available again on the App Store.

I hope this hasn’t been too inconvenient for anyone, I really was expecting that at the most the apps would only be unavailable for a few hours, but it actually turned out to be a few days.

SongBook Mac Progress

February 9th, 2009 4

I’ve been working on SongBook Mac lately and it is progressing well. The trouble is knowing when to stop and get a release out. My plan was to stick to the basics and get something out that Mac users could use and rely on.

I’ve failed dismally at that goal, as this screenshot shows:

A weekend productively spent though. I am enjoying browsing through my music collection album art on a large screen.

I’ve also added Apple remote support, quite handy for adjusting the volume with a nice small remote.

App Store Apps may be unavailable for a short period

February 2nd, 2009 3

I’m migrating my iPhone apps from a personal registration to a company registration with Apple, they have informed me that when they do the migration the apps may be unavailable for a short period. So if you have problems purchasing SecretBook or SongBook over the next few hours, just wait a short period and try again and it should all work.

Update: Apps are unavailable at the moment. I have completed all changes that are required so I expect that everything will be back to normal in a few hours.