Bookshelf Apps

Software Updates

June 10th, 2010 2

We’ve released updates for SongBook DS 3 in the last few days. The iOS versions (iPhone, iPod, iPad) are waiting for approval for Apple. We got a super fast approval last time but it’s not happening this time. Maybe all the testers are busy at WWDC? Anyway the approval is taking a while this time, which is frustrating as there are some crashing bugs in the current release that we all would like to be gone. Hopefully the update will be out in the next few days and all the crashes will be sorted out. We really have made some major improvements in SongBook 3 over 2, there’s just a few issues out there that we didn’t catch, but in the long term this version will be much faster and much more reliable than earlier versions.

We’ve been testing with large playlists and large data sets and this version of SongBook handles them much better and faster than earlier releases. Some of the feedback from users has been very useful for this. For example we just found an issue with loading the playlist that seems to affect some users. We were loading the entire playlist in one network round trip, which worked fine for us, but for some users it seemed to cause a problem. We changed the code to load it in smaller steps so hopefully that works better for users that have a problem. We’ve also reduced the memory usage and sped up the loading operation.

SongBook Mac has a new version, beta 4. It’s also working much better but we are still getting some reports of missing tracks in the iTunes listings so we need to do a bit more work there.

SongBook HD, the version for DigiFi devices, has been very popular. It’s due for an update soon that should make it even better. In the next release we plan on adding volume control for devices that support it, vTuner support and playlist saving. We went a little off track here with the volume control. The Naim HDX doesn’t have an internal volume control, and we thought that was the same for other devices, but it turns out it is not the case, if you have a Hush DigiFi for example, you should be able to control the volume from SongBook. We’ll get that update out as soon as we can.

We’re also hard at work on better UPNP support. We’ve had mixed results getting manufacturer support for this. Some have been very helpful (Naim being one), and some just won’t even return our calls (I won’t mention names here). While we’re on the subject of Naim, we have heard that there will be a software update for the Uniti that will make SongBook work much better with it, so we’re holding off on getting a new release out until we’ve got more information on this update.

Needless to say we’ve been very busy the last few weeks. We’ve got a couple of other projects on the go as well, one is a joint venture with a US company, and the other is a new product for us (not entirely new, but an extension of existing software). You should see the update for SongBook DS shortly, SongBook HD soon after that, and SongBook Mac should become an official release some time soon, depending on the feedback.

2 Responses

Jordi
June 11th, 2010

Fantastic. Have you check the twonkymedia NAS issue, also?
It would be frustating if I can’t connect to my NAS also with these version.

Thanks! and keep on going!

BR

Jason
June 11th, 2010

The update fixes all known major issues at this time. A reminder for everyone though, if you are having any problems please send a message to support@bookshelfapps.com. This is the only way that we can track issues. Posting a comment here, or on a manufacturers forum, may get noticed, but there are no guarantees. At the moment we are especially busy with releases and updates and don’t have time to monitor forums. We read every support email that is sent in, and reply to almost every one. More importantly though, the support cases are tracked to ensure that they are handled correctly.

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