Bookshelf Apps

SongBook ’11

May 4th, 2011 0

We’ve got some great new updates coming out in the next few weeks. Because the changes are so large we’re renaming some of the products too, this gives us a chance to simplify the product range and better address the needs of our users. The new products are named SongBook ’11 to differentiate them from the existing applications. One of the biggest changes is that we are splitting the iPhone and iPad versions out to their own releases. In the early stages it made sense to have a universal application, so that existing users could update to the iPad version without having to repurchase, but over time this has become more and more of a problem. I think once you see Songbook ’11 on the iPad you’ll see that this has really paid off, instead of a bigger iPhone application the new iPad app was developed from scratch for the iPad and this really shows.

Screenshot 2011 04 11 21 00 31

New Apps

The new range will consist of these apps:

SongBookUPNP

SongBook ’11 for UPNP (iPhone)

An iPhone application for UPNP based systems. For the first time ever this merges the UPNP products and the Linn DS products. The reason for this is that they both share the same underlying technology, they both use the same media servers, and in many cases both UPNP and Linn devices are used on the same network. So one new product going forward.

Highlights include:

SongBook ’11 for UPNP (iPad)

A completely new iPad user interface that makes use of the large screen like never before. Advanced library browsing and searching features enable you to see your music like never before. Available on the App Store today.

SongBookDigiFi

SongBook ’11 for DigiFi (iPhone)

Updated DigiFi release adds many new features and improvements.

SongBook ’11 for DigiFi (iPad)

New user interface provides more information, like composer details.

Mac Applications

SongBook Mac will be updated over the next few weeks to add these features too, it will also have a user interface update to be more consistent with the new iPad applications.

Retirements

What about the other applications?

SongBook Naim

SongBook Naim is going away. This was a combined UPNP and DigiFi application, but we found that there were just not enough users to justify this. To make use of this application you needed to have a HDX and one or more Uniti’s, and that is not a really common setup. It was also very complex to understand the interactions between the DigiFi and UPNP sides of the application, and a lot of people bought this app when they would have been better off with either SongBook UPNP or SongBook DigiFi. So to simplify the range we have withdrawn this application. Users with Naim HDX’s should use SongBook ’11 DigiFi, and users with Naim Uniti’s should use SongBook ’11 UPNP.

SongBook DS

The functionality of SongBook DS has moved in to SongBook UPNP. If you are an existing user of SongBook DS you can continue to use it for as long as you want, but if you want the new features of SongBook ’11 you will need to purchase a new version. We would love to offer upgrade pricing here, but this is just not something that Apple lets us do. What we’ve done instead is offer special introductory pricing on SongBook ’11 UPNP for the next month.

We thought long and hard about this, but due to the inflexibility of the App Store we didn’t have many options. If we split the iPhone and iPad applications then they needed to be new products, so no upgrade path was possible. For users that purchased recently this may be a bit disappointing. You can continue to use SongBook DS, so nothing is being taken away, but we had to make a cutoff somewhere. On the other hand a user that purchased SongBook 1.0 has had a really good run. SongBook 1.0 was really very basic. Along the way we added lots of new features, all for free, including iPad support, OS upgrades and new features, and built in RadioTime (now renamed TuneIn Radio). We pay a license fee for the TuneIn support, so this update cost us money and we didn’t pass this on to existing customers.

Release Schedule

As each application is released we’ll let you know. The first one to be available will be SongBook ’11 UPNP for the iPad, closely followed by the iPhone version.