The big disadvantage of FLAC for Apple users is that it is not supported by iTunes, or on the iPhone. So someone that used iTunes and also had a streaming Hi Fi system was in a situation where there was not one lossless codec that they could use in all situations. Possibly the best solution here was to maintain two copies of your music, a high quality lossless version for streaming, and a compressed version for mobile use. Not ideal but workable.

If ALAC was widely supported then this would be less of an issue, so what difference will opening the code make?

Firstly, the current non-apple implementation of ALAC are based on reverse engineering of the file format. That is not ideal, but did seem to work OK. One of the issues here though was some uncertainty of the higher quality encodings in ALAC. 16-bit, 44.1kHz was fine and well understood, but higher bitrates were often not supported. The source code that has just been released provides documentation on all the supported formats now, so this is no longer an issue.

The other problem with existing ALAC decoders is the somewhat questionable legal status of them. Apple had been known to prevent manufacturers from including ALAC support in their products, but with this open release this has now changed. The source code is released under a very fair and liberal license. The notable thing about the license is that it includes a clause giving full patent license to users of the code, so Apple will not sue users of this code for any patent infringement. This means that there is no reason to not support ALAC now.

Currently though ALAC is not well supported, so for now sticking with FLAC is still probably a better option, but in the long run I expect that ALAC will be supported in most new products, so the future looks good.

Another question that may come up is which format is technically better? On a basic level both formats do the same job, the bits that come out the end will be exactly the same. Both formats (or their standard containers) have good metadata support too. So for most users the main reason for choosing one format over the other is device support.

One format may be more efficient at decoding than the other. This would require some testing to confirm, but ALAC was designed to be efficient on limited hardware, so results with it should be good. The source code is also very easy to read and understand, which is good.

In the end, opening the source code to ALAC can only benefit us all, so it is a very generous thing for Apple to do. Who knows, maybe AirPlay will be next?

SongBook Lite has just gone live on the App Store today at a special introductory price. It’s perfect for trying out SongBook if you have not already tried SongBook ’11.

One of the reasons we had for releasing SongBook Lite is that Apple would not let us to continue to support existing SongBook DS users with updates and fixes. We didn’t think that this was acceptable, so we had to find a way to keep SongBook DS alive but to also clearly differentiate it from our current main products. Given that SongBook DS had less features than SongBook ’11, and that it also had full UPNP support, we could rename SongBook DS to SongBook Lite and achieve an end result that allows us to still support our existing users. We do hope that most users that are serious about streaming music will move up to SongBook ’11 over time, but this still means that they are not forced to upgrade.

New features such as the iPod streaming are only available on SongBook ’11 and this will continue to be the case. SongBook Lite will provide all the basic features needed to enjoy your music while still going well beyond what other products offer in terms of features. As an example of this we have full TuneIn radio support in SongBook Lite. This not only lets you browse the entire radio directory, but you can add and remove favourites right from within SongBook. These favourites are synced to your TuneIn account so that they are available wherever you listen to TuneIn Radio.

SongBook Lite

SongBook ’11 UPNP

SongBook ’11 UPNP HD

We’ve mainly been working with their Solo Neo product, which is a great all in one system. It’s got a huge array of features onboard and all this comes at a great price, so it’s worth checking out as a starting point for music streaming, or an addition to an existing network. I think once you’ve tried streaming though, you won’t want to go back to CD, so while the CD drive on the Solo Neo is a good fallback option, it is not entirely necessary if you have embraced streaming 100%.

We’ve also tested with Arcam’s highly rated home cinema receivers. These are truly impressive (and heavy) devices, and while you wouldn’t buy one for music streaming, it’s good to know that they can form a part of your streaming network. They’re possibly one of the only receivers that you can buy where sound quality comes first, so are well worth checking out.

Here are the links to Arcam product details:

Solo Neo – Arcam

AV Amplifiers – Arcam

And you can see SongBook for Arcam on the iTunes Store.

The background to this is that we have replaced SongBook DS with two new products, SongBook ’11 UPNP for iPhone and iPad. These are new applications so SongBook DS was removed from sale. The trouble with this is that by removing SongBook DS from sale we removed our ability to provide updates.

This is important to us for a few reasons. We have two updates planned for SongBook DS. The first, an update with fixes and speed improvements is available today. The second is to provide Davaar support for existing users. We said we would try and do this, and I think we have found a way.

Another reason to have SongBook DS in the store still is so that existing users can download it again if they lose their copy. Just because we are not selling SongBook DS to new customers does not mean that existing customers should stop using it.

So we want to have SongBook DS in the store, but for nobody to purchase it ( they should purchase SongBook ’11 UPNP). The only solution we came up with was to make SongBook DS available as before, but to set the price to the highest available ($999). So from today SongBook DS goes on sale at US$999. We’ve added a note at the top of the description to explain this, so hopefully it doesn’t cause any confusion, but past experience shows that a lot of people don’t read the descriptions. I really hope that nobody purchases a copy by accident.

So while this does feel like a very strange thing to do, it should achieve the desired result. Just please don’t go telling people that we have raised our prices to US$999.00.

And one more thing, while updating the SongBook DS listing we were presented with this helpful message from Apple:

Most people with custom trees have used the tree that Briain (on various forums) has developed. Briain has updated this tree to work with SongBook ’11, so if you use Briain’s customised tree you should update to the latest version. It’ll still work the same with other control points, but will now also work correctly with SongBook ’11. Briain also tells me he has found some speed improvements, so it’s a good upgrade all around.

I’ve attached the files to this post so that you can download them directly from here. There’s two versions, one makes use of the AlbumArtist tag and the other doesn’t. The files contain all the standard twonky groups, but when you select ‘Advanced Default View’ in twonky you also get Briain’s improved music tree.

Briain has more information and installation instructions in a series of posts at the twonky forum.

Here’s the files…

2011_04 ArtistOnly.zip

2011_04 AlbumArtist.zip

And if you have customised the twonky tree yourself, as long as you leave the default groups available you should have no trouble. You can still change the tree in any way that you want, but SongBook relies on the “music/*” groups being available.

SongBook DS only supports Cara, so will not work with Davaar devices, you’ll need one of the versions of SongBook ’11 for UPNP if you upgrade.

In the next few days we’ll be updating the web site with details of these new applications. They’ve been in development for quite a while, so expect quite a few new features and improvements.

For now, here’s a screenshot of SongBook ’11 on the iPad:

If you have a HDX, NS01, NS03, or want to use the sound output on your UnitiServe, then you should use SongBook DigiFi. You should have at least firmware version 1.5 on these devices. This has been out for a long time, so it is very likely you have it already. As for the future, we’ve got a big upgrade to SongBook DigiFi almost ready to go. It will be released in the next few weeks.

If you have a Uniti, UnitiQute, or NDX then SongBook UPNP is the right version for you. We’ve done a lot of work improving the support here, so the latest SongBook should work well with these products. One feature that has been sadly lacking was volume control, but with the 3.0 firmware from Naim this is now fully supported. Most of these products should have this firmware (the NDX comes with it as standard), but if you have an older Uniti then you may need to contact your dealer for an upgrade.

New Apps

The new range will consist of these apps:

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:

• Improved UPNP device compatibility
• Linn Cara and Davaar support
• Linn multi-room support
• TuneIn Radio built in

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.

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.

We will continue to maintain the exiting non-App Store version for people that have purchased it, and so that users can download a trial version, but we expect that most new users will purchase the App Store version.

The Mac App Store requires that you have Mac OS X 10.6.6, which not all people will want to upgrade to, and of course it’s Intel only. In the process of building the App Store release we updated a library that unfortunately broke compatibility with older Mac’s. We’ve fixed this with the 3.2.0 release that has just been uploaded. Normally we would catch this as we test on a PowerPC Mac, but that Mac recently broke down, and there seemed little point in getting it fixed as it is very old now. That may mean the end of the line for PowerPC support as it’s getting harder and harder to maintain it.

In other news though, while creating the build for the App Store we have added Intel 64-bit support. In reality this won’t make any noticeable difference, but it is important for future updates.