iPeng 1.1 is ready – Go SqueezeNetwork!
While the 1.0.x releases were mainly focusing on bug fixes and minor enhancements, iPeng 1.1 will bring some more fundamental changes:
iPeng goes SqueezeNetwork
Long awaited by those of you who don’t operate their own serve
r or don’t want to run it 24/7, iPeng now also offers access to SqueezeNetwork. Just “swipe right” on the “NowPlaying” home screen and you will find it on the MultiPlayer Control along with any servers you might have. There is also a new button for each player that will connect or disconnect that player from SqueezeNetwork.
What does SqueezeNetwork offer with iPeng?
iPeng will support the full functionality of SqueezeNetwork, that is: Play internet radio, podcasts and music services, manage your favorites, and control your players. You will also be able to set alarms and this brings us to the second big change in iPeng 1.1…
Plugin Support
iPeng 1.1 offers support for the SqueezePlay menu system which allows it to support a lot of functionality as it would show up on a Squeezebox™ Controller or a SqueezePlay software player.
This open up iPeng to a lot of internal SqueezeCenter features that were not yet supported: Alarms, Sleep, Browse by Years, Random Mix, TrackInfo Details,… almost everything offered by SqueezeCenter will now be controllable on iPeng.
Yet it’s not limited to that, because using this interface, iPeng also has access to 3rd party plugins, so now you can define your own library queries using CustomBrowse, browse by statistics using TrackStat, get background information using Biography or Album Review, build custom mixes using MusicIP, it’s a whole world…
Performance Improvements
“Oh my, iPeng was such a nice app, now with all these new features it’s growing fat and slow…”
No!
It doesn’t, the opposite is true. iPeng’s internals have been completely re-done and use a faster protocol now but also, thanks to great support from Logitech we have been able to make iPeng cooperate better with recent versions of SqueezeCenter so if you use SC 7.3.2 or newer, iPeng will offer some notable performance improvements:
- Much faster loading of large databases. Our benchmark in the beta phase was for remote(!) access to a huge database with 247.000 tracks and 24.000 albums, iPeng was synchronizing this database in under 6 minutes! A small database with < 2.000 albums should load well below one minute. Note: This may also depend on your server; iPeng can not make up for slow server performance.
- iPeng now supports SqueezeCenter’s list sorting. This is not only a speed improvement but it also means that ALBUMSORT and ARTISTSORT tags or custom sort orders will be respected by iPeng. Your database will now show up in iPeng as it would in SqueezeCenter.
- New option to keep server connection open. This will allow you to get immediate access to your server once your iPhone comes out of standby without having to establish a server connection first. Note: this will use more power and can eventually drain your battery.
Along with these big changes, there’s a lot of small improvements that make the iPeng experience more feature rich and streamlined. Just upgrade or get your iPeng now on the App Store and…
Have Fun!
Wednesday April 8th, 2009 at 09:54 PM
[...] Penguin Loves Music placed an interesting blog post on iPeng 1.1 is ready – Go SqueezeNetwork!Here’s a brief overviewThis will allow you to get immediate access to your server once your iPhone comes out of standby without having to establish a server connection first…. [...]
Wednesday April 8th, 2009 at 10:34 PM
[...] iPeng (e.g Alarms, Random Play,…) are now also available. Learn more and see some pictures here: iPeng 1.1 is ready – Go SqueezeNetwork! | Penguin Loves Music and here: What’s new in 1.1? | Penguin Loves [...]
Thursday April 23rd, 2009 at 04:34 AM
I am still confused. I got the iphone app, I have a squeezebox, but I can not figure out how to configure ipeng to control the squeezebox.
it says no player connected. when I try to select select sqeezenetwork in the lefthand pane, I get a pop-up that says “Do you want to change the Music Source?” and if I click “ok”, then it tells me to go to squeezenetwork.com and enter a PIN number. this is odd because my squeezebox is already registered with its pin.
if anyone has any clues, please write to me at brewster@archive.org
thank you!
-brewster
Thursday April 23rd, 2009 at 08:56 AM
Brewster,
So your player is connected to SN, right?
iPeng will present you with a PIN number because – like a player – your iPhone will have to be registered on SqueezeNetwork.
The reason is, that this is SqueezeNetwork’s way to identify you. You will not have to enter a username/password but SN will recognize your iPhone and connect it to you account.
You add your iPeng by going to http://www.squeezenetwork.com and selecting “add player”, give it a name and enter the PIN iPeng gave you.
After that you can restart iPeng or just wait a few seconds and iPeng will see your players on your SN account.
Does that help?
Friday August 7th, 2009 at 05:20 PM
Great product but I can’t seem to figure out a few things:
Can you add a track to your favorites from the Now Playing screen? How do you manage playlists?
Thanks.
Friday August 7th, 2009 at 05:26 PM
Favorites: Not yet. The next release will support that.
Playlists: What do you mean by “manage”?
Right now you can browse and play saved playlists (through the main menu) and you can rearrange your current playlist using the playlist view on NowPlaying (swipe left).
The next release will also allow to save a playlist and become a bit more comfortable on the re-arranging.
There is currently no native support to modify a saved playlist, maybe there’s a way through the TrackInfo menu (next version) and a plugin, but I don’t know that, yet.
If you need more, feel free to add a ticket at https://trac.penguinlovesmusic.de/trac/ipengnat/wiki
Thursday November 5th, 2009 at 04:21 PM
iPeng is working great, easy to work multiple players between multiple servers. Well done!
My problem is, playing around to set up SqueezeNetwork I registered a new username and password for testing purposes. Now I want to go back and re-register my iPeng to my existing account (the one with all my players registered) but can’t. Actually, I never even received any 5-number PIN to register at all. How to I delete SqueezeNetwork settings that are not stored?
Thanks
Thursday November 5th, 2009 at 04:25 PM
That feature is unfortunately still missing in MySqueezebox.com (it was there in SqueezeNetwork).
Please mail me (coolio att penguinlovesmusic dott com) and I’ll get that fixed for you.