What is probably the last iPeng for iPad update of the year showed up on the App Store today.

It’s mainly meant to be a bugfix release but since it’s close to Christmas time Coolio added a nice Christmas icons and a new feature for you:

The Lyrics Screen Saver.

iPeng has been able to show lyrics for a track for a long time through it’s context menu. Yet this is not always the most convenient way to use them.

Since iPeng for iPad has somewhat flexible screen savers it looks like a good idea to add an additional one for the song text.

How does it work?

• You can swipe it in instead of the big cover art or the playlist screen saver, it’s simply a 3rd page.
• It starts to scroll automatically with a speed that makes it scroll through the whole lyrics text during the duration of the song. Note: There is currently no support for Karaoke tags so this is a bit of a guesswork and will probably not always be correct. Due to this…
• You can scroll the text manually and then iPeng will start to scroll from the new position. For what I have seen this usually should give you a correct scrolling after adjusting it once.

How Do You Get Lyrics?

There is one disclaimer: iPeng itself does not retrieve lyrics for you. Lyrics rights are a really complicated matter and it’s really hard to get a global solution for this and little Coolio can’t stem that for now. So iPeng right now needs to get the lyrics from your server and there are two means of retrieving them:

1. Lyrics embedded in the music’s meta tags. If you’ve got these, they will always take precedence
2. You can install the Song Lyrics plugin for Squeezebox server. This is a really cool plugin written by Erland Isaksson. You can install it right through your Squeezebox Server’s settings page (under “Plugins”). Song Lyrics uses several different lyrics sources and has only let me down on very few occasions.

So for now, the long winter nights may come…

iPeng 1.2.9/iPeng for iPad 1.0.2 are now available on the App Store and besides having some bug fixing, improving caching and changing startup behavior to better support slower servers and some smaller enhancements it brings you one cool new feature:

Party Mode / Kids Mode

The basic idea behind this feature is to allow you to block all functionality that can delete a carefully assembled playlist while still allowing you guests to influence the music choices.

By default, it will block play actions (which immediately delete the playlist) and only allow to add songs or to insert them after the currently playing track (play next).

In addition to this, it will block player management which could have similar effects (syncing two squeezeboxes will delete the playlist of one of them) and you probably also don’t want your guests to change your music setup for your party. This is a configurable option.

The same goes for playlist management. In party mode, clearing the whole playlist is not supported but optionally you can also disallow deleting or rearranging single tracks.

Kids Mode

And you can exclude Menus. There’s also an option to only do this (in which case you can still play and do all the other things Play Mode blocks) which I dubbed Kids Mode for myself. You can define a number of menus you don’t want your guests or kids to access.

There is a number of menus predefined which are known to be able to delete the playlist (although for most of them this, again will be blocked by Party Mode) or otherwise cause trouble like SvrPower Control which shuts down your server – something you probably don’t want during a party.

For all of this you can set a password. You’ll have to enter it under settings and then again if you want to enable the party mode. Note: Changing the password disables party mode first, just to be sure. The password is not encrypted so from an age of nine on your kids will probably find out how to hack it but that doesn’t matter because before hacking it they will find out they can clear it by uninstalling and re-installing the App anyway… Oh, wait, you can block that on iPhone, too, but they’ll know your password….

What does Party Mode Block?

Things that are being blocked when Party Mode is on:

• All kind of play actions. No guarantees taken but except for the limitations mentioned below I’m not aware of any ones left over. Note: 3rd party plugins might still have features that kill your playlist but are not blocked by iPeng. If you use such plugins, you need to disable them or block them using the menu exclusion feature.
• deleting the current playlist, except for doing it one item by the other
• saving playlists
• deleting stored playlists
• deleting favorites
• changing shuffle and repeat states (this also blocks the “love” and “ban” buttons
• re-scanning the server and changing WOL.

Limitations

Nothing’s perfect. There are a few limitations, some destructive Actions iPeng can not block due to general limitations:

• No guarantee for your guests taken! They can obviously still do nasty things like adding you whole collection of audio books as the next song to the current playlist. iPeng can’t block evil.
• iPeng has no influence on the player switching to MySB automatically (if you e.g. play an App through TinySBS). You’d have to block the Apps and Internet Radio menus to avoid this.
• It doesn’t work really well with Pandora. Pandora is a bit strange (I would call it “buggy”) in that it actually does a destructive play action even on some add commands or while opening a context menu. iPeng can’t inhibit this. Maybe it’s worth a bug report to Logitech
• iPeng can’t block library management functions from Apps such as Napster. So whenever somebody uses a Remove from Library menu there this will actually work.
• Loving/Banning through the Song Info context menu still works.

Other new features

Party mode is the big thing but there are some other changes in these iPeng versions as well:

Rescan Library from iPeng

You can now start a server scan from within iPeng. It works more or less like the control panel for the server and you can find it in the server’s settings menu, below the WOL settings.

Delete Stored Playlists

You can now delete a stored playlist through it’s context menu.

Enter Internet Radio URL

iPeng now allows you to enter a URL under Internet Radios for a custom radio.

You can then play this station or add it to your favorites.

No Manual Cache Flushing Needed

iPeng should now really always detect when your library changes and flush it’s cache automatically. The button is still there but I believe you’ll never need it anymore.

Unified Player Icons in the Player Screen on iPad

In iPeng for iPad the icons used in the Header Bar are now also being used in the MultiPlayer Screen.

As usual: Have fun with iPeng!

… And now Coolio is out for submitting just another update to the App Store which will add a nice feature for Christmas 🙂

iPeng now also on iPad

You have an iPad and you are a Squeezebox user? Or you do already use iPeng and you feel you sometimes need a big screen to search for stuff. The Squeezebox web interface is too slow for you? Then we’ve got something for you: iPeng for iPad is here.

iPeng for iPad is not just a scaled-up version of the iPeng App for iPhone and iPod, it’s a completely rewritten App with a new and exciting user interface.

What’s special about iPeng for iPad?

Full use of the big iPad screen

• iPeng for iPad doesn’t just scale up the menu, it uses the space of the screen to show you more of your content while giving you quick access to all player controls.
• You have permanent, direct access to the main menu, so you can easily switch between your own library and online sources
• All Player and Playlist controls are just a tap away
• Use of big artwork for best visual appearance. Finally you know why you added all that cover art to your music collection
• See much more content at the same time than on a small screen; read even long titles as they are common in classical music.

Support of Portrait and Landscape Orientations

• Use portrait mode for long lists to see a lot of information simultaneously and to re-arrange your long playlists
• Use landscape mode to see your covers side-by-side.

Use Big Artwork for a Perfect Visual Experience

• You like the look of your music’s cover art? iPeng gives you big high-resolution thumbnails and let’s you scale them to fit with a pinch of your fingertips.
• For albums you can get a big cover and all the album’s  tracks in a clear side-by-side view. Even for whole collections of albums at the same time, e.g. all albums by an artist.

Screen Savers to View Your Music From A Distance

• If you want to keep your iPad running in a dock as a status screen, iPeng gives you a big cover view and a big playlist view to be watched from a distance.
• iPeng gives you access to all player functionality and the current playlist even from the screen saver.

Shortcut to Search Functions

• iPeng will always show you a search bar on the main screen giving you a quick way to search your library
• The search feature can switch between a local search (for your library only) and a global search
• Local search shows all results immediately in a single list
• Global search lets you search your library as well as online media from a single entry point. It can also be faster if you search on a slow server.

Get the Full Functionality

Of course, iPeng for iPad will give you all the functionality iPeng for iPhone provides to give you full control over your Squeezebox.

iPeng for iPad is now available on the App Store.

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Since today a new iPeng version – 1.2.7 is available on the App Store.

iPeng 1.2.7, along with an earlier 1.2.5.1 update, is mainly a bugfix release that also brings some minor improvements over 1.2.5:

• Easier discrimination between „On/Off“ states for Squeezeboxes and between the active and non-active players
• Dutch translation
• iPeng should no longer lose the connection to the server when waking up from the background
• Other improvements and fixes around WOL, caching and the display of very large covers, Global Search, some context menus and for moving players to MySqueezebox.com

• iPeng will no longer switch the active player when becoming active from the background
• Cover art thumbs now also show in full resolution on iPad
• Proximity sensor support with “Prevent Standby” no longer requires an App restart to switch state

After a period of silence there is now a new iPeng update on the App Store – 1.2.5

I call it the “iOS4” update since one of it’s drivers was to provide full compatibility with iOS4 including multitasking support. But then this name is a bit inaccurate since

• iPeng 1.2.5 actually runs on any iPhone OS device from 3.0 on, not only on iOS4
• There’s more than just iOS4 support in this update

So what is it about?

Let’s group this into “what’s new”, “what’s improved” and “what got fixed”:

What’s New?

• iOS4 support. iPeng now makes use of fast App Switching and Multitasking. This means if you leave iPeng and come back later it will still be in the exact same place where you left. iPeng does NOT run in the background, this would eat up too much power, but it does continue synchronizing the cache from the server until that’s done.
• Landscape Mode. iPeng now supports both portrait and Landscape modes. The NowPlaying screen in Landscape mode will now provide a screen-saver like full screen view. Some spill over from some other development we’re working on 😉
• High-Res graphics. iPeng now uses full-scale graphics on NowPlaying and bigger cover art thumbnails on iPhone 4 (and iPad). Actually the “and iPad” part for the thumbs doesn’t work right now but I will upload an 1.2.5.1 update shortly that will fix this.
• Accessibility. iPeng now fully supports VoiceOver (iPhone from 3GS, iPod touch from 3^rd generation and iPad only) making it probably the most powerful Squeezebox remote control solution for people with visual disabilities. This sounds like “what’s this good for?” for a lot of people but actually it’s a biggie. First: It’s not as simple as Apple claims and second: it’s really, really helpful for blind people compare to iPeng’s last release but especially to most other means of remote control
• Localization. iPeng is now fully localized in English, German and Danish languages and provides enhanced support for many other languages, too. More to come.

What’s Improved?

• Improved Player and Music Source handling. iPeng will now find your player automatically in even more cases and also switch Music Sources if required. This is especially important if you switch Music Sources a lot and don’t find your player then. Now iPeng usually will find it for you. Also: iPeng is ow able to reconnect “lost” players as long as they are still on the network, a big improvement especially for users of the SB Receiver.
• Even more enhanced Squeezebox feature and plugin support with additional search and context menu functionality. “Global Search” is now supported through “Extras” and also through additional context menus on the NowPlaying Context Menu.
• Enhanced Server configuration support. iPeng now allows you to change your MySqueezebox.com account and has improved support for Wake-On-LAN (WOL). WOL can now be activated manually, you can define more than one WOL address and iPeng autodetects your server’s MAC for convenience.

What Got Fixed?

• Several issues with iOS4 and Squeezebox Server on the Squeezebox Touch are fixed in this release:
• Alarms do work now in iOS4
• Drag&Drop now works in iOS4. This one was the technical biggie. Apple made a change in iOS4 that effectively means you can no longer update a view in the background when using D&D. Which is kind of a problem if the data you show is permanently being updated from an external server and can stop to make any sense if it’s not.

So wait a moment, what happened to iPad and Playback?

Now, playback has eaten up a lot of time and resources here and still doesn’t work correctly, I’m sorry for that.

Actually since it DOES take so much effort I decided a while back to focus on iPad first. So the next thing you are going to see is not an iPeng with Playback but iPeng for iPad.

Does this mean Playback is dead?

Not it’s not, but it’s delayed. We are pursuing some alternative options to integrate it that might speed things up but as it stands right now, iPeng for iPad will come first.

But for now: Have fun with iPeng 1.2.5!

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