Penguin Loves Music

Hi friends of Coolio!

The long awaited iPeng 1.1 version is currently in beta testing and to make the wait a bit more exciting, here’s a little update on what it will do.

We have received a tremendous amount of suggestions and feature requests during the last months and we really want to thank you all for these. Really! This is what will make iPeng better. Now iPeng 1.1 is probably the single most important update to make these things happen since a lot has changed under the hood which will enable iPeng to be much more flexible and allow for more functionality.

As a little “teaser” I want to give you an outlook on two of the more prominent results of these changes:

iPeng with plugin support

iPeng 1.1 will support plugins that provide menus for the Squeezebox(TM) Controller. This includes basic functionality like Alarms, Random Play etc., additional ones like CD Player and Biography but also really complex plugins like Custom Browse.

So iPeng’s functionality will not grow by one or two features but potentially dozens! Cool, isn’t it?

iPeng goes SqueezeNetwork

The other big change (awaited by lots of you) will be support for SqueezeNetwork. You no longer need a SqueezeCenter server to use iPeng with your Squeezebox.

See some screen shots of both functionalities below.

Now if you want to add your own feature requests to make iPeng even better and probably get that one functionality you’ve really been missing, please file a ticket with our trac ticketing system:

https://trac.penguinlovesmusic.de/trac/ipengnat/newticket

(don’t let yourself turn off by an error message, you have to log in/register and then you can use it)

Have fun!

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iPeng and PenguinLovesMusic.com is growing in features and functions so the poor penguin can’t keep up doing everything on his own.

So he’s looking for help in the following areas:

Webmaster

~10 h a week.

Responsibilities: Maintain PenguinLovesMusic.com’s blog and trac site, answer support requests.

Graphics Artists

per assignment.

As some have noted before, Coolio’s not the greatest Artist on this planet, so he would need help doing in-application artwork and site design.

If you are interested in one of these openings, please contact coolio(at)penguinlovesmusic.com

iPeng 1.0.4 is now released on the App Store as a free upgrade following the somewhat ill-fated 1.0.3 release. Since we did not write an update then, here’s a summary of the new features:

What’s new?

• Music Folder Browsing. You can now browse your folder structure through the respective SqueezeCenter function. (1.0.3)
• Long lists are now sorted in a separate thread. This strongly improves performance during the loading of large libraries. iPeng will now stay reactive and the load time for a 3,000 album library improves from approx. 4 min to approx. 2 min until the cache is fully synchronized. (1.0.3)
• There is now an experimental Wake-On-LAN funtionality that may or may not work. You have to manually set the MAC for this under Settings. (1.0.3 and 1.0.4).

What’s fixed?

• The “The The” bug is fixed (see Known Issues), so you can put your “ignored articles” back in if you used the workaround in 1.0.3. (1.0.4)
• Albums will now fully load and artwork will show up (1.0.4)
• No more crashes due to SqueezeCenter Bug 10242 (empty album records). You might see empty albums now in the list of albums but they should do no harm. (1.0.3 and 1.0.4)
• Artwork scaling in the list should finally work in cases where the server doesn’t scale (e.g. bmp artwork). It’s still strongly discouraged to use embedded .bmp artwork in your files since you will transmit lots and lots of data and fill your iPhone’s flash disk quite a bit. A full scale .bmp Artwork as delivered by iTunes will take around 1 MB, if you’ve got 1,000 albums that makes… (1.0.4)
• Sorting of Album and Artist lists should now be as expected (1.0.3)

We apologize for any inconvenience you may have had with the 1.0.3 version.

Have Fun!

You liked the iPeng skin? Just thought a WebApp is too slow? Well, then we’ve got something for you:

Explore iPeng usability and iPhone speed with the iPeng 1.0 now on the iPhone App Store.

It’s the ultimate remote control software for Logitech® Squeezebox™ players and the SqueezeCenter server. Have full control over the music all over your home with your iPhone or iPod touch.

We told you it would come and we told you it would have limited functionality but Coolio has been an insisting Penguin, so now it does already give you a bit more than originally expected. Here are the highlights:

• Explore your music library at unprecedented ease: Browse your library categories at our wingtips and select one of “play”, “add” or “add next”. And do that on any level that has playable content with the “touch-and-hold” gesture. Available Categories are
  • Albums, Artists, Genres, Playlists, Favorites

• NowPlaying screen with multi-page controls: Let’s you do all player related activities in one place
• Play Internet Radio, Music Services and Podcasts: Everything that can be accessed through SqueezeCenter can be accessed through iPeng. Including Search, Artwork and all the other goodies. With the same playback functionality as for the library (as available for streaming content)

• Manage, simultaneously control and synchronize all your Squeezebox™ players and servers with iPeng’s MultiPlayer control: iPeng’s MultiPlayer control now is the main dashboard to select , manage and control your players. And Servers.
  

• Manage your playlist: Re-order and directly play the Tracks on the current playlist.

• Have full control over your player features: shuffle, repeat, rate songs, love and ban tracks for music services and much more. On the overlay of the artwork screen. Just as you know it from iPeng.

• Full localization through SqueezeCenter: iPeng itself is currently English only, but most menu items and texts are fully localized as of your server setting.

Now on the iPhone App Store for $9.99.

Download and have fun!

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For more information and detailed usage instructions see help.penguinlovesmusic.de
iPeng requires a SqueezeCenter server from version 7.0 on, available for free from Logitech® at www.slimdevices.com and one or more Squeezebox™ or Transporter® or any compatible hard- or software player.
Squeezebox™ is a trademark of Logitech.

iPhone, iPod and iPhone App Store are trademarks of Apple Inc.

iPeng 0.5.3 is a maintenance release.

Originally it was meant to support the new Alarm feature of SC 7.2 but that functionality is not ready yet. Sorry. I need it, too

Here’s what’s new:

• 0.5.3 is zipped under Windows instead of on a Mac. Vista users were experiencing issues with Mac zip-files.
• it comes with support for the XM Radio plugin
• the Podcast plugin is now supported
• there’s a toolbar shortcut icon for Pandora

Oh, and some cool but useless stuff, too:

• 0.5.3 has the smooth main-menu transition of the failed 0.6
• plus some bling-bling on Now Playing
• the MultiPlayer control is now a bit more reduced. It doesn’t show the track title, album and artist anymore. This takes down server and client load a bit and makes the control smaller, fitting more players on a screen. Should anybody miss the text items, please let me know.

Have fun

OK, it’s been a while since my last update and it hasn’t happened too much.

Reason is simple: Apple ran out of these cool 36-hour iDays so Coolio and I had to live along with that old, analog 24h version

Along comes the big issue that MobileSafari for the time being tuned out too slow and too buggy to handle all the cool stuff I tried to include in the 0.6 skin/plugin version, so I had to drop that one

OK, back to native.

Recently I DID finally find a bit of time to continue working on it and now it’s progressing a bit.

It still doesn’t do too much (just a menu placeholder and a NowPlaying screen) but there’s quite a bit of under-the-hood logic already in place so I actually see it progressing every day right now.

Given past experiences and uncertainty of supply for iDays I will NOT make any predictions on WHEN this is gonna come but I’ll keep you updated and given the current pace I think about a month more could get me something release-worthy.

Coolio and I don’t get along without teasers, so here’s a screenshot of NowPlaying as it looks today. It may not be a lot, but at least I can say that everything you see there works already…

So now it’s up to you: spot the differences

When we released the new Playback feature the first question was “How long will the battery last”. Streamin application (not only) on the iPhone are notorious for their power consumption. And for the iPeng playback to work correctly, Auto-Lock has to be off, so the screen will always be powered on. So is it worthwhile?

To find an answer to that question I did some endurance testing today and it took me hours – which is what I had hoped it would

It looks like it pays off, that Apple does not provide for “real” streaming, but only for file playback – the tracks get transferred to the Phone or Touch in a few seconds and then there’s no more communication needed.

So here’s the result:

Test setup:

• iPod touch (8GB) with FW 2.0 and iPeng 0.5.2
• Auto-Lock switched to “off”, so the screen will stay on and the Touch will play continuously
• Volume set to 50% (so this is more a “realistic scenario” as an “how long can it get if you max it out”
• Brightness:50% and Auto “ON”
• Test-Playlist: Mixed music tracks
• Test process: Browse to playlist. Load playlist. Browse to Playback plugin. Start playback. Let it run.

Playback time: 5h 12min!

Now I feel that’s a good result. I had expected something like four hours, so more than five is quite good. And much better than the two hours of browsing I get on the device.

So: Happy listening!

Today we’ve got the first beta of a tool Coolio has been waiting for from the very beginning. It was his (and my) Christmas wish but now it came true in summer: “Stream” your library to iPhone/iTouch!

OK, it’s still early beta and has some “experimental” appeal, but it works.

What does it do? Well, you can’t stream mp3 streams to iPhone. Still not. But iPhone can play mp3s  on your server. So what iPeng does: it has a new NowPlaying plugin, called “iPeng Local Playback” that will give you your actual playlist as a set of mp3 files (no, you don’t see that, it’s just a playlist) and you can click them to play.

QuickTime will open and playback the track and all that follow.

Sounds cool? Is cool.

However, it’s still experimental, so it comes with some issues, which hopefully will be sorted out soon, but definitely for the native app:

• You have to turn off the screensaver. That’s probably the biggest one. MobileSafari switches off event handling when the screen saver kicks in. The result of this is: the playlist will not advance after the currently playing track. A workaround is to unlock the screen saver manually after each track (iPeng will automatically advance the track then) but this is not fun. We do have a good idea how to fix it, but it’s work. iPhone simply does not support this better right now.
• The skip buttons in QuickTime don’t work but end the playback.
• mp3 and AAC only. No transcoding on the server (yet). It’s being worked on…
• You still need a player connected to the server. SqueezeCenter can only manage a playlist for a player, so you need one. Can be a computer (through the mp3-stream) or SoftSqueeze (which comes with SqueezeCenter), but it’s needed. I filed an enhancement request so hopefully this will also be sorted out soon.
• The Quicktime Control acts somewhat erratically on the screen. It will sometimes overlay the top menu bar. This seems to be an Apple bug. Don’t know, if they’ll fix it. It doesn’t look good, but it does not kill any functionality, just swipe away the Playback page and it will go away, too.

Why so late? Logitech had to do an enhancement to the SqueezeCenter server. They did this for the latest beta now, so here we are.

So how does it work?

1. Download and install the latest beta of SqueezeCenter 7.1 (build 21902 or later)
2. Download the iPeng 0.5.2 file from the Downloads page
3. Install it. If you’ve got iPeng 0.5.1 (only that one) installed, you can install it over the old version and use it right away, no need to restart the server. To update from older version see Installation.

Have fun!

So, after a busy weekend doing some final fixes here’s the first version of iPeng for iPhone 2.0 / 3G (and iTouch 2.0, of course).

It finally will be a completely rewritten plugin, but for now, only some of the new stuff is ready, but it is already fully compatible to iPhone 2.0.

What’s new?

All of the current changes are on the NowPlaying screen (where they were needed most):

Smooth Scrolling:

• The different pages on the NowPlaying screen now can be scrolled in and out like the Pages of the Springboard.
• You don’t need to do “two finger scrolling” to move around content pages or the playlist. We’ve all waited for this, haven’t we

Seamless Volume and “Elased Time” controls

• In former iPeng versions, you could click on the volume bar to select a volume. This was a bit inexact. Now you can drag the volume handle.
• While dragging, the current volume will permanently alter, so you can hear whether it’s what you want
• An extra overlay will show the current volume level, in case you like it VERY exact.
• For “Elapsed Time” this will show the time into the track. But no, no immediate update here, of course, your track stays on until you release the handle

And last but not least: Drag’n'Drop reordering of the Playlist

• No more clicking between tracks to change their order.
• Just touch and hold a track for more than 1.5s and it will be “elevated”. Now you can drag it along the list and drop it into the place where you want it to be.
• COOL!

So. Have fun. Send fish. And wait for more to come

Some news from Coolio after a while.

He recently went to California to visit Apple’s WWDC (Worldwide Developers Conference) for you. And after getting a few penguin full of fish out of the Pacific ocean (OK, he’s a lazy guy, he let the fishermen get it out of the ocean for him), he attended the conference to see what new is there on the iPhone and iPhone native apps.

What he learned was really cool, even though the weather was rather hot (form him). Native apps on iPhone perform well but also the web interface improved a lot. So Coolio convinced me, to give the web based plugin another try and improve that first. What comes out of this will be available together with Apple’s 2.0 Software on July 11th and it is quite amazing stuff. Looks like this solves a LOT of iPeng’s current performance issues and let’s this really look a lot like a native app while still retaining all the flexibility of a web page.

So look forward to July 11th, and expect a new release with cool improvements. Best of it right ahead: No more “two finger scrolling”

Cheers!