Dear iPeng users. It’s springtime here in Berlin, and we celebrate it by bringing you a wealth of new features and improvements for iPeng and iPeng for iPad.

Actually, there are so many changes that have accumulated in the current release that we will write a number of more detailed announcements over the next weeks to honor them all, but here’s an overview showing you what you get.

Retina Support for iPeng for iPad

Let’s start with what is the smallest change but will be important news to all you owners of the new iPad: There is now retina support for cover art, meaning that all the thumbnails will use the full resolution the new iPad offers (in the default size), and the same is true for NowPlaying artwork – if your artwork is big enough…

It’s just unbelievable how crisp your artwork can now look on the iPad and just how cool it is to browse these big cover art “thumbnails”. And iPeng really is the Squeezebox App to show it at it’s best.

Time to Update Your Artwork!

We’ve always said it: Your artwork can’t be big enough, and now: how true has this statement been proved… iPeng for iPad will now use artwork sizes up to 1536×1536 pixels. So if you’ve still got low resolution artwork in your library, now is the time to get better ones.

Completely New Playback

The second change applies to both iPeng versions: iPeng Playback (In-App-Purchase) has been completely rewritten with a lot of improvements.

Gapless Playback and Synchronization (1)

iPeng now fully supports gapless playback and synchronization of players, two features iPeng users have been looking forward to since playback was introduced.

Of course you can still play iPeng’s player on its own.

Large Buffer for Mobile Streaming (1)

If you use iPeng on the road or in places with spotty WiFi reception a large playback buffer will help to keep the connection stable. To learn more about how to play remotely see Coolio’s Guide to Remote Playback.

Note: A large buffer helps for mobile playback, but it can cause trouble when using synchronized playback with certain online services. For this case, there now is a new setting under “Settings->iPeng Settings->Enable Playback” (or “Bitrate Limiting” in the player settings) to change the buffer size. Please read the help comment for this setting for details.

Equalization

This is completely new in iPeng: iPeng now supports iOS’ default Equalizer settings for its playback. You can enable it under “Audio Settings” for iPeng’s player.

(1) At least an iPhone 3GS, 3^rd Generation iPod Touch, iPad 1 or any later generation device is required for the large buffer and synchronization.

But the biggest news is yet to come…

Coolio’s Latest Hit: iPeng Party

iPeng Party is your Party Remote for the Logitech® Squeezebox™. It’s a completely new App. It’s a universal App for iPhone and iPad.

And it’s free!

What does it do?

As a guest, it allows you to participate in the music choice at the party and to see what’s playing and what’s coming up. You have access to all the music your party host has available and you can even bring in online music sources as they are available.

As a host, it lets you give your guests the chance to influence the choice of music on your party without giving away full control. No more troublemakers changing the volume or deleting the playlist, replacing it with all of their own choices, but still a chance to let your guests be heard and drive the direction of the party.

To learn more about how to use and set up iPeng Party, please visit iPengParty.penguinlovesmusic.de

Support for iPeng Party in iPeng

To make best use of iPeng Party as a party host, there is special support in the full iPeng versions. iPeng can support you (as a host) by allowing you to automatically provide configuration information to your guests using iPeng Party. You can find details about how to do that, too, under the link above.

Have fun!

As usual, iPeng does of course improve the details on this release (such as improved volume sliders) to make sure it continues to deliver what’s most important: lot’s of fun for you with your music!

One more note

You will notice, that iPeng for iPad now has an age restriction of 17+. This is not because iPeng itself now contains any material that could be offending but iPeng contains an internet browser that you can use to play music from the internet (from music blogs or services like SoundCloud) or that allows you to use sites like Wikipedia to get more information about your music.

Apple’s rules, however, require that Apps with free access to the internet are rated 17+ since the internet obviously contains all kind of unrestricted material. We are sorry for the inconvenience.

Well, this had to come some day….

We just had to decide to drop support for iOS3 in iPeng (for iPhone) with one of the next releases.

Why?

First, you have to move on someday, it’s getting harder and harder with every release to include capabilities of the new platforms and at the same time stay compatible with the old ones. Second, obviously with Apple’s current SDK development (debug) builds in some cases behave differently than distribution builds like they are being released on the App Store. With the 1.4.2 release (iPeng for iPhone) we have an issue that didn’t show up at all during testing and we can reproduce that it only shows up when doing distribution builds which makes it very, very hard to identify let alone fix issues.

Add to that that managing, installing and testing distribution builds under iOS 3 is much harder than under iOS 4 and newer which means we have practically no beta tester support for testing under iOS 3 anymore – nobody found this particular issue, for example, even though beta builds were affected, too.

Under these circumstances we have decided we find it too risky and way too much effort to continue support for these old platforms.

When?

There will be one additional bugfix release for iOS 3, though. So if you see some errors that need addressing, please report them as soon as possible so that we can make sure they are part of that release.

Please report issues to coolio att penguinlovesmusic dott com or use the bug tracker here https://trac.penguinlovesmusic.de/trac/ipengnat/

What Is iOS and Am I Affected?

iOS is the operating system on your iPod or iPhone. If you bought it two years ago, then at that time iOS 3 would have been the version it came with.
If you always did the software updates since then whenever iTunes asked you to, you are probably currently on iOS 4.1.2 or even iOS 5 (if you do already have an iPhone 3GS or newer or a 3rd or 4th generation iPod touch, that is if it has 32 or 64 GB of flash memory or a Retina Display).
You can find out about the operating system version on your device under “Settings->General->Info”, there’s a “Version” field, this is the iOS version.

The following users are affected:

1. All users of the 1st generation iPhone (the one with the aluminum back side) and the 1st generation iPod touch (the one without hardware volume keys).
2. Users of 2nd generation and 3rd generation devices (iPod Touch 2nd and 3rd generation, iPhone 3G and 3GS) who for some reason or other chose NOT to upgrade their devices to a newer operating system/firmware release. I believe this will especially apply to users of 2nd generation iPod touch devices and iPhone 3G (not 3GS) who found iOS 4.1 to be too slow.

Other devices are not affected.

What Does the Discontinuing of iPeng’s Support for Devices Mean?

For devices listed under 1. and 2., that is.

• You will no longer receive updates for iPeng after the next release (or a possible, unplanned, “really final” bugfix release).

• You can no longer purchase iPeng on the App Store

• If your device is one of the devices mentioned under point 2. above, you can continue to get iPeng updates by updating your device to the latest firmware version using iTunes.

Just in time for the launch of Apple’s iOS 5, there are new versions of iPeng (1.4.2) and iPeng for iPad (1.2.2) on the App Store which fully support the new Apple firmware.

Apart from that it’s mainly a service release which fixes a few bugs, improves performance with slower hardware and has some better artwork caching.

Have fun!

Create “Web Apps” in iPeng

One of the features a Squeezebox is really good at is integration with online music sources. It supports Spotify, Pandora, Napster and a wealth of other services and even where there is no support from Logitech directly there are 3^rd party plugins for things like BBC iPlayer and YouTube .

However, the Squeezebox doesn’t cover everything and there are other services it does NOT support, yet, like SoundCloud, The Hype Machine, Aupeo! and probably dozens to hundreds of others.

Now, if these services offer an HTML-5 enabled web page (that is: they can play on your iPhone/iPad without a dedicated App) chances are that iPeng can somewhat help you with these.

It’s not a perfect replacement (see the limitations below) but it’s usually good for playing single tracks and it’s a great way to play all these links others might send you via mail, facebook, Twitter or Google+.

The Browser

Already since iPeng 1.3.4/1.1.4 there were additional features allowing you access to e.g. facebook and Wikipedia through a browser and giving you a sharing feature for the music you are listening to.

Now, we’ve extended these features to integrate a full-blown browser under “Extras” in iPeng, allowing you to set and manage bookmarks and to add these bookmarks as “Web Apps” to your “My Apps” list in iPeng.

iPeng also now comes with a set of predefined bookmarks you can try.

How it Works

Essentially what this does is it takes the music that the web page tries to play on the browser and sends it to the Squeezebox instead. Just search for “Play” buttons on the web site and try them out. If it works, you will get a context menu for “Play”, “Add”, “Add Next” and “Save to Favorites”.

Limitations: What it can NOT do

Even though this often gives you a right-away access to services you have to be aware that from a Squeezebox point of view this is a bit of a kludge. It will NOT replace a fully integrated Squeezebox “App” or Plugin because your Squeezebox will still not understand about the service it is playing. It just gets a link from iPeng it should play and that usually works but other features may be difficult.

In a lot of cases, you will only get Track (Meta-) information after the playback of a track has actually started. In no cases will you be able to search the service’s library from a playing track and a lot of services have limits on how long a stream is valid so you might not be able to do more than just a simple “play” of a track  (e.g. for SoundCloud) or a track might only be valid for a few hours.

An additional limitation is something you’ll see with a lot of “Custom Radio” type services like 8Tracks or Aupeo! These services play a track and when playback has ended, their web page will automatically start a new one. Now this doesn’t work in iPeng because the web page is loaded in the browser while the music is actually playing on the Squeezebox so that the web page will never know when to play something new. In this case you will have to manually select a new track again.

And then there are of course those services that require you to use their own App on iOS, no chance for these.

Tell Us About Your Experience

Please try this out and if you encounter web sites that work very well, please let us know so we can extend the bookmark list we ship with iPeng in the future.

And if you encounter sites that do not work but that you would like to use, please let us know, too, maybe there is a workaround we could builtd into iPeng; we were successful with such an approach for SoundCloud for example.

Some Examples and Special Considerations

Here are a few examples of services and the limitations they have

SoundCloud: SoundCloud have two types of links you can use, streams and downloads although the mobile site we linked in iPeng usually only supports streams (and most of the content also doesn’t have a download link). Download links are permanent but stream links will only be valid for a few  seconds. This means you can NOT bookmark them and usually you also can not queue them up in a play list, you have to play them immediately.

Aupeo!; Aupeo! is an example of a service that has customized “stations” you can play. Here, only the first track will play after you hit the button and if you want to add another one you have to “skip” and “play” again. Aupeo! links are valid for a few hours, though, so you can queue up a number of these links to play a whole station (unless you run into a skip limit).

8tracks: 8tracks has a special WebApp it uses on iOS by default. This WebApp takes full control over your browser window and does not allow you to play stuff on your Squeezebox but instead ask you to immediately play a file which is just silence. However, if you hit the “8tacks” logo at the top of that page you can switch to the non-mobile version of their web page which will allow you to play their streams and will have a similar usage scheme as Aupeo!

Google Music Beta: Actually, even Google Music Beta somehow works but unless they decide to add a mobile site the user interface from within iPeng is so awkward that I would not call that “supported”. What you can do is select a track from your library and then hit the “Play” button at the bottom of your page and this will actually play the content. The upside is that the links are valid for quite a while.

As usual: have fun and let us know about your experience!

New iPeng updates are now available in the App Store.

One thing is that they fix is an annoying crash on startup that some people experienced after upgrading to Squeezebox Server 7.6.0. There was a simple workaround but hey, let’s better fix it…

To not make it just a boring bugfix, there are also a few updates to the functionality:

Browser

• There is now an (internet) browser under “Extras” that you can use to browse and play music from web sites on your Squeezebox. I love that I can no read music blogs like Stereogum and listen to the stuff they link right away

• Each page driven by a browser (including facebook and Wikipedia) now has it’s owm URL entry field and “pull to refresh” feature (iOS 4 and newer only).

Sharing

• There’s now better support for sharing and playing shared links with Rhapsody and Spotify

• Facebook posts now have an (editable) default “I’m listening to” text.

Lookup

• Wikipedia lookup now also works for local library entries while browsing

• There’s now also a Google Search for Lyrics under the Lookup menu. No, you can’t use it for the lyrics screen saver in iPeng for iPad, that would be a bit too much of a stretch.

Playing Music

• There’s now an “Play All” entry on some context menus. There are a few cases where this will play whole menus (e.g. Top 100 tracks in Triode’s Spotify plugin) where you could only play single tracks before. Unfortunately, Favorites is not one of them.

Stability

• There were cases where iPeng got “stuck” when it could not connect back to the server right away. This should now be fixed by iPeng reconnecting but depending on Network status it can take some seconds.

Have fun!