iPeng for iPhone 1.3.4 and iPeng for iPad 1.1.4 bring some new feature Coolio has been demanding for a long time now: getting social about your music.

Be Social About Your Music

Now what is this about? Oh yes, they needed to add “Twitter” and “Facebook” to the App description – yawn. Is that it? No, it isn’t.

It’s about sharing what you listen to with your friends and – just as important – discovering what they listen to! And, most importantly, to be able to do that not only on your computer or the iPhone itself but also through your Squeezebox and your HiFi equipment.

And if you don’t use  any Social Networks, you can just as well use E-Mail and get the same thing.

Here’s what it really is:

1. Share What You Listen To…

iPeng now has a new Context Menu item for the current track and the tracks in the current playlist. It allows you to tell others what you listen to via E-Mail or Twitter or Facebook. By default it will send the title, artist and album (you can of course edit that) and – most importantly – whenever a link is available that can be played (as is the case for services like Spotify, Rhapsody, YouTube or radio stations) that link will be sent, too. So your friends don’t just know, what you are listening to, they can just click the link and listen to it, too.

I don’t know about you, but for Coolio, his friends are an important source to learn about new music so this is really cool.

Which brings us to part

2. … and listen to what others share

Of course you not only want to tell others what you listen to, you also want to learn about their music. Ever got frustrated that you could also play these links they post on a computer or a phone but not on serious audio equipment? No longer. With iPeng you can now play this directly on your Squeezebox. This currently works for streams and single tracks from Internet Radio stations, Last.fm, Napster (you can send links for iPeng only, but playing Napster links should work), Pandora, Rhapsody, Slacker, Spotify, WiMP, YouTube (Squeezebox Server with YouTube plugin required).

Some new Apps

E-Mail sharing will work immediately but you can also use Twitter or Facebook. To do that, iPeng adds a new category to the App Gallery menu: iPeng Apps. Here you can enable iPeng’s own Facebook and Twitter features that allow you to tweet and post as well as read timelines and walls.

Now wait, didn’t the Squeezebox (and iPeng) already have a Facebook App? Yes, but it’s not as useful as iPeng’s. iPeng will replace it with it’s own, because iPeng’s simply is more versatile in this context.

Actually, it’s not even any special App or functionality, it’s just Facebook as you know it on your iPhone or iPad but with the added extra feature that iPeng will recognize playable links and not just follow them but offer you to play them on your Squeezebox. And if a link goes to a web site first which then contains the music link, just follow it, browse the web site and when you encounter the music link, you can play it as well.

Twitter has it’s own Timeline in iPeng but apart from that, it works just the same.

So Coolio now wishes you a good time sharing music with your friends.

What else?

Ok, it’s been a while since the last update, so there are also some other new features to be had:

• Browse Wikipedia for information about what you are listening to, by artist, album or title. And if you encounter playable music, you can just send it to your Squeezebox again.
• iPeng now shows an AirPlay control for the iPeng Player if there is an AirPlay device on the network, so you don’t have to use the task bar four audio routing.
  
• There is a new behavior for the PlayNext feature. Whenever you select PlayNext and your player is currently off or paused, iPeng will start playback with that song you add to the playlist so it’s a way to have a Play command that does not delete your current playlist.
• Plus a lot of other detailed improvements and behind the scenes improvements like support for Squeezebox Server 7.6.

Have fun with iPeng and get social!

Dear iPeng Users!

The recent updates to iPeng 1.3.2 and iPeng for iPad 1.1.2 bring some improvements to playback, bug fixes and a change to the discount offered for users of both Apps.

What Happened to Free Playback?

Let’s talk about the discount first.

When we introduced Playback in iPeng 1.3/1.1, I wanted to give something back to true customers of both iPeng versions. This is not as easy as it sounds since the App Store business model is fixed, discounts are not provided for. Something is either entirely free or has to be sold at full price.

So my idea was: “Hey, let’s give users who own both Apps the Playback for free”.

Bad idea.

To cut a long story short: As it turned out, the only solution we found was too complicated for a lot of users and the lack of a simple capability to transfer the license to other devices (there was a capability, but it was awkward) lead to a lot of disappointment and bad mood.

The final stroke then came when Apple objected to this model because it’s in a violation of one of their App Store review rules. The rule says, that you may only use App Store mechanisms to unlock additional features. Our interpretation of this (and well, it did pass review) was that this only applies to using other means of SELLING features (so that you can not set up your own In-App-Purchase system) but Apple informed us that it would also apply to unlocking something for free. Now actually a lot of other Apps do that, too, but this is probably a different story.

So that was it for free playback. However, if you have enabled this feature in version 1.3.1/1.1 you will not lose it, your free playback will stay active!

Enter Discounted Playback

However, I’m not willing to give up the discount completely so here’s a new try: Discounted Playback. It uses the App Store to make available a discounted (to the equivalent of $1) copy of Playback through the App Store in iPeng for iPhone (it will enable playback for iPeng for iPad, too). Besides having the disadvantage of requiring you to pay 1$ more, it has a few advantages:

• It only uses the App Store to unlock a feature so should be compliant to the App Store rules.
• Since it uses the App Store it’s simple to transfer it to other devices.

How does Discounted Playback Work?

Here are the steps you have to follow to purchase and use the discounted playback.

1. Install both iPeng for iPhone and iPeng for iPad on the same iPad.
2. Start both Apps on iPad.
3. Go to iPeng for iPhone(!) on iPad
   
4. In the Enable Playback dialog, iPeng for iPhone will now offer you to purchase Playback at a discounted rate equivalent to ~1US$
5. Purchase Playback
6. Playback is now enabled for both Apps on the iPad
7. To transfer the license, open iPeng for iPhone on a different device and press Restore Previous Purchase in the Enable Playback dialog. Do NOT purchase it again, use the Restore Playback button instead.

What else has changed?

OK, so much for the business side of things. There are also some other improvements in these iPeng releases.

• New File and Stream formats: iPeng Playback now supports Ogg/Vorbis and PCM (WAV, AIFF). While Ogg/Vorbis is helpful for files in that format and some radio streams that use it, PCM will especially help support some streams that required server-side transcoding.
• Bug fixes in Playback and stream handling. BBC streams in AAC format, for example, will now work.
• iPeng now limits the bitrate over the cellular network to 128kbps to meet the App Store criteria.
• And then this iPeng release fixes a really nasty bug that lead to excessive CPU usage and battery consumption in iPeng, not only with playback.

Now, I know a lot of you will be disappointed by the dropping of the free Playback capability. I’m sorry about that but can’t change that, I hope you can live with the discount solution, too.

If I could start this anew, I’m pretty sure I would no longer try to discount something but just charge the full price. While this, too, would cause some bad mood it would just cause so much less trouble.

Cheers!

Coolio’s Guide to Remote Playback

Now that playback on your device is available for iPeng, a lot of people have been asking how you can configure this to work not only at home but also remotely.

So here’s a little writeup of how that works.

Please note: unless you use this over a VPN (Virtual Private Network, see last point below) this is inherently not secure. Although no real vulnerabilities are known yet, they might very well be there. For this reason I would strongly recommend to only run this if your server that contains your music data and Squeezebox Server software doesn’t contain any sensitive data and you are having good backups of it.

If you chose to use a VPN (especially recommended if your router already supports it) you can spare yourself the part about port forwarding below.

The Big Setup

This is how the world looks like for a little penguin trying to use iPeng from abroad:

I’ll show you how you have to configure your Router, your Server and iPeng to make this work.

The Server

The server is the part of the picture that is the most simple one to handle. You have to install Squeezebox Server (you did that anyway to feed your Squeezebox with your music) and you have to know it’s setup.

There are two things you need to do on the server

1. Find out your server’s IP Address (Server IP) and the HTTP Port number (Server Port).

You can do so in the Squeezebox Server’s Web interface under

Settings->Information->Squeezebox Server Status

Or in iPeng under

Settings->Advanced->Squeezebox Information->Squeezebox Server

2. Set a username and password. Otherwise, your Squeezebox Server will be exposed to the internet without any form of protection and anybody could log in and e.g. play some music in your home. Or SET a password.

Important: The usename/password combination used by Squeezebox Server will be sent entirely without any protection. So please use a unique username/password combination and not your facebook account.

You can set this in the server’s web interface under

Setting->Advanced->Security

Fixed IP Address

There is one more thing about your server: To make all of this work, the server’s IP address needs to stay the same.

On a typical home network setup IP addresses are being assigned automatically by the router (or by a DHCP server, to be precise. That’s usually part of the router, if not, you probably know yourself how to set up a network) and can change with every power up.

There are two ways to change this: one dangerous and one good one.

1. The dangerous way: Set the IP address in the computer. Windows, for example, supports this in the system settings. The “dangerous” part about this is that you have to chose an address that your router doesn’t use for the dynamic assignment or you will have two devices with the same address. And it needs to be in the IP range (“subnet”) your router also uses. Routers usually have address ranges they don’t use for this.
2. The “safe” way: Tell the Router to assign a fixed address to your server. See below.

That’s it about the server.

The Router

Now for the tricky part.

A router is a device that essentially separates your local network (the icberg; with your server and all the Squeezeboxes) from the big, bad internet (BBI). Seen from the internet, your whole network only has a single address, your home’s IP address (Home IP). To make things worse, in a typical DSL setup this also changes every day (actually a good thing from a security standpoint).

This IP address has nothing to do with the IP addresses in your network. The latter ones are usually something like 192.168.x.y or 10.x.y.z, the former can be anything else and depends on country and internet provider.

So what you want to do now when you want to stream your music to your iThingy is to reach ONE of the devices on your local network (the server) by calling your home’s IP address. Now you have to tell that to your router.

What your router normally does is, it simply does not allow _anybody_to reach anything on your local network. Only your local network can call the outside world and the router will send any responses back to the computer which initiated that call.

So we have to change that behavior.

To do this, all routers I know have a web interface through which you can configure them. If your computer has an IP address of e.g. 192.168.0.x I would expect the router to be reachable under 192.168.0.1 and so on.

Port Forwarding

This is the big change you have to make.Your router’s web interface will have a section called “port forwarding”. In this section you can define rules for what to contact whenever somebody calls from the outside. You need to define two rules:

• Your Server Port, typically 9000: You need to forward your server port (see above) on the router to the SAME port on your server. The protocol is TCP. So what you enter is that you want to forward e.g. port 9000 on your router to port 9000 on your server’s IP address. It’s important that the two are the same. This is a Squeezebox thing and doesn’t apply to general networking, but here it’s important.
• Port 3483 TCP. This also should stay the same. Forward Port 3483 on your router to port 3483 on your server for the TCP protocol.
• There is a third one that is not needed for iPeng but I believe some Squeezebox models need it if you want to use them remotely: Port 3483 UDP. You also need to forward port 3483 (the same as above) for the UDP protocol. These are different rules!

Fixed IP Address

If you chose above to use a fixed IP address assigned through your router, you have to look for a component called DHCP in the router setup. Another wording may be “IP Settings” or “IP addresses” or simply “Devices“. What you will typically see is a list of connected (and unconnected) devices with an “edit” button. Here you typically can chose to fix an IP address for this device.

Find your server and assign a fixed IP address.

DynDNS

Now you are essentially done except for … that changing IP address. You could now reach your server from the internet but you would have to know the IP address. Which is awkward. And probably changes every day.

What you can do here, is set up a service called “Dynamic DNS”. Google it, there are several free ones.

What DynDNS does is, it sets up an internet address for you (something like “my_new.cool.address.com”) and connect that to your Home IP whenever that changes. Most of today’s routers support this by automatically sending your new address to the server once it changes.

So here’s what you need to do:

1. Go to your Router settings again and find the “Dynamic DNS” section. Here, look up which services your router supports.
2. Register with one of these services and set up an account and address
3. Enter your account details in the router settings

Now you’ve got yourself a nice, new address through which you can reach your server.

Setting Up iPeng

Now for the last but easiest part (of course) 🙂

Go to iPeng’s settings under

Settings->iPeng Settings->Add Server

Enter your sever’s new address as in

my_server.dyndns.org:9000

If you use port 9000 you can omit the “:9000”.

That’s it, you just got yourself a remote streamer.

Have fun with iPeng Playback!

VPN

As promised: one more note on security.

All of what you have set up now will potentially be highly insecure so make sure you have no critical data on the machine you expose to the internet and that you have good backups.

A much better solution than directly forwarding the ports is to use a VPN, typically through a system called “IPSec” and which is supported by iPhone/iPad/iPod touch.

Some routers support this out of the box, in other cases you need to set it up on your server. The setup is highly operating system dependent so I can’t really give advice here but it’s definitely worth it.

Dear Users!

Apple has been very fast and supportive on this and so we’ve now got the 1.3.1 update of iPeng for iPhone in the App Store which fixes the crash on startup experienced with iPhone 1 and 3G and iPod touch generations 1 and 2 in iPeng 1.3.

Sorry for the inconvenience involved and have fun with iPeng!

Happy 2011, iPeng Users!

Here’s the first new release in 2011 and it brings you a long-awaited functionality for iPeng: Playback.

How Does it Work?

iPeng Playback will make your iOS device show up on a Squeezebox Server like any other Squeezebox Player and you control it just like that, too. With iPeng Playback your iOS device will have essentially the same music management capabilities as all your other players, so you can queue up tracks for a playlist or just play an album or even use plugins like Dynamic Playlists.

What Does it Support

iPeng Playback supports Squeezebox Server versions 7.3 and newer (previous versions back to 7.0 might work but are untested).

It plays the following file formats natively (that means: on the device itself):

• MP3
• AAC
• FLAC^*)
• ALAC^*)

Other formats can be used if your server supports transcoding and can encode them to FLAC. This depends on the available processing power and the file format involved.

*) Cellular Network Operation

When you use iPeng playback outside a WiFi network, over the cellular network, the “lossless” formats FLAC and ALAC will not be available to limit the bandwidth requirements. In this case, your server will have to support transcoding to MP3, which generally requires more processing power than FLAC encoding and you will have to have the necessary encoding software installed.

What are the Limitations?

iPeng Playback does NOT work directly with MySqueezebox.com. MySqueezebox.com is a service offered and run by Logitech in support of their own hardware and Logitech had to get approval from all of their content partners supported by it to use their services. This does not cover use on iOS so it’s not possible for us right now to use that service.

Also, we don’t believe this will be a big limitation since most of the services available through MySqueezebox.com can already be used through existing radio Apps for iOS or by the respective iOS Apps that these services provide themselves.

We believe, the biggest value of this feature lies in the capability to use your own library on the iOS device without having to sync it to the device.

Do I Have to Pay for Playback?

If you own only one iPeng version: yes.

Providing this capability along with continuing development of iPeng’s users interfaces and other functionalities (there’s a lot more exciting stuff coming up in 2011!) simply is too much work to be ever done for free.

In this particular case we used an implementation by a partner, James Fearon, who’s responsible for the whole feature and of course he wants to be rewarded for his hard work, too. We definitely can’t afford to pay him for all the users who have already purchased iPeng in the past, so this feature is only available as an “In App Purchase”.

Note: Free Playback is no longer available and has been replaced by a discounted version. Please read this newer post:

New iPeng Versions Update Playback, Change Discount Model

Get Playback for Free on iPad if You Own iPeng for iPhone and for iPad

There’s one exception: Those users who bought both the iPhone and the iPad version of iPeng can get the playback feature for free on iPad. It technically also works to transfer this to iPad if you follow the process below but be warned: it’s a bit awkward.

We regard this as a little “kickback” to our true customers. As I’ve written before, we would have loved to be able to give discounts to those who purchase both Apps but due to the structure of the App Store we can’t do that and we also could not afford to make the iPad version a completely free update. So this is how we want to give you a little delayed discount.

How do you get it?

1. Install both Apps (iPeng for iPhone and iPeng for iPad) on your iPad. If you have not used iPeng for iPhone on your iPad: As long as you are using the same iTunes account as for your original purchase on iPhone or iPod, downloading it again on the iPad will be free; you can generally use App Store purchases on several devices. This is also true for In App Purchases (for the same App).
2. Start iPeng for iPad and go to “Settings->Enable Playback->You own both iPeng for iPad and iPeng for iPhone? Get Playback for free!”.
3. Press “Create Code”. This will create a voucher code that is valid in the OTHER App. Note: this code will only be valid for a limited time but you can create a new one at any time.
4. When the code shows up in the entry field at the top of the page, “hold” the code text for a second and release to get the popup menu, then select “Select” and “Copy” to copy the code to the clipboard.
5. Leave the App and start the OTHER iPeng App (iPeng for iPhone) on the iPad. Go to the same menu and do the “hold” in the empty text field, then select “Paste” from the popup menu.
6. Now press “Validate Code” and the playback feature will be enabled. Enabling the feature in one App will enable it for both Apps on that device.
7. Restart iPeng for iPad (the one where you generated the code). You need to “really” restart it, leaving to the home screen is not enough under iOS 4. You quit an App under iOS 4 by doubleclicking the “home” button on the iPad until the task bar shows up; then “hold” the App icon until it wobbles and press the red “-“. Then restart the App.
8. Back Up your App Data with iTunes. We don’t guarantee that this offer will be available in future versions of iPeng but once enabled, Playback will stay activated.
9. If you want to use the feature on other iOS devices, too, you need to first backup your App data on the iPad by synchronizing it with iTunes. Then you have to restore your other iOS devices using the backup you created from your iPad. This will work but you will have to re-install Apps that are different to the ones on your iPad and you will lose Music, Videos and other content stored on the second device in the process. I know this is complicated but we currently don’t have a different idea about how to solve it; the App Store only restores purchases that actually have been done through it.