iPod Touch App - Controlling M1001

[chris5287]

I'd hope not, and although it does kinda step on the toes of iTunes Remote in its type of interface, it is controlling something completely different that iTunes Remote would never actually do.

My contracts on iTunes Connect have finally gone through (got the famous green ticks) and are ready to use for both free and paid apps. By my reckoning if i've gone to the back of the queue based on last time I'd hopefully get a response in the next two-three days. As I said, as soon as I know anything I will let you guys/gals know.

[chris5287]

ITS READY FOR SALE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Maybe over the top but ive finally just received an email to say they're happy. I was just told the roku radio went off last night while I slept through it lol, so they manage to connect and test it. Shall post direct link to iTunes when it pops up in the morning.

Wooooohooooo!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Obviously let me know what you think here and if there are any problems you find either post here or by my email so I can get it sorted asap. Also if you can let me know what music server you are using so I can add it to compatability list if you have got it working.

Edit: http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=290002607&mt=8 and yes I was up at 4.26am when I posted, I told you as soon as I knew anything I'd tell you lot.

[Aborigine]

First customer here!? Just downloaded it from the UK app store! Been lurking and waiting for this. Unfortunately I'm at work so can't actually try it out yet.

[chris5287]

First customer here!? Just downloaded it from the UK app store! Been lurking and waiting for this. Unfortunately I'm at work so can't actually try it out yet.

Woooohoooo, I feel I should give you a prize or something lol. Let me know how you get on later

[eric27]

Downloaded it this morning had it running in 2 minutes serrving iTunes. Great job - thanks.

[chris5287]

Downloaded it this morning had it running in 2 minutes serrving iTunes. Great job - thanks.

Great news, just wondering, does the album artwork work?

[jstoddard]

Brilliant - works great. Very easy to set up. Using Firefly served off FreeNAS server on an M1000.

Chris5287 - Cover art does work in the "Remote" screen - great job!

[rgs_uk]

Great app! Just downloaded it and was very impressed with the quick response.

I do have a couple of suggestions (sorry to bring this up so early!):

- It would be great if when searching by artist you are presented with a list of albums before being shown the songs. At the moment, you select the artist and are presented with all songs for all albums for that artist. Would be great to have a filter on the albums

- The songs are appearing in alphabetical order. Can these be ordered in the correct order as they would appear in the album

I'm using windows media player if this is relevant.

[neilaevans]

Chris,
I just bought it as well. Great job - very slick! Control is responsive, it looks great, nice menus, etc. Hopefully you can update the screencaps in the app store to show the album art being displayed - it's definitely a great feature and a shame it's not shown. (I'm not sure if you have control over that or not).

I noticed that the artist list took longer to load (maybe 10 seconds or so) than it does for the Roku to load directly (2-3 seconds), but I have a good size library, so that's acceptable. My song list took about 4 minutes to load - but I have more than 15,000 and would never browse that way anyway.
These were tested with iTunes 8 serving on a Mac.

Remote power on and off is great! Too bad it can't turn on/off my stereo as well...

Now, for version 1.1...

I definitely agree with the previous poster about how browsing by artist should work (more like the Roku itself or the iPhone iPod app). I didn't notice the alphabetical song issue, but agree, it should be by track order.

It would be nice to fastforward/rewind, but as I recall that's a Roku limitation.

The biggest thing for me (which make me switch to using this app pretty exclusively) is if there's anyway for you to incorporate the creation of genius playlists, from iTunes 8, in the app. I'm not sure if that's really possible at this point or not, but it would be a fantastic feature!


Congrats man, good job!
-Neil

[HarryDymond]

Chris,

Sounds like you've done a great job, sadly as I already said I'm unable to check it out as I don't have a Touch or iPhone. But I do hope that we can encourage you to stick with Apple and Cocoa development because:

The biggest thing for me (which make me switch to using this app pretty exclusively) is if there's anyway for you to incorporate the creation of genius playlists, from iTunes 8, in the app. I'm not sure if that's really possible at this point or not, but it would be a fantastic feature!

There are some very useful things that you could do with iTunes if you developed a little "helper" app to run on OS X at the same time as iTunes. As neil said, with iTunes 8 there's Genius, and with 8 and previous versions, there's smart playlists.

On the whole, I like to listen to albums as originally intended, but for the odd playlist or two (mainly the guilty pleasures of one-hit wonders I've bought from iTunes and un-DRMed) I prefer to listen in shuffle mode. However, this is best when combined with a smart playlist that has "last played date" as a criterion. It works like this:

• all songs bought on iTunes are tagged in the comment field "bought from iTunes"
• make smart playlist with "comment contains bought from iTunes" and e.g. "last played is before 19/09/2008"
• On creation, this smart playlist will contain all tracks I've bought from iTunes
• As songs are played, "last played date" will update to sometime after 19/09/2008 and they will disappear from the smart playlist
• Now I can stop the playlist, listen to other stuff in iTunes, then come back to the playlist a few days later with it still on shuffle, and not hear any of the same tracks I heard a few days before because they're no longer in the playlist

Of course, there are plenty of other scenarios involving plenty of other tags such as playcount etc. where dynamically updating smart playlists are a very good thing. The problem is that whilst they work very well on iTunes playing directly from a computer or on an iPod, it doesn't work with a SoundBridge as the SoundBridge can't update the information such as playcount and last played date in iTunes. What's required is a little helper application that watches the SoundBridge, and when it's finished playing a track, uses AppleScript to tell iTunes to update the track information.

I hope that that made sense and that it catches your interest.

[chris5287]

Woo, thanks for all the great feedback and support messages, I dont think my inbox has ever been as full.

I thought i'd start a feature request list here so people can keep tabs of what has been asked for and where I am in sorting it out (or maybe not). So here it goes:

Features added in next version:

Autodiscovery with bonjour: DONE
It should automatically find all your devices for you (No need to manual add anymore). I have left manual adding in there, just incase people do want to set static ones (such as controlling your device over the internet (forward port 5555 to ur roku device for extra fun when your away and someone is at home ), Also needed so apple can exactly do that to test the app on my device)

Alphabetic track order changed to normal track ordering: DONE
There was an option in the roku spec, ive set it so it does alphabetic when you list all your songs, but for everything else it is done by track order. (iTunes users, i understand what was happening now, iTunes lists things by lastPlayed unless you tell to otherwise)

Radio, Internet Radio and Preset Controls: DONE
Have add option to choose and play presets and internet radio presets

Artist -> Album -> Songs: DONE

Lyrics Download: DONE
Using Lyricwiki.org api

Alarm/Snooze: DONE
You can toggle through the different snooze times/off
You can switch alarms on or off. Cant really do anymore as roku spec doesnt give any other commands, so cannot get alarm/snooze details or set specific times etc..

Artwork/Lyrics caching
Once pulled off the net once, both are cached in the app for later use. When app closes, image data is saved to ipod/iphone and then reloaded when app restarts. Makes major improvements in speed of remote after caching starts to return hits

Correct Artwork
A long touch press (3 secs) on a displayed artwork in the remote will open your photo album, where you can select a replacement artwork image for that album. Recommended size is 325x330px


Features to be worked on:

Queue Managemnet
Adding, deleting songs to/from queue. Will hopefully get in later version

List loading speed:
After working on list loading, I cannot reduce it anymore than what it is due to roku limitations and ipod touch/iphone. The only way to speed it up was to introduce multiple-threading for processing lists, however creating threads on ipod/iphone is very very expensive the task required, meaning the time gained by multi-threading was lost in the thread creation times. If anyone has any other ideas, please let me know

Device status in device list
Main screen shows which devices are currently on and even what song they are currently playing


Features requested that cannot be done/not at the moment:

Fast-Forwarding and Rewind:
Sorry, but Roku spec doesnt allow for this so no way for me to implement it

Alphabetic Indexing (Similar to contacts on the right hand side):
Not at the moment, searching does the same job just as easily and it requires a lot of re-coding to do. Sorry (unless there is a big ask for it)

iTunes genius support:
Cannot do this atm as I am in the UK and have Pinnacle branded roku devices, which do not work with iTunes (unless anyone knows a way around this), so its very hard for me to test and develop for it. As far as I am aware, any genius playlists you do create in iTunes (either on your computer or iPod) should appear in the playlist in the app.

More detailed screen
Not currently possible without major speed drawbacks. When you ask list songs, it only provides track names, so would require polling roku for each songs details individually which will be very slow. (Unless I can think of a different way)

Browse by folder
Doesnt work with a lot of servers, so not worth implementing

Saving application state, so opening application takes you back to where you was previously:
I think there could be complications with this in reconnecting to the roku device afterwards and trying to restore lists etc... Shall again look through roku spec and see what I can utalise.

Album artwork from id3 tags before checking the web:
This could make the app very slow loading as each song would have to be downloaded into the device to pull the id3 tag information out. It currently gets artwork from amazon.com api services, but could try to make it hybrid maybe? Definitely one for later on at this moment in time.

Playlist creation:
Wont be looking at this atm, as im guessing I will have develop a solution for each type of server (firefly, itunes, wmp etc...) to get this working. Shall get other features done first.



To HarryDymond: it certainly sounds like a useful application, but I'm currently quiet busy with other projects, including this and uni restarting. If, when it quiets down I found my self with some free time I shall certainly have a look at doing something like your suggested helper. I have enjoyed developing on a mac and certainly would like to do so more development in the future.

[HarryDymond]

iTunes genius support:
Cannot do this atm as I am in the UK and have Pinnacle branded roku devices, which do not work with iTunes (unless anyone knows a way around this), so its very hard for me to test and develop for it.

Playlist creation:
Wont be looking at this atm, as im guessing I will have develop a solution for each type of server (firefly, itunes, wmp etc...) to get this working. Shall get other features done first.

To HarryDymond: it certainly sounds like a useful application, but I'm currently quiet busy with other projects, including this and uni restarting. If, when it quiets down I found my self with some free time I shall certainly have a look at doing something like your suggested helper. I have enjoyed developing on a mac and certainly would like to do so more development in the future.

Great stuff, Chris.

Maybe if you sell enough copies of your app, you'll be able to buy another SoundBridge? Expansys sell "real" Roku ones here

[neilaevans]

Sorry to digress...

Chris,

What's required is a little helper application that watches the SoundBridge, and when it's finished playing a track, uses AppleScript to tell iTunes to update the track information.

Harry,
I assume you're on a Mac. Have you tried the Applescript app I wrote called "Shared Music Monitor"? It should still be available on dougscripts.com. It hasn't been updated in a few years, but it does what I think you're asking - updates the iTunes playcount when Soundbridge or other music servers play a track... Very handy for smart playlists.

It's a bit of a kludge but it works (or at least, it used to). Like I said, it hasn't been updated in a while, nor have I used it in a while. If you've tried it, and it's broken, I can try to update it...

-Neil

[deshpak]

I just downloaded the app and it is working fantastic. Took no more than 5 minutes to get up an running. I think the cover art feature is fantastic. Now I don't feel so jealous of my buddies Sonos remote.

Thanks for making such a great app!

[cinnamonsigh]

I just bought it and had a go. Excellent work! Works wonderfully.

It would be great if you could include the 'Add song to Song Queue' function that the normal soundbridge remote has.

And I'm not sure if you could do this since the normal soundbridge remote can't, but removing songs from the queue would be awesome too.