iSub iPhone Client - Version 2.0 Released

[Alig26]

Hey I just purchased ISUB, and really liking it. But maybe I'm missing something, but how can I queue songs? Or is that in a future release?

Thanks
AliG

[einsteinx2]

Hey I just purchased ISUB, and really liking it. But maybe I'm missing something, but how can I queue songs? Or is that in a future release?

Thanks
AliG

If you are referring to the ability to queue songs to the current playlist, that is coming in version 2.2. Right now when you play a song from an album the whole album is queued but removes whatever is currently playing from the queue, same for playing a song from the all songs view -- all the songs are queued. In version 2.1 (awaiting approval in the app store right now), there is also a play all button for each artist to queue up all of their songs, that also clears the current queue.

In version 2.2, full support for building playlists on the go as well as saving playlists will be implemented. It will be built upon the new playlist view introduced in 2.1 (see the pics on page 2 of this thread). I'm just working on implementing the most non intrusive way of choosing to queue songs rather than just play them.

[Alig26]

Cool, thanks for the heads up! Great work you're doing, really like it

[einsteinx2]

Note to anyone that has been experiencing dropouts while having full signal bars:

I'm now under the firm belief that the signal bar indicator on the iPhone only represents the phone call signal strength, not 3G strength. I was using iSub to listen to music over 3G at a party last night, all of a sudden with full bars, the audio kept dropping out. I checked the new buffer view, and low and behold it was empty and having a very hard time filling back up. I paused the audio for a 5 seconds to allow the buffer to fill a bit before hitting play again, then I watched it slowly wind back down to 0 as it couldn't keep up. The entire time I had full bars. I switched to streaming at 128kbps and it worked fine after that (most of my mp3's are LAME V0 encoded ~250kbps and I don't explicitly downsample in Subsonic unless I log into my 128kbit acount). The really annoying part is that I wasn't driving or otherwise moving around 3G service areas, the phone was just sitting still on a table. So the 3G connection levels seem to fluctuate wildly all on their own, no moving necessary.

So to anyone experiencing dropouts with what seems like a great connection -- I feel your pain! At least now you won't be scratching your head as to why it's dropping out, it's definitely the 3G connection speed dropping even though the bars don't show it. Don't worry, full song caching will be implemented very shortly and will completely do away with audio dropouts caused by these random 3G signal dropouts.

[bombjack]

Note to anyone that has been experiencing dropouts while having full signal bars:

I'm now under the firm belief that the signal bar indicator on the iPhone only represents the phone call signal strength, not 3G strength. I was using iSub to listen to music over 3G at a party last night, all of a sudden with full bars, the audio kept dropping out. I checked the new buffer view, and low and behold it was empty and having a very hard time filling back up. I paused the audio for a 5 seconds to allow the buffer to fill a bit before hitting play again, then I watched it slowly wind back down to 0 as it couldn't keep up. The entire time I had full bars. I switched to streaming at 128kbps and it worked fine after that (most of my mp3's are LAME V0 encoded ~250kbps and I don't explicitly downsample in Subsonic unless I log into my 128kbit acount). The really annoying part is that I wasn't driving or otherwise moving around 3G service areas, the phone was just sitting still on a table. So the 3G connection levels seem to fluctuate wildly all on their own, no moving necessary.

So to anyone experiencing dropouts with what seems like a great connection -- I feel your pain! At least now you won't be scratching your head as to why it's dropping out, it's definitely the 3G connection speed dropping even though the bars don't show it. Don't worry, full song caching will be implemented very shortly and will completely do away with audio dropouts caused by these random 3G signal dropouts.

Hi,
I'm working in the telecom business and can confirm that your assumptions are correct. Short explanation:
The bars you see actually do show your 3G (or more correctly WCDMA) coverage. What it tells you is the signal strength between the user equipment (iPhone in this case) and the base station, i.e. the air interface (data and speech are all the same when it comes to the air interface, so it's not correct to talk about "phone call signal strength" though).

What happens between the base station and your subsonic server is something else and can't be measured with the bars on the phone.

This makes sense: Compare this with your home wlan. If you unplug the wlan access point from the internet, you still have "full bars" on your wlan connected lap top, but you can't surf the internet.

[einsteinx2]

Thanks for the explaination! At least we're all not crazy, the connection speed does fluctuate with no visual indicator.

[wraithdu]

edit/
I just noticed this bug has been reported already. If you need a test account for further investigation, let me know.

Found a bug in v2.0

I have my MP3s and FLACs separated, so
Music\MP3\<artist>\<album>
and
Music\FLAC\<artist>\<album>

I have some artists with albums in each format / folder. In the Subsonic webapp the albums are merged under the artist name. In iSub, there are two artist entries, one for each format / folder. However after clicking one of the artist names (doesn't seem to matter which one), backing out and clicking the other will yield the same album results. Whereas what should happen is clicking the first will list the MP3 (or FLAC) albums, then backing out and clicking the other should list the other format albums. I have a feeling this has to do with your caching of Artists / Albums / Songs.

[einsteinx2]

edit/
I just noticed this bug has been reported already. If you need a test account for further investigation, let me know.

Found a bug in v2.0

I have my MP3s and FLACs separated, so
Music\MP3\<artist>\<album>
and
Music\FLAC\<artist>\<album>

I have some artists with albums in each format / folder. In the Subsonic webapp the albums are merged under the artist name. In iSub, there are two artist entries, one for each format / folder. However after clicking one of the artist names (doesn't seem to matter which one), backing out and clicking the other will yield the same album results. Whereas what should happen is clicking the first will list the MP3 (or FLAC) albums, then backing out and clicking the other should list the other format albums. I have a feeling this has to do with your caching of Artists / Albums / Songs.

I haven't actually started testing this problem, but after speaking to Sindre about some API additions, the way directory ID's are coded came up and I think that explains it. Basically, directory ID's (the ID that I use to grab a directory and subsequently cache it) is just a hex version of the directory name. So if the two directory names are exactly the same, they will have the same ID. Not sure why this doesn't cause problems within Subsonic itself, but that would definitely seem to be the problem on my end. Unfortunately, iSub is bound to the limitations of the API so there may not be much I can do about this problem. I will be looking into it for possible solutions though.


And sidenote: sorry about the delay on 2.1. It's been waiting for review for longer than usual, possibly because I added SSL support and had to check the "did you add encryption" toggle when submitting, which has to do with export restrictions on encryption. I've heard that can make the process take longer. Hopefully they approve it by early next week (I'm not sure if they work on weekends).

[wraithdu]

Is the directory ID based off the parent directory only, or the full path? If full path, then the IDs should be different. Not to cross-promote (I purchased both apps), but Z-Subsonic does get this right, so the API is capable.

[einsteinx2]

Is the directory ID based off the parent directory only, or the full path? If full path, then the IDs should be different. Not to cross-promote (I purchased both apps), but Z-Subsonic does get this right, so the API is capable.

Directory ID is based off the folder name only (to the best of my knowledge, I could be wrong I need to test that more). Not sure how he does his caching, but I'll be looking into how to resolve this problem in iSub, so look out for a fix in 2.2

[GregF]

Does anyone know - is the license that's required to use iSub or any app required per server or per app? That is, if I set up my server but a friend wanted to buy iSub but only stream from my server, would they need a license too, or would the one I buy for my Subsonic install work for any app I give my server info to? Seems like it's per server, but I wanted to check before I encourage them to buy the app...probably not going to be worth app+donation to them to once in a blue moon stream my music. And just to double-check - the license is required to use the app at all, right? Not just to use the Subsonic subdomain feature?

Also curious if whole-song cacheing that can be accessed later, like in z-subsonic, is coming for any updates? I prefer iSub's interface but that's a really nice feature.

Just left a review on iTunes...thanks for the nice product.

[bombjack]

Does anyone know - is the license that's required to use iSub or any app required per server or per app? That is, if I set up my server but a friend wanted to buy iSub but only stream from my server, would they need a license too, or would the one I buy for my Subsonic install work for any app I give my server info to? Seems like it's per server, but I wanted to check before I encourage them to buy the app...probably not going to be worth app+donation to them to once in a blue moon stream my music. And just to double-check - the license is required to use the app at all, right? Not just to use the Subsonic subdomain feature?

Also curious if whole-song cacheing that can be accessed later, like in z-subsonic, is coming for any updates? I prefer iSub's interface but that's a really nice feature.

Just left a review on iTunes...thanks for the nice product.

I'm pretty sure it's on a per server basis. I have suggestion: remember that we are all using software that we downloaded for free. (kind or ironic we have paid for the client) Without Subsonic we would be stuck with iPod/iTunes (which sucks). So, why dont you and your friends do a donation together? That would help Sindre to continue to improve his software even more.

[rattboi]

I just bought iSub and have run into a few issues with it. The main issue I can think of right now is that it crashes on my Unicode titles. I have some japanese music, that when I try to even show the playlist for that album, iSub just crashes. Also, some characters that are standard also aren't displayed. For example, Melt-Banana's albums mostly have quotes around them, so it's like "Charlie" or "Bambi's Dilemma" . In iSub, it shows as _Bambi's Dilemma_ instead. I like the program, and hope that these bugs get fixed soon.

I also agree that whole-song buffering should be a priority. Before now, I was using another product called Simplify Media that worked really well, but interfaced with a separate server for mitigating the connection. I like hosting my own music server that is stand-alone, but I'm hoping it won't take long to get up to feature parity with something like Simplify Media.

Thanks alot and I'm looking forward to future releases.

[einsteinx2]

Does anyone know - is the license that's required to use iSub or any app required per server or per app? That is, if I set up my server but a friend wanted to buy iSub but only stream from my server, would they need a license too, or would the one I buy for my Subsonic install work for any app I give my server info to? Seems like it's per server, but I wanted to check before I encourage them to buy the app...probably not going to be worth app+donation to them to once in a blue moon stream my music. And just to double-check - the license is required to use the app at all, right? Not just to use the Subsonic subdomain feature?

Also curious if whole-song cacheing that can be accessed later, like in z-subsonic, is coming for any updates? I prefer iSub's interface but that's a really nice feature.

Just left a review on iTunes...thanks for the nice product.

Thanks for the review! Yes, the license is on a per server basis. So once your server is licensed, all clients can connect. And of course there is a trial time (a month or two I actually don't know for sure) where the Subsonic API is available without getting a license.

Also, song caching with full offline playback is already almost done being implemented and is on the plate for version 2.2. I'm just fixing up things like song resuming and getting the interface for browsing through cached tracks completed. Expect a submission to the app store with full song caching (as well as song/album downloading for later listening and full on-the-go playlist support) in about 2 weeks. Then it's a matter of how long it takes Apple to approve it. Version 2.1 with SSL support and the new current playlist view has been in "Waiting for Review" status for almost a week now

I just bought iSub and have run into a few issues with it. The main issue I can think of right now is that it crashes on my Unicode titles. I have some japanese music, that when I try to even show the playlist for that album, iSub just crashes. Also, some characters that are standard also aren't displayed. For example, Melt-Banana's albums mostly have quotes around them, so it's like "Charlie" or "Bambi's Dilemma" . In iSub, it shows as _Bambi's Dilemma_ instead. I like the program, and hope that these bugs get fixed soon.

I also agree that whole-song buffering should be a priority. Before now, I was using another product called Simplify Media that worked really well, but interfaced with a separate server for mitigating the connection. I like hosting my own music server that is stand-alone, but I'm hoping it won't take long to get up to feature parity with something like Simplify Media.

Thanks alot and I'm looking forward to future releases.

I was unaware of those problems with japanese fonts, thank you for bringing it to my attention. Would you be able to create a test account for me on your server so that I can look into this problem. If I can test against your songs that are known to cause crashes/bad display than I can guarantee a fix in version 2.2.

[u2jrmw]

Looks like I'm getting an eternal "loading" on the songs tab button. Granted I do have a massive collection, but I let it load for a very long time and its got nothing. Artists and Albums tabs work though.

Edit: Disregard above, it DID finally finish loading. Took 20 minutes lol.

Heh ya that can take a while for a massive collection. It's basically doing searches with no parameters and a limit of 1000 results over and over until all songs are grabbed. For the next update, the default behavior will be to save the all songs/albums/artists list between app uses so for people like you, you can load it just once and only reload when you know you added more music to subsonic. That should make that page a bit more usable for people with collections like yours.

Also, it would be super nice to have a "play all" button at the top of album or artist lists, so that I can play all tracks of a specified artist.

That's a great idea, I'll put that in the next version as well.

I have a massive music collection as well. Just bought the app today and I have not yet been able to load my song list...

Is it possible to just have a shuffle all button at the top level that would not require the loading of all songs? Thats pretty much what I want to do.