iSub iPhone Client - Version 2.0 Released

[crichardso]

i would also like to make a request to have podcasts added so i can listen to my podcasts via isub pretty please

[awooga]

bencjedi -

I was having the same problem as you. To alleviate the issue, here's what I did:

-Log into the subsonic server
-Go to Settings -> Players and select your iSub [user] player from the drop-down menu
-Set the Max bitrate to 64 Kbps. (Not sure if it had any effect, but I also set the Cover art size to small)
-Save the changes

This did wonders for me. I think the AT&T network just can't handle the high bitrate streams.

[bencjedi]

awooga

Thanks for the advice. I've just changed to the settings you recommended. I'll how how it performs tomorrow at the office.

I wonder if SimplifyMedia is automatically squeezing the bitrate to like 64kps and hence why it never broke up.

What annoyed me about SimplifyMedia was that I was adding albums of MP3s to my NAS constantly and the software took forever to recognize the new music added. iSub seems to recognize it faster though I wish there was a setting in iSub to 'refresh library' and see some kind of progress meter (a count of all the MP3s it becomes aware of as it is refreshing the library would be slick).

[sgmorton]

I get

there was an error parsing the XML response. Maybe you forgot to set the right port for your server.

I am positive it's the right port though... any advice?

[aakashamin]

Set the Max bitrate to 64 Kbps.

Hello,
I actually had a question about this. I did as you suggested and I think is may have helped. However when I play a song in the iSub player, the song info page still reads "Bit Rate: something > 64 kbps" Is it just programmed to tell me the original Bit Rate? How do I know that it is actually streaming a lower bit rate transcode?

UPDATE: Nevermind, I found by looking at the status window in my server's webrowser page. The "Bit Rate" graph indicates the lower bit rate.

[u2jrmw]

Crashes happen to me during song loading. Basically I can not use the app at all. Pretty disappointing. I do have a very large track collection (25,000), so that may just be more than the app can handle.

Got over 26,500 tracks in my collection, so size shouldn't be the issue here. If it is crashing on track loading, that is usually caused by an issue with transcoding in Subsonic. iSub asks Subsonic to start streaming the track, and then Subsonic sends back data that iSub isn't expecting and it causes a hard crash. I've experienced this myself trying to play a FLAC song when I didn't have my transcoding settings set up properly. Are your tracks MP3, or are you transcoding from another format?

All my tracks are MP3. I will give this another try tonight, but I don't think I have been able to get all my tracks loaded yet. Basically I have not been able to use the app at all. I too am a Simplyfy Media refugee.

If I could just do one thing it would be to start the app randomly streaming songs from my library and giving me the possibility of skip. Thats all I want...

[u2jrmw]

Still trying to get my tracks loaded. The first 2 tries loaded about 6000, the 3rd try only about 4000. That is way off my 25000 or so. It takes about 30 mins plus to even get the number it is loading. How is this going to be practical when I add a new album, and I need to reload?

[u2jrmw]

Still trying to get my tracks loaded. The first 2 tries loaded about 6000, the 3rd try only about 4000. That is way off my 25000 or so. It takes about 30 mins plus to even get the number it is loading. How is this going to be practical when I add a new album, and I need to reload?

I got 10000 this time... Am I doing something wrong?

[u2jrmw]

I got 10000 this time... Am I doing something wrong?

OK so I wondered if it was because my phone was locking. So I changed the settings to never lock. Now I wait for 30 mins and it finishes with 0 songs!!!!! Come on. I have tried this 3 times with the non-lock and every time it is 0 songs.

[primary]

Hi Guys,
I have about 10000 artist, 2700 albums and 40000 songs reported in subsonic using web gui. When trying to load artists on Isub it reports 231, 3324 albums?? and 2008 songs..
Something is not connecting here i assume.
Also trying to reload songs, after a while my Isub v 2.1 on Iphone 3GS 3.1.3 terminates without any error message.

Could reported number of artists, albums and song be related to how I configure my subsonic server. I have 5 folders mapping to 5 different shares on my windows file server. And I also have my own folder structure on file server with sub folders and so on for to sort albums like I want..

Any ideas?

[u2jrmw]

isub reports

8306 albums. Subsonic tells me 3142
1849 artists, SubSonic tells me 2612
0 songs, Subsonic tells me 23,393

I cannot under any circumstances get it to list any songs now... Help.

[hansolos]

Thanks for a great iPhone app! It works great, if only AT&T could support their 3G network
Just a thought to get more on the screen, put the number of items in the top black bar along with an icon for reloading instead of using a 1/4 of the top of the screen to display that info.
Looking forward to the next release.
Keep up the good work!

[einsteinx2]

Sorry I've been away from the forum for a bit. Between moving into a new house, working on the New Kids on the Block cruise last weekend, and coding nonstop to get iSub 2.2 ready, I haven't had much time to check in.

Quick status update on 2.2, beta3 will be in testers hands tonight. I expect to have beta4 ready by the end of this week which will be the final beta and then it's submission time. This version took a bit longer than I expected because of personal stuff combined with the sheer amount of changes being done. This turned into a much bigger update code-wise than I had anticipated. However, I think the wait will be well worth it (just ask any of the beta testers ).

New features in iSub 2.2:
- Full local playlist support
- Queue artists, albums, and songs to the playlist by sliding to the right on any table cell to reveal the queue button.
- Save bookmarks using the new bookmark button in the song info overlay
- Full song caching - Songs are cached to disk when they are played, drastically reduces bandwidth and should stop almost all song dropouts.
- Manually song caching (aka Wifi sync) - Choose artists, albums, and songs to cache to the phone without playing them by sliding to the right on any table cell to reveal the cache button. Note: Only works over Wifi due to App Store restrictions.
- Offline play - Play all your cached songs offline. iSub can now completely replace the iPod app. Just manually cache whatever artists, albums, and songs you want and listen to them when you have no net connection. Also, all songs that are played are automatically cached (can be turned off in settings, also amount of cache space to allot can be chosen).
- Scroll text by sliding to the left on any table cell
- Fixed a bug affecting a small percentage of iSub users that was keeping iSub from opening.
- Finally tracked down the bug that is causing a crash sometimes when selecting a new song. Attempting a fix, but it happens so randomly that I won't know for sure if it's fixed until 2.2 has been out for a while.
- More stuff that is probably escaping me at the moment

I'll be creating some YouTube videos showing the new features once it's fully complete. Also, I'll be creating a series of instructional videos on Subsonic to help new users that are having trouble getting Subsonic up and running. I hope that will help all new users of Subsonic, not just iSub users. I don't want the higher level of technical difficulty in installing Subsonic compared to some other less feature packed media streamers to be a barrier of entry for new users. Everyone should get to experience the awesomeness that is Subsonic, regardless of their level of computer knowledge. Subsonic is already a favorite among techies, I want it to be everyone's favorite!

I want to thank everyone for their patience, and just want to let all of you know that just because I haven't been around here for a bit, I haven't forgotten about iSub or Subsonic and will continue to focus all of my free energy on improving these great apps and the community surrounding them.

[einsteinx2]

Now to address all of the posts that I missed:

This has probably been asked before and answered, so forgive me. When OS 4.0 is released in June, will iSub be able to play in the background while working in other Apps?

Thanks for all of your work. Definitely my favorite app on my IPhone/IPad

Yes, this is something that I will be implementing in version 3.0 along with full native iPad support. It might not be ready on day one of iPhone OS 4, but it will be available shortly after.

does isub have the ability do do song rating? rating/smart playlists is one of the only features i like from itunes/ipod/phone and i would love to have the same abilities

Thanks
-Chris

To my knowledge this is not supported in Subsonic, so I have not included this feature. I may include it client side only, but there would be no way to sync those ratings between phones or back to the Subsonic server. Right now I'm trying to finish implementing all of the available Subsonic API features first. This is definitely something I will consider for a future version though. Thanks for the suggestion.

i would also like to make a request to have podcasts added so i can listen to my podcasts via isub pretty please

I don't believe this is supported in the Subsonic API that iSub uses to connect, unless I missed it in the API documentation. I will look into a way to implement this in the future, but it may take an update to Subsonic first.

Thanks for a great iPhone app! It works great, if only AT&T could support their 3G network
Just a thought to get more on the screen, put the number of items in the top black bar along with an icon for reloading instead of using a 1/4 of the top of the screen to display that info.
Looking forward to the next release.
Keep up the good work!

That's a good suggestion, I'll look into possibly changing it to work that way depending on how much it crowds the top bar. I will definitely consider doing this.


@u2jrmw and primary:
Regarding the artist, album, and song counts, iSub totals those differently than Subsonic. As I understand it, Subsonic uses tags to get those counts. So for artists, if you have multiple artists in an album, they all get counted. The count in iSub is simply the number of artist folders. For the album and song counts, there is currently a bug that causes the number displayed to be double the actual count, but also iSub uses a different method to tally those than Subsonic I believe. For album count, iSub grabs all subfolders of the artist folders one level deep and shows that count which is the number of rows in the Albums tab (currently doubled because of the bug). For songs, it does a search with no paramaters to grab all songs from Subsonic and counts that number that it receives.

Regarding the issue loading the Songs tab, the iPhone memory capacity cannot handle song collections that are as large as yours the way that I am currently implementing the Songs tab (which is a bit of a hack, just to get an iPod style interface as Subsonic doesn't officially support grabbing all songs in the library). It takes a long time to load because at the moment the search feature in Subsonic is very slow. When that is improved in the future, load time will drastically speed up. I am also working on rewriting the way that the songs list is stored so that it doesn't all need to be loaded in memory. This only affects those with extremely large collections such as yours. So unfortunately for now, you need to use the Artist and Album tabs to browse your collections. Thanks for your patience and please know this is being worked on, I've just had so much work to do getting all these new features coded that I've had to put that off until iSub 2.2 is released.

[adhesiv]

Just a word to those waiting for the new version. I can tell you it has a lot of new features and upgrades/bug fixes that are worth the wait. Us beta testers are working hard to break it and help make it better for everyone's benefit. Ben is a great developer and very passionate about this app. If you have any issues let him know and he'll do his best to help you sort it out.

Also everyone's ideas are helpful too. They might not be implemented in the next version but if it's a good utility to add to this already excellent app Ben will find a way to get it in there as long as Subsonic can accommodate it.

Keep in mind this app has only been around for the better part of 3 months! Look at the progress since then and the possibilities going forward...exciting times!