play:Sub 1.6 (iOS): Podcasts, Audiobooks, Landscape, Lyrics

[Michael Bech Hansen]

Hi all,

Another version of play:Sub has just been released on the App Store.

Here's the news:

Podcasts, Audiobooks, Landscape, Lyrics.

PODCAST and AUDIOBOOK SUPPORT
Podcast and audio books are now supported, with support for remembering and resuming playback wher you left off.

LANDSCAPE ORIENTATION AND MORE
play:Sub now supports all interface orientations (finally you say ).
Of course this includes iPad multitasking.

LYRICS AND MORE
Dive into the background information of your music:
view track lyrics and background information for artists and albums.

TWEAKS
A number of tweaks has been made to ease use and discoverability:
The context menu is now more easily activated by tapping the "3-dot" button on the player screen and cover art in browser.
The cover art in the browser now directly supports the most common actions (play, shuffle, etc ...)

FIXES
Stability: v1.5 was two steps forward in audio support, and one step back in stability. v1.6 has multiple stability fixes.
FIX Proper compilation album support (finally you say )
FIX Significant play list performance improvements for huge playlists.
FIX OGG playback while downloading would fail when download completed.
FIX Problem resuming after app has been backgrounded for longer time.
FIX Starring did not work on 32-bit devices.
FIX Cache size would not go above 4GB on 32-bit devices.

For feature requests or issues:
please use the in-app form (play:Sub | Feedback),
or the contact form on http://michaelsapps.dk

Cheers,
Michael.

[rob63]

Awesome update! Random freezes with large playlists gone. Seems much faster overall. Love the landscape mode and addition of lyrics.
Your just spoiling us now

[timlance]

What rob63 said!

Thank you for the continued development.

[Nico]

happy to be a new play:sub customer, thank you!

[apastuszak]

Ok, I just handed you over $4.99.

How do I get audiobooks added to Play::Sub? Do I need to tag my music in some way?

Lyrics don't seem to work for me. I'm going to guess you're not reading them from the ID3 tags or Vorbis comments.

Can I speed up the playback of podcasts or audiobooks?

[Michael Bech Hansen]

Hi,

Ok, I just handed you over $4.99.

How do I get audiobooks added to Play::Sub? Do I need to tag my music in some way?

Lyrics don't seem to work for me. I'm going to guess you're not reading them from the ID3 tags or Vorbis comments.

Can I speed up the playback of podcasts or audiobooks?

Welcome on board!

The audiobooks section in play:Sub is entirely based on the genre of tracks/albums.
Currently the app use a hardcoded list if genres that populates the audio books section.
So yes, if tagged with certain genre names they will appear as audiobooks in play:Sub.
Here's a partial genre list: "audio book", "audiobook" "spoken word", "drama", "humour" (partial because it's from memory).
All audio books should appear as normal tracks/albums in other lists in the app.
(Eventually the genre-list for audiobooks will be user-configurable)

Lyrics are only fetched from the Subsonic server, which I believe is only fetching lyrics from an online source.
I'm hoping the server will eventually read lyrics from tags, as I see that as the best solution... but I may end up reading lyrics from tags in the app.
I'm going to implement other things that require tag-reading in the near future, and maybe I'll just piggyback lyrics support onto that.

Currently there is no way to play back podcasts and audiobook at anything but 1:1 speed.
It's on my todo-list though.

Cheers,
Michael.