Signal 1.0.3
This is a bug fix release that primarily addresses issues with playing and displaying songs that contain extended characters, but does include a couple of useful improvements.
- The media library back button now remembers the last page it was on when navigating backwards, and can also navigate back into the previous search result.
- When playing videos through iTunes the videos are now played using the default playback preference (set in iTunes under iTunes > Preferences > Playback). So if the default playback preference is full screen or windowed mode, videos or TV shows started through Signal will now use this as well.
The full list of changes is available in the release notes.
October 17th, 2007 at 10:37 am
What about UPnP support? It would be nice to use Signal without the need for iTunes/Media Player!
October 17th, 2007 at 11:31 am
This program is awesome!!
And it’s been a roller coaster ride of happiness and disappointment.
I was ecstatic to find a remote control program like this. I had been working up a Bluetooth stereo receiver system, and then added an ipod touch to the mix.
I really didn’t want that big ‘ol dongle for the Bluetooth hanging out.
Then the joy of finding this program began.
Downloaded, installed, setup, then nothing. No log on, no activity.
Reboot, then here we go!!
Started to access my itunes, but was behaving erratically. No album art, back and forward controls didn’t work most of the time, just odd operation.
I figured, it was still going to work, and was better than any Bluetooth rig.
Next day, fired it up again, and this time performance was great.
I could see album art.
Back and forward buttons worked.
Everything seems just peachy now!!
The only thing that doesn’t work for me is video playback. Signal starts the video in itunes, but nothing on the itouch. Oh, well, still a lot better than what I had!
I like the possibilities so much, that I bought a dedicated PC for iTunes and Signal, and then have it distributed through out the house.
Talk about a universal remote control!!
Nice job!!
After a few more days of evaluation, I fully intend on purchasing the full product.
Best regards, and thanks for the hard work.
October 17th, 2007 at 4:57 pm
robert: It’s being considered, as there are some interesting UPnP devices out there.
Woody: Fire off an email to support@alloysoft.com if you run into any kind of odd behavior like this again, I want to make sure any problems like this get resolved for you.
October 19th, 2007 at 12:50 am
Team – Unbelievable discovery. This is probably going to be the one thing that will accelerate the ipod touch sales beyond analyst’s most optimistic estimates. Simply to be used as the worlds most advanced universal remote. If you guys figure out how to pair this with standard electronics you are really on to something. Regardless, I want to thank you for developing this simple yet powerful app. As a true minimalist this is the next step at simplifying home entertainment. I have now combined my iphone/signal to control my mac mini (w/no monitor by the way) which is driving my living room speakers. Its incredible… We had friends over the other day sitting in the back yard around the fire pit. We passed around the iphone and had music playing out through the windows all night… Everyone there demanded that I set this up for them. You are truly on to something. I know that apple will probably build a native app sooner or later but you guys/gals deserve a pat on the back. A couple of things to think about in your next releases:
-raido station control within itunes (maybe already available not sure)
-quick link to the signal que (always on top)
-Initial volume protection (prevent music from blasting when you first play a song) typically this only happens the first time you play a song that day. I know… the next day when we woke up I was a bit hung over and threw on some Bob Marley and WHAM!!!! about crapped my pants. Forgot I left the volume up so high. This is a creative one but I know that it can be done right.
Just a few suggestions. I will be purchasing in a couple of days.
One more ? Will you offer people who purchase this web app a free upgrade to a native app when you guys release one next year? Now that apple is releasing a developer kit. I will purchase it anyways but it is a good selling point and good customer service.
Thanks,
MikeG
October 19th, 2007 at 6:00 pm
MikeG: Thanks! It’s always great to hear from someone who enjoys the app. Improved radio station support is something that’s being looked at, currently this information is not provided very well through the iTunes API. One work-around is to drag your favorite radio stations into a playlist, you can then use Signal to start this playing and the playlist view to pick the radio stations you want to listen to. Volume limiting is an interesting idea, I’ll have to think about that.
Integration with other consumer electronics would be fantastic. The problem is that most devices have IR as their only input. High end products sometimes include RS/232 interfaces, but there hasn’t been much motivation for these to trickle down because the control solutions that use them are themselves very high end affairs. This leaves some form of IR blaster as the only bridge, and that involves either attaching some wired IR transmitter over the device’s receiver (ugly) or setting up a box with line-of-sight to the device (hard, because usually you are between wherever you would put it and the device being controlled).
Right now it’s too early to comment on native app support. When the SDK is released and we know for sure what a native version of Signal looks like then I’ll be able to tell you more.
October 20th, 2007 at 5:12 am
Great! But… Where has the search facility gone on the pocket pc? It was there in remoteamp. and whilst artwork etc looks good i’ll struggle to find my music quickly.
October 20th, 2007 at 6:01 am
Found why it didn’t work. I never needed to use the media library function in winamp on my media server before I just had a large play list.. this works really well. Next time I promise to RTFM!
October 20th, 2007 at 8:25 pm
Saw your app on Geekbrief and had to try it out on my ipod touch. Works great after I opened a port in my firewall. Maybe add a text file in the download to remind people to open the port rather than getting frustrated and having to come find the answer.
A strange thing about album art. I have about 600 cds that I have imported into iTunes. iTunes recently spent the time to go and find album art. It came back with a lot being empty. When I play a track with signal, the album art appears on my ipod touch and yet in iTunes it displays the music note symbol and the artwork window shows “No Artwork Available”. I am running iTunes 7.4.1. Just curious if iTunes is hiding the artwork for some reason.
Great app.
October 21st, 2007 at 10:51 am
when will we see save playlist from signal, the ability to organize the songs from signal by dragging, landscape mode, all the above were available except landscape in remoteamp so implementation should not be that hard, please give us a update on these features thank you and keep up the great work.
October 21st, 2007 at 2:03 pm
Hi!
Love the app. but when I browse the library on my iphone while a song is playing it knocks out my airtunes for about 10 seconds….
Any ideas how to stop this?
R
October 21st, 2007 at 7:13 pm
Mark: I agree that the firewall configuration on the Mac is not as obvious (although it is mentioned in the documentation). I’m looking into a way to detect when the firewall is active and let the user know that a rule is needed.
As for album art, when Signal encounters a song for which iTunes has no album art it will automatically go out to the internet and try to find a match. It will also do this then when playing an internet radio station that exposes track title information. It’s not 100% accurate, but it generally does a pretty good job. There are a number of other applications available that will perform similar searches and allow you to add the results to your iTunes tracks after previewing them.
joyce: While I can’t say when certain features or releases will be available, the current plan is to finish 1.1 and then deliver a significant update to the Windows Mobile client.
Rick: Thanks! I’d be rather surprised if the two were related, as browsing the media library sends very little data across the network. One thing you might try is increasing the iTunes buffer size for AirTunes, this is available in iTunes preferences under the Advanced section. Another thought is that if you’re using an 802.11b network you might consider upgrading to 802.11g. I know that when I used AirTunes with a b network I would get frequent drops, since moving to g I haven’t had any problems.
November 4th, 2007 at 9:40 pm
Can this app work to control Firefly Media Server??
http://www.rokulabs.com/support_sb_dwnld_firefly.php
November 6th, 2007 at 11:55 am
Matt: This is a fantastic app, and has become one of my most frequently used. I know that you’ve had the request many times to add AirTunes speaker switching. I know there’s no direct Applescript support for this, but somehow a competitor (RemoteBuddy http://www.iospirit.com) of yours has added this feature, and it’s working quite well through the Universal Access feature. Overall, Signal is a more polished solution, but this feature would be a VERY welcome addition.
Another request: it would be great to have a Home button in every screen to get back to the Media Library screen (or better yet, the Music screen).
There seems to be a bug when building the Signal Queue by selecting an Album or Artist. When I do this, (watching the iTunes window on the Mac), the first song on the album will start playing, then the list will build, and then, the process will repeat 3 – 7 times, until there are many copies of each song added to the list. I’m surprised that no one else has reported this issue.
Anyway, thanks for listening, and keep up the good work!
November 6th, 2007 at 10:38 pm
Moler: Since iTunes sees Firefly as a shared library, it works in much the same way. Shared library support is currently in the Windows version of Signal, and is in the works for the Mac version.
David: Thanks for the comments, glad you like the app!
AirTunes speaker control is coming in one way or another. There are work-arounds for this but they are…well, horrible. I was holding onto slim hope that iTunes 7.5 would finally add Applescript/COM SDK support for speaker selection, but no such luck. So Signal is going to move forward with a hack approach of its own.
Regarding easy access back to the now playing screen, this is a little difficult to do since there is no way to specify a UI element at a fixed position on top of a scrolling list in Safari. To work around this, I’ve integrated Signal 1.1 with the browser’s back and forward buttons since these are always visible. You can tap the back button from anywhere and be taken back to the now playing screen, then tap the forward button to go right back to where you were in the media library or playlist view.
The repeated command issue you noticed occurs with operations that take a while to complete, and has been fixed. A 1.0.4 update will be going out later this week that addresses this as well as a couple of other issues.
November 6th, 2007 at 11:57 pm
Hello Matt,
First again thank you for your awesome product. I am not sure if you’ve got my e-mail question so I am posting it also here.
You wrote above:
> As for album art, when Signal encounters a song for which iTunes has no album art it will automatically go out to the internet and try to find a match.
—–
It seems to work but I’ve got some special album / songs which they don’t have artwork on the internet.
What I did, I created my artwork (jpeg 600×600 pixels) and save it into the AAC audio file. It works perfectly in iTunes – it shows up in iTunes with no problem.
But unfortunately in your program I am getting just question mark and no artwork. It seems that your program for some reason ignores the artwork from the audio file and since it is not on the internet, it shows only that little question mark.
Please could you confirm that the stored artwork (jpeg) into AAC audio file should work? Are there some special requirement on the type / size of jpeg? I am using 600×600 since this is the size of original Apple artwork.
Thanks for your answer,
MK
November 7th, 2007 at 12:34 pm
very nice program!
is it safe? please send me a mail.
November 8th, 2007 at 9:29 pm
MK, tunc: Responded to you both via email
November 10th, 2007 at 1:18 pm
hi matt,
great application…the first true killer app for the iphone / ipod touch platform!!!
question for you. is there any planned support for foobar2000?
thank you in advance for your response.
brett
November 10th, 2007 at 4:00 pm
brett: Thanks! Right now there isn’t any planned support for foobar2000, but what is being looked is the possibility of an extensibility framework to allow for add-ons to control other media players. This would allow others to develop plug-ins for players that aren’t supported in the core application.
November 10th, 2007 at 6:40 pm
matt – thanks for your reply. i look forward to seeing what you come up with.
brett
November 11th, 2007 at 2:08 pm
Hey, just wanted to say thanks for such a wonderful program! Heard about it, tried it and purchased it yesterday — which is a rare thing for me to do that quickly, but it’s certainly worth a few bucks, so thanks! Nicely done!
It’s been surprising to me that Apple didn’t ship an app like this for the iPhone and iPod Touch already — the integration of these devices with iTunes (and Apple TV) seem just like such an open area for innovation. Glad to see you stepped in with an offering, especially given that you’re limited to Safari!
One issue I’ve noticed that I do hope you’re able to consider for an upcoming release is the sort order of artists and albums. iTunes has “Sort Artist” and “Sort Album” fields that allow the user to control the sort order for those of us who think, for example, that Paul McCartney should be listed under M, not P. Assuming you have access to those fields, it should be pretty straight forward to use them, when present, over the regular artist or album fields. Would make a world of difference to those of us who have set these fields and would prefer the iPhone view to mirror the iTunes view. Thanks for your kind consideration of this request.
I’ve had a 3-zone Sonos setup going for over a year, and your program, my iPhone and a few Airport Expresses are a heck of a nice alternative (and much cheaper) — I’m tempted to sell my Sonos system and just go with this instead. True, I can’t play different music to different Airport Expresses (that I’m aware of), but I don’t have to worry about updating the Sonos version of the music library either.
Am anxiously awaiting to see the direction this goes in when Apple releases their iPhone SDK.
Dan
November 13th, 2007 at 2:40 am
Sorry for this noob question. But is this just for wifi?
November 14th, 2007 at 12:41 am
calob: You’ll get the best performance out of Wi-Fi, but Signal will work with any network connection, so you can use it over the cellular data network. This does require some additional work to set up, as you’ll need to forward a port in your router to the computer running Signal and connect using your public internet IP address or a Dynamic DNS service.
Dan: Thanks for the comments! I’ll look into the sort fields, if this information is easy to access and can be automatically incorporated I’ll put it on the list. As for independent streams to different Airport Express units – you’re right, currently AirTunes can’t do this.
November 18th, 2007 at 2:55 pm
Thanks for the consideration, Matt.
One other question — in looking to replace the Sonos with this simpler solution, I wonder if you can recommend any approach of setting up an alarm clock that could be integrated into it. Just setting alarms and having music to play at a certain time would be great, but of course, allowing a user to snooze from the iPhone would be killer.
November 18th, 2007 at 9:42 pm
There are alarm clock solutions that integrate with iTunes such as Awaken and Alarm Clock 2, you could use something like this to give you an alarm clock setup similar to the Sonos’.
There have been a couple of requests for integrating an alarm clock solution directly into Signal for the snooze integration you suggest, this is on the list for consideration. Personally I’ve found the iPhone’s built-in alarm function to be sufficiently annoying to wake me up, then I flip over to Signal to get the music going.
January 3rd, 2008 at 8:03 am
Hi, all. I have been reading through the comments and suggestions.
I recently bought an i touch and was hoping to play music straight from my Itouch though airport to my speakers,
I know the signal program uses the computer and acts as a remote.
Does anything like my first thought exist?
I just would like to be able to play it on my headphones, walk into my room, and select the airport and play through the speakers.
A pipe dream or something possible around the corner?
Thanks
January 3rd, 2008 at 9:37 am
Paul: Currently what you describe isn’t possible through a web application, and I’m not aware of any hacked apps that have this ability. I agree that such streaming capabilities would be very cool, but one thing to keep in mind is power consumption. If Wi-Fi was in constant use as it would be for streaming I expect he iPod’s battery would be drained in just a couple hours.