Signal 1.1.1
Signal 1.1.1 is now available and offers fixes for a variety of minor issues, with a few items of note:
- Albums are now sorted by disc number before track number
- When adding or playing an artist with only one album tracks are now sorted properly
- Resolved an issue that prevented the remote speakers menu from appearing for some Pocket PC users
The update is available now via software update or direct download, with the full list of changes available in the release notes.
April 14th, 2008 at 2:42 am
Please! Add Last.Fm client support and I’ll buy the software!
http://www.last.fm/download/
April 14th, 2008 at 7:59 am
Rafi: That’s an interesting request. Are you referring to the ability to control the Last.fm stations or scrobbling support? I think the station control is an interesting idea, but scrobbling seems as if it would be best handled by the dedicated tools that already exist for that.
April 14th, 2008 at 1:57 pm
Hi Matt,
Thanks for the update!
I’ve got one more for you (So far
)
When you go to Music > Artists and select an artist who you only have one album it’d be great to get an album selection screen so that you can play the entire album so the order would be-
Music > Artist > Album (Even if there’s just 1 there) > Tracks (If you haven’t played the whole album)
Hope that makes some sense!
Thanks again- really looking forward to where this project goes in the future!
April 14th, 2008 at 2:13 pm
Dan: Thanks for the feedback! The application intentionally doesn’t display the additional screen since there’s not much need for the extra tap in most cases. For single-album artists if you tap the plus button next to the artist name you can start the whole album playing.
For the future I’m looking into having the media library work like the iPod application by default (so tapping one track name would create a playlist of the entire album automatically) and having a separate “queue mode” that would support adding individual tracks.
April 14th, 2008 at 6:00 pm
This is a pretty cool tool .. and looks to be exactly what I’m looking for, so thank you for providing this.
However, one thing I was hoping it would do is sync the display of the cover art on my iPod Touch with the iTunes server. The cover art syncs up fine when I choose a single playlist and iTunes will scroll to the next image just fine. But if I choose to play a second playlist remotely, the iTunes server fails to sync up with the new playlist’s cover art.
With my HTPC hooked up to my 52″ DLP and new hi-rez cover art displayed in the cover browser mode, my jukebox has never looked sexier. Controlling it remotely with a wi-fi handheld instead of a bulky wireless keyboard is simplly awesome! Keep up the great work!
April 14th, 2008 at 11:20 pm
Rick: Thanks! As for keeping the full screen Cover Flow view in sync, I did some investigation here but haven’t come up with a way to get this to work when the playlist changes. iTunes doesn’t appear to update the view with the contents of a different playlist and I believe a change would be needed in iTunes for this to operate the way we’d like.
April 15th, 2008 at 4:58 am
Hi Matt, I think you are right. After playing around with it more, it appears to be a problem with iTunes’ Cover Flow mode, rather than Signal.
April 15th, 2008 at 9:35 am
Hi Matt. Good to see that Signal is still moving along nicely. You must be a mind reader… was just about to report the problem with not sorting by disc number.
My only other comment is that I’d still love to see support for the ‘Group compilations when browsing’ feature of itunes. The most useful part of it would be to hide individual artists from the artists list if their track is flagged as being part of a compilation. I have many DJ dance compilations, and each has maybe 50 or 60 individual tracks/artists, and every single artist appears in the artists list. A way off hiding these would be great.
Keep up the good work!
Andy.
April 15th, 2008 at 7:25 pm
Hi Matt,
I have probably a strange problem since nobody else reports that.
When I try to change Air Speakers and I tap on let say “Computer” I see that in iTunes a little menu pop up (bottom where is possible to select the speakers) but from that point the computer looks like frozen. iTunes continues to play but the keyboard doesn’t work nor the mouse.
When I am trying to click with the mouse anywhere, nothing happens. The only way to get out from this strange status is to press CMD+OPTION+ESC – the force quit window appears but I don’t have to force anything. Just press ESC and everything is back to normal.
This was happening with version 1.1 when I had Tiger 10.4.11 and iTunes 7.4. But the same thing is happening also now when I got Leopard 10.5.2, iTunes 7.6.2 and Signal 1.1.1. I am using iPhone to control the iMac. It means the changing speakers have never worked for me on iMac and iPhone.
Please do you have any idea what can be wrong? I did enabled access for assistive devices.
Thanks, MK.
April 15th, 2008 at 10:20 pm
Andy: Yep, this one’s on the list for consideration in a future release.
MK: By any chance are you running a utility that intercepts mouse events or performs actions based on mouse gestures? That’s the only thing I can think of that could be causing behavior like you describe. If you continue to run into problems you can send an email to support@alloysoft.com and I’ll see what we can do to help get it sorted out.
April 15th, 2008 at 10:37 pm
Hi Matt:
Thanks for publishing the update. The issue with the missing speaker selection menu on my PocketPC appears to be addressed.
I noticed another problem. After browsing to an album (Media Library > Music > Albums) and selecting “Play Now” for one of the albums, the “Signal Queue” in iTunes is populated, but the album doesn’t play. In fact, browsing through the Media Library > Music > Albums path results in the inability to play any tracks via subsequent lists presented by Signal. In all instances, the queue is loaded up, but then it never plays.
Overall, this product is great! I’m looking forward to being able to make it a core part of my remote/multi-zone music control system at home, and to being able to create custom skins, too!
Thanks!
EL
April 15th, 2008 at 11:02 pm
Elliot: Try taking a look at your debug log by bringing up the Signal settings interface and pressing Ctrl+Shift+D. If you can copy and paste the contents of the log into an email and send it to support@alloysoft.com I can take look and see if it offers any clues.
April 15th, 2008 at 11:40 pm
Hi – great software so far. I am currently evaluating it for my home media center (Mini) and am trying to figure a few things out. In order to play Internet radio, I made a playlist with all of my favorite stations. If I click on that playlist in Signal, it automatically starts loading the first station. Do I need to make separate playlists for each station, or is there a way to ‘load’ a playlist without it automatically starting? Also, while I have a Signal playlist going, sometimes I’ll want to remove a song or change the order and I can’t figure out how to do either of these. Any advice?
April 16th, 2008 at 12:43 am
Hi, Very nice program, Is there any way to play movies on my tv using my apple tv with Signal, or if not, any update coming for the apple tv ?
April 16th, 2008 at 8:42 am
Mok: The ability to browse into playlists through the media library is on the list for a future release, in the meantime once the playlist has started you can go into the playlist view (icon in the upper-right of the now playing screen) and select another song or station.
Removing a song from the queue is also on the list for the future, re-ordering is as well but this one may not be possible today. iTunes doesn’t actually have support for re-ordering within its API, and although there are ways to hack around it they are pretty ugly and don’t always work the way you would expect.
Colin: Apple TV support is something I would really love to see added to the application, but unfortunately Apple has chosen to make the Apple TV a closed device so there is no way for Signal to talk to it today. If this ever changes in the future Signal will certainly be updated to support it.
April 16th, 2008 at 9:05 am
Thanks for the swift answer Matt, I am going to buy it anyway as I have added an airport express to my out building and it is fantastic to be able to control my itunes library from the iphone (just tested it and it works great) in another building.
Keep up the good work.
April 16th, 2008 at 9:05 am
Hi Matt,
Thanks for the respond. Yes, the culprit is XGestures
http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/16710/xgestures
I am using this mouse gesture software a long time. I cannot work without it
It will be awesome if you can find some way to fix this incompatibility. You can download this software and try it. Please don’t forget to start this software by pressing “Start xGestures” button in Options Tab of xGestures System Preferences. I am using:
Perform a mouse gesture by… Clicking and holding the right mouse button.
It’s actually the default configuration. You don’t have to even define any mouse gesture. If you run this xGesture with just default setting, your air speakers feature doesn’t work.
Thank you for your work and application. I really love it.
MK
April 16th, 2008 at 12:02 pm
MK: I can certainly see what’s possible here, but I can’t make any promises about having this work. I may be wrong, but I believe that Signal is using the mouse event APIs correctly and this utility is breaking those APIs. If it comes down to requiring implementing a hack for everyone that works around a specific utility I may have to say that this is simply not supported.
April 16th, 2008 at 12:41 pm
Hi Matt,
Thanks for looking into this. If you will find out that xGestures is breaking some APIs, please could you write me some notes about that so I can pass them to the developer of xGestures?
I hope that he will be willing to fix it if the problem is on his side. (Of course feel free to contact him directly. But I know that this will go beyond any regular support.)
Thank you,
MK
April 16th, 2008 at 9:18 pm
thanks for the speedy reply. I asked about removing songs from the playlist because I saw it on the front page where it describes what you can (already) do. I have no doubts you will find a way as this already is so feature packed. Keep up the good work!
April 16th, 2008 at 9:57 pm
Hi Matt:
I’m on a Mac- how do I bring up the log?
April 16th, 2008 at 10:20 pm
Mok: Yep, this needs to be added to the iPhone/iPod interface, currently it is only present in the Pocket PC client.
Elliot: On a Mac, quit Signal if it is running then start it again while holding down the Option key until the interface appears.
April 17th, 2008 at 7:02 am
Hi Matt,
Since upgrading to 1.1.1 I have a problem playing anything other than from an existing playlist. Selecting an album or track to play results in iTunes locking up and having to be force quit. I’ve tried relaunching iTunes and Signal but to no avail. I’m running Tiger 10.5.2 with iTunes 7.6.2 if this helps.
I hope this is just me overlooking something as your app is one of the greats!
Many thanks.
April 17th, 2008 at 7:10 am
The Duffer: That’s the first I’ve heard of anything like this happening, could you try capturing your logs as described above and copy and paste them into an email?
April 17th, 2008 at 9:28 am
Hi Matt,
Thanks for the update, the ’single album’ issue had been my biggest gripe, now that’s dealt with I am really pleased.
I’m sure tweaks and enhancements will follow- given the rapid development of the software since its launch- so can I ask for 1) remote shutdown of computer and 2) display of time elapsed/remaining and track number on the main display?
Once again, thanks for a great app.
Alan
April 17th, 2008 at 10:55 am
Dear Matt,
I too would love to see time elapsed/remaining as featured in for example AJAX software which is inferior to Signal imo.
Once again thank you for the best piece of software out there – I am really, really looking forward to an actual application when Apple opens the App store in iTunes
April 17th, 2008 at 2:35 pm
Alan, Stoffer: Thanks! A scrubber bar is planned for the native app version since I think it will be most effective there. Most UI development work is going into the native app at this point since June really isn’t that far away.
As for shutting down a computer or putting it to sleep, this is on the list for consideration, but I think raises some security issues. If someone somehow hijacks a Signal connection today the most they can really do is be a nuisance. Providing the ability to shut things down should require more restricted access, either authenticating the connection or certain commands.
April 17th, 2008 at 4:41 pm
Signal is exactly what I was looking for when I bought a single speaker/amplifier for the dining room and another Airport Express to route music there (in addition to the Apple TV in the living room). It works like a charm!
I’m very happy to hear about “going native” soon. To that end, I would love to see the ability to have separate volume control for multiple speakers. Perhaps that’s impossible given that Signal controls iTunes and iTunes won’t let you separately control volume — but I’m going to ask for it anyway!
April 17th, 2008 at 6:08 pm
Thanks Jared, glad to hear you like the app!
As you guessed, since iTunes doesn’t provide per-speaker volume control right now Signal can’t do this either. This seems like a pretty obvious feature for iTunes to add, if they ever do I’ll be sure to update Signal to support it.
April 17th, 2008 at 8:55 pm
Hi Matt
I would just like to share some thoughts and ideas with you and others that read this blog. What originally led me to ‘Signal’ was the search for a device that had the ‘potential’ to ‘totally’ control a HTPC/HiFi Media environment.
From my reasearch nothing on the market was giving me the level of control, and visual feedback that I was looking for. However, with the release of the ipod touch that all changed. It had the potential to be a great remte control device. It then became a search for the right software.
‘Signal’ is a great step forward in what I am looking for, but there is still a piece of the puzzle missing. Because the the ipod touch doesn’t have IR remote capability a solution to that problem needed to be found.
Further reaearch has uncovered an elegant solution to that IR problem being developed by Haukur H. Thorsson (http://rc.hot.is/). His IR solution has similarities in it’s implementatin concept to ’signal’.
The combination of ’signal’ and ‘remote control’ would deliver a very effective HTPC/HiFi Media remote management solution. To that end I have left feedback on Haukur’s website (which he has responded to) mentioning ’signal’ and suggesting he takes a look at it. Maybe is would be useful for you to take a look at ‘remote control’. Maybe there’s an option for shared development between the both of you.
Good luck with you product and I look forward to future releases.
April 18th, 2008 at 11:22 pm
Hi Stephen,
It’s definitely an interesting idea. The ability to use an iPhone as a true universal remote for all of your components is very attractive, and with the right software behind it I think this could be an incredibly cool addition to the product.
This is actually something that I’ve thought about a lot, the problem I keep coming up against is that IR is the only interface available to most components and there is rarely a good place to put an IR blaster. Even if you had a wireless unit it still needs a power cord, and since it requires line-of-sight (or near enough) to the devices being controlled it needs to be where the people usually are instead of tucked away with the rest of the components. Sure, there are wired connectors that can be stuck over the component’s IR port, but this turns your setup into an ugly Medusa-like monstrosity that sends both children and small animals fleeing in terror (though some might consider this a feature).
I think for this to really be usable it has to be easy for virtually anyone to set up and use, without adding a blight to the living room. So far I’m not aware of anything out there that really meets this criteria.
April 19th, 2008 at 11:47 am
Hi Matt,
I just updated to 1.1.1. Something that I have been trying to do for a long time is to have 2 instances of Signal runing on my Vista. The reason is that I have 2 music database. One wich is all my MP3 and the other which is all my uncompressed CD in WMA format. I do not want to mix them all in the same library as I will end up with songs in double (MP3 and WMA). I want to keep it that way since I listen to my WMA on my home amplifier, and my MP3 for casual listenning and syning with my iphone.
I have managed to do this by having 2 different accounts in Vista, set up with different libraries. This works well as Signal will ask for different port numbers depending on which account I want to access. The only problem with this is that I need to log on both accounts for this to work. My media center is set to start automatically in Media center when it powers up, and I need to manually log into the other accounts.
So…. my question is, can I start 2 diferent instances of Signal from 1 account without having to login my other account? For this to work do I need to have 2 instances of media player working?
An other way to go around this is that with Vista and Media player you can share music libraies between PC and users on a same PC. So this has proved out to work well but signal will only access the main library. In order to have signal view the other libraries I need to put the songs in a playlist (as for the radio stations), but again this is not the optimal way as I will end up with too many playlists
I am trying to keep all of this simple and configured by simply turning my media center PC on.
Thanks for your cool app. very usefull when listening to music outside.
April 19th, 2008 at 1:38 pm
Great app, no bloat, works well. I like the new responsiveness. Very cool! Still, there’s always something more to ask for
. System volume control on top of the existing iTunes volume control would be nice!
April 21st, 2008 at 10:17 am
Hey, love the app, perfect for the airport express wireless music thing, one step away from apple making the ipot compatable with it but o well!
where do you stand on jailbreaking the ipod touch and iphone? and is there any chance that signal could be made as an app for them? are you developing with the new sdk thing?
was just wondering if you cant work it out or if you havent done it due to apple not supporting the jailbreak. a permenant app would be amazing. im off to purchase anyway! thanks
April 21st, 2008 at 3:30 pm
Jac: As far as I’m aware there isn’t a way to have Signal start up under a different user account, you’d have to log in with that account as you’ve been doing and start Signal as that user. I’ll look into the WMP11 shared library feature and see if this is something that Signal can support.
Rob: That’s an interesting request. I’m curious, what kind of scenarios do you need to adjust the system volume independent of the media player volume for?
Matt G: Signal has been developed as a web app intentionally so that anyone can just download and use it – no hacking required. A native version based on the official SDK is in the works, for a commercial product I think it’s best to stick to the officially supported development environments to make things easy and risk-free for everyone who wants to use the app.
April 22nd, 2008 at 1:11 pm
Hi Matt, when I control iTunes on my Mac, it sometimes happens that my system volume is very low, so that even even maxing out my iTunes volume doesn’t cut it. I know that Remote Buddy offers it. But I only want to use Signal. Oh, and why don’t you offer the Signal icon in more colors as an optional download? I know, never satisfied …
April 22nd, 2008 at 5:05 pm
Hey, i cant seem to figure out how to operate multiple sets of speakers from signal. I am running an ipod touch with version 1.1.1 and when i touch the cover art, the menu appears where i can change # of stars, volume, etc, but i dont have any icon for controlling multiple speakers. what am i doing wrong?
April 23rd, 2008 at 3:38 pm
Rob: Thanks for the info, I’ll put it on the list for consideration in a future release. As for icons, there’s a white version available – to use it you’ll need to replace “apple-touch-icon.png” in the application bundle under /Contents/Resources/web.
Mike: The speaker option will appear automatically if you have an AirPort Express or a powered on Apple TV in your network and the speaker selection drop-down box is displayed in the bottom-right corner of the iTunes window on your computer. Otherwise this feature is hidden automatically as it is only available when an active AirPort Express or Apple TV is detected.
April 25th, 2008 at 1:10 am
Hi Matt, thanks for this awesome tool. I saw an ad about the squeezebox duet from Logitech and really thought the remote is the right thing for me. When I sit on my sofa I can hardly read the little screen of my iRadio. But since the squeezebox is rather expensive and does not really work with my twonkyvision server, I thought this should also be doable with a little PDA tool and my macMini – Bingo! Your tool does exactly what I want. I ended up listening to music for a few hours last night. Thanks!
I just had the client on my PDA (pocket loox 720) hang a few times (reconnecting) or not responding. Don’t know why.
I am not exactly a friend of itunes to be honest. I can live with it, but a little UPNP client on my macMINI, that directly communicates to my twonkyvision server would be much nicer. So if you have any plans here…
April 25th, 2008 at 11:40 pm
Jens: Thanks! Although Signal doesn’t integrate with either of these yet, for playback from a UPnP media server I believe you can use either VLC with some of the available plugins or the OS X port of XBMC.
April 28th, 2008 at 11:21 pm
Matt, please don’t forget about Airfoil support! Next update???
Keep on rockin’ out the updates! This is probably _the_ coolest app i ever bought.
April 29th, 2008 at 8:43 am
Haven’t forgotten
I don’t know about the next release, but it is high on the list. Thanks again!
May 5th, 2008 at 1:23 am
Hi Matt
Would be great to include support for 320 x 320 screen.
My Mac is set in the study room, and I stream it to my AE in the bedroom. Usually, would let the music run in the night until the zee monster comes upon me. Would be great if Signal has the ability to remotely power down the iMac when it’s time to get to bed.
May 5th, 2008 at 7:35 am
Lionel: Square screen support is something that’s planned for the Windows Mobile UI refresh following the native iPhone client.
The ability to put the computer to sleep or shut it down is something that’s been requested a few times before and is on the list for consideration. I just want to make sure that if this is implemented it’s done in a way that is both simple and secure.
Thanks for the suggestions!
May 6th, 2008 at 10:00 am
I dunno how it works, but I just wanted to report that Signal is successfully controlling internet radio channels from SomaFM and Radio Paradise, complete with cover art. wow!
May 31st, 2008 at 7:53 am
Hi Matt,
I really like this application. I am having one specific problem though and was hoping you might have a solution. Some of my playlist aren’t appearing on my iPhone within the Signal 1.1 app. I have my playlist organized as a-artist name, a-artist name2, a-artist name3, b-book name, b-book name2, b-book name3, etc.
For some reason the playlist that begin with “a-” aren’t appearing. the “b-” ones however, are showing up.
Any way to fix this? Also, is there a way to refresh the playist on my my iPhone’s Signal app? I’ve tried changing some playlists names and it doesn’t appear to be updating.
Much thanks,
Rob
June 3rd, 2008 at 2:11 am
Rob: Responded to you via email.