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foo_touchremote 0.1.1

pieceofsummer — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 21:56:44 +0000

Here’s a small update for all of you, people.

Now you can browse and play your library music. Selected albums or search results are now loaded into auto-playlist on the foobar’s side.
Also compression of data was added. Almost all output traffic is gzipped, so loading large numbers of tracks should be faster now. Album art is not compressed, but it is now resized as requested by iPhone app.

Known bugs:
- Currently playing track list (those you ‘flip’ on the NP screen to set ratings) is not working.
- No shortcut letters in the lists. Seems Remote supports only latin letters, making anything else to be ‘#’. That require me to change sort order (latin letters first, numbers and all other letters next), and it is not so cool. Need to think on how to override that behavior.
- Any library changes are reflected only after foobar restart. That should be fixed soon.

As it is usable somehow, download link is posted to the product page, so grap it there.

foo_touchremote 0.0.5 alpha

pieceofsummer — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 17:26:30 +0000

First public build. No library support, no search, possibly buggy

iPhone Remote support

pieceofsummer — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 21:02:54 +0000

iPhone Remote support plugin (foo_touchremote) is an implementation of DACP server for foobar2000. The key feature of Apple’s version of DAAP is using Bonjour for discovery, so you need Bonjour Service (usually you already have one installed with iTunes).

Version 0.1 introduces initial library support.

Quick Start: go to the plugin settings page and pair with your iPhone or iPod Touch.

Try foo_touchremote 0.1.2.1 now!

History

Feb 7 2010: Version 0.1.2.1.

Fixes XP compatibility issue of 0.1.2

Feb 6 2010: Version 0.1.2.

Sorting according to client hints
Search makes no difference between letters with grave, acute etc. (requires Vista or later)
Album tracks when flipped from Now Playing screen (but no rating yet)
Pairing now uses foobar’s built-in http client (and doesn’t rely on WinInet and IE settings anymore)

Jan 31 2010: Version 0.1.1.

Library support
Autoplaylist from library selection
Traffic compression
New (foobar 1.0) album art configuration support

Nov 04 2009: Version 0.0.7.1.

Better pairing
Fixed crash on exit on WinXP

Oct 30 2009: Version 0.0.6.

Some minor fixes
Ability to control process or system-wide volume instead of foobar’s built-in one

Oct 17 2009: Initial public build 0.0.5 alpha.

iPhone Remote App + foobar2000

pieceofsummer — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 20:58:19 +0000

iTunes has a brilliant feature to browse local library and control playback using iPhone and WiFi. The only thing is that I like foobar, not iTunes. The question is why not to use a free iPhone client to control it as well?..

So I’m starting a foo_touchremote project to make love between foobar and iPhone running Remote. Stay tuned!

iPhone OS 3.1: noway

pieceofsummer — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 18:31:19 +0000

It has a bit faster spotlight (they added some indexes, lol), that’s true.
But a bug with sorting non-english track names makes navigation completely unusable. All such tracks are put into “123″ section even though locale supports required symbols and they’re shown as jump letters.

I’m lucky iTunes allows upgrade to an older version, because I don’t have a copy of my library on a PC.
So waiting for next beta…

ArtDoctor 2.0 console

pieceofsummer — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 09:56:58 +0000

Works with firmware 3.0 both on Windows and Mac OS X (using Mono) – tested on iPod Touch 1g (Windows 7, Snow Leopard) and iPhone 3GS (Snow Leopard).

This is still experimental, so comments and bugreports are welcome!

Download: ArtDoctor2con.

Still have no time to make GUI, sorry.

New iTunes library is here

pieceofsummer — Mon, 25 May 2009 07:35:33 +0000

I’ve just got why you should use new iTunes (8.2) since beta 5. They have replaced old iTunesDB library with new one based on SQLite, so sync is a bit odd thing now.
Device itself doesn’t use iTunesDB at all, but iTunes still does – I think it’s for compatibility reasons. When syncing, iTunes writes both iTunesDB and new library files to device. If there’s no iTunesDB file on device, iTunes will also purge new library and all your music will appear as “other” data.

I wonder whether new library will completely supersede iTunesDB or will they continue coexisting for compatibility reasons. But anyway, linux guys would be happy since SQLite format is open and much more clear for understanding.

Sync: “Slide to cancel”

pieceofsummer — Sat, 09 May 2009 19:14:24 +0000

Yeah, I’ve just found out how to handle this and terminate sync when user slides cancel switch.

We need following functions (meta-language):

ERROR AMDObserveNotification(HANDLE proxy, CFSTR notification); ERROR AMDListenForNotifications(HANDLE proxy, NOTIFY_CALLBACK cb, USERDATA data);

and callback delegate:

typedef void (*NOTIFY_CALLBACK)(CFSTR notification, USERDATA data);

First, we need AMDObserveNotification to subscribe notifications about “com.apple.itunes-client.syncCancelRequest”. Then we should start listening for notifications (second function) until we get “AMDNotificationFaceplant”.
That’s it. When notification got, you should unlock and close lock file handle (don’t sure if you need to post “syncDidFinish” to proxy, seems it doesn’t matter) and terminate sync gracefully.

P.S. The same notification is also got when you unplug your device, so you should always be ready for errors.

ArtDoctor page added

pieceofsummer — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 00:02:11 +0000

No updates yet, it is still version 1.0.2.

Go to product page.

ArtDoctor

pieceofsummer — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 23:52:05 +0000

Artwork (album art) is a great feature of Apple devices. It not only helps to distinguish your albums, movies or podcasts visually, but also it is a real eye-candy. A lot of people enjoy it!

Loading pictures from tags and resizing them every time is really slow, so devices are using cache with images of several different sizes to speed-up loading. And sometimes this cache is getting corrupted. As a result you can see “black squares” or partially drawn images, or even images from other album/movie.

In such cases iTunes won’t help you a bit – it reads images directly from tags and doesn’t even know about cache corruption. Also for new devices there’s no “Show artwork on device” option anymore. And even if your device is either jailbroken or you have TouchCopy (or other file manager), deleting artwork cache won’t force it to get rebuilt.

As a workaround, you may automate iTunes via COM and rewrite artwork for each track, but it takes a lot of time and you’re not guaranteed it won’t get corruped on next sync.

ArtDoctor utility was written exactly for healing corrupted cache. It will scan all your albums, get uncorrupted artwork from tags and write it into cache. You may use existing cache (to keep images that can’t be extracted from tags, e.g. video thumbnails) or recreate it from scratch.

ArtDoctor deals directly with binary cache, without rewriting tags, modifying iTunes database and performing other stupid things. Thereby it is very fast (takes several minutes on average content) and doesn’t affect synchronization.

Download ArtDoctor 1.0.2.

It requires .NET Framework 3.0 (or newer), iTunes and Windows XP/Vista/7 to run.

Note: ArtDoctor 1.0.2 doesn’t support iPhone OS 3.0. Please refer to ArtDoctor 2.0 preview.