Saturday, January 26, 2008

Streaming music to the iPod touch, part 2

As I just told you I was looking at different solutions for streaming music to the iPod touch. Now I've tried out webot and simplifymedia and unfortunately none meets my requirements. Webot felt slow and sluggish, and I don't like that you stream via a server on the internet. Simplify's UI was utter crap - you were only shown an alphatebized list of your songs, which is totally useless when you have a large library.

What now? I'm still hoping that slimserver will be the method in the future, but for now I've installed apache on my machine to serve up my music. I had some problems with my local firewall, but once I got around that everything is working smoothly. I will probably try to add Apache::MP3 later to get a better way of navigating my files (demo), but I have my music collection in pretty good order so just navigating the directory structure is good enough.

I haven't bothered to make a separate post about the latest Apple announcments, mostly because I was underwhelmed by the Macbook Air, unimpressed with Apple TV 2.0, and irritated about paying $20 for a couple of iPod touch applications that you get for free if you buy the touch now.

2 comments:

paul said...

Niklas, writing apps for the iPhone without an SDK has been a challenge, so when we released the first version of Simplify Media it was missing some important features, espcially the one you identify.

I wanted to let you know that the newest version has a vastly improved UI and you can:

* view by artist, album, genre and song
* jump to a letter a-z using an iPod-like sidebar
* skip to the next song without leaving the player
* view track information during playback

and, as before, you can still play an album, a playlist or any number of songs in a row without interuption or while surfing the web.

We still many things to add, but we'd appreciate it if you gave us a second look.

Niklas Morberg said...

Thanks for the update Paul, I'll check it out as soon as I jailbreak my touch again. I upgraded to a fresh 1.1.4 a couple of days ago since I didn't actually use any of the apps I had installed.