AudioBlog

Hello people,
it’s no longer a secret, the Official AudioBox.fm iPhone native app is there, and it’s free to get from the Apple Store.

You can find more informations about the app in its dedicated page.

App was built by one of our fellow users, @softboysxp, and given the quality of his work we agreed to make it official.

The app itself focuses on streaming and organizing your data by Playlist, Artist, Genre and Album.
It’s very straightforward to use; we decided deliberately to not implement advanced features such as offline playlists at this time because we weren’t sure Apple approved the app, since few of its kind are generally approved.

But now that we are on the market we’ll continue to improve the mobility features that AudioBox.fm offers, so stay tuned for more!

Our is a very young startup and the dev team hopes that you like what you see and rest assured that more and more functionalities are coming. Oh, and a sync tool it’s on its way aswell.

Cheers and thanks for using AudioBox.fm!

Hello,
our native Android application have been upgraded to the version 0.2-beta.

This release includes Froyo support along other enhancements and bug fixes, all users should upgrade to the newest version.

Also if you are a developer check out the JavaLib project on Github. Those are the very same libraries we used to build the native Android application, so imagine what you can do if you know Java.

An important news is that an Official iPhone/iPod Touch native application is going to be released soon, built by @softboysxp

Screenshot 1
Screenshot 2
Screenshot 3

Now, words from our developers.

Time has passed from the first beta and the feedback is really encouraging! So… thanks!

This brand new release (0.2-beta) comes with two important news.
The first one is the way you interact between playlists you are browsing and the one you are listening to and another little GUI improvement is the love/unlove button.
The second news is about how things works under the hood.

Our first Android app came with a built-in “AudioBox.fm client”.
Testing such architecture was really hard and took really long time.

While we were developing the new Android application version, we realized that our platform is growing fast and keeping things as they were would lead us to a “really-hard-to-maintain-application”.
To face this problem we decided to split what we consider the “view” from the “engine”.
That’s the main reason behind the birth of the AudioBox.fm-JavaLib project.

Designing, building and finally testing those libraries took a long time and many efforts but the benefits will be really great and you’ll see it in future versions.
This is briefly why the GUI has not yet revamped: the engine has changed and it’s ready to rumble!

With the new Java libs ready we can now focus to improve the User experience for versions to come.

Thanks for your support!

Hello people,
our fellow user @cjk117 just released the first Windows application for audiobox.fm

It is in early stages so bugs may arise, please help contributing by following @DeskBoxFM on Twitter.

Screenshot: http://yfrog.com/jq7byp
Follow on Twitter + Download link: https://twitter.com/DeskBoxFM

Features include a coverflow-like visualization mode, most of the functionalities of our Cloud Web Player and a Sync feature, allowing you to pick a directory and automatically upload your media files towards audiobox.fm.

Again congratulations Cody for the release!

There’s struggling in waking up and testing the new Safari/Mac version.
If you are wondering it doesn’t currently work with our Cloud Web Player.

A bit of background, the issues started after an update to Safari 4.0.5.

On Mac OS X Safari uses an internal component, called CoreMedia, that takes care of rendering what it matters to us, audio.
After updating we realized that something was wrong since it cannot play some mp3s, so after a deep investigation I notified Apple about this bug through their bug tracker; I got a little response from an Apple employeer demanding more data to test, even though my bug description was extremely clear and had attached all the required files.

The bug was presenting itself in the new HTML 5 audio tag, if Safari/Mac tries to load a remote file, i.e. a mp3 file hosted on a remote location, it just fails silently.

I updated the Apple ticket two or three times but never got a response.
For our AudioBox.fm we had only one solution, a fallback to Adobe Flash was needed, thus skipping the HTML 5 part.
The issue that is raised then is that sometimes it doesn’t switch automatically to the next track, and that’s a major headache for us.

You now may ask why Google Chrome does indeed work since it have the same rendering engine.
The answer is pretty simple, while Chrome does use WebKit it doesn’t take ‘advantage’ of CoreMedia to render audio files.

Yesterday Apple released Safari 5, at first I thought “Great, they may have been fixed this bug, let’s try”.

To my disappoint not only they didn’t fixed anything, but my tests reveals that CoreMedia now isn’t able to playback anything.

So, again, we will recognize the new Safari identification string and fallback to Adobe Flash.

I’m talking to Valerio and Fabio to understand if it’s just an incredible bug in CoreMedia that just gotten worse or it’s made on purpose.

Either way we strongly advise switching to Google Chrome.

We have some big, exciting news for our loyal users, Android native application is finally arrived!

Mad props to Valerio and Fabio of AudioBox.fm team for making it possible.
The app itself is very easy to use, however please keep in mind that this is a first beta release and bugs may surface.
So if possible please report them at the usual support@audiobox.fm and we’ll be happy to take a look at what’s wrong.

Another surprise, the Android application is available on the Android Market free of charge!
It’s functionality will be free for a limited period of time, after that you are required to have a proper plan in order to continue using it, but, hear hear, the basic plan ($3.99) will support it!

In the effort to keep innovating we are also releasing a basic AudioMash for Dropbox.
This is the first step to ease the uploading phase of the workflow of AudioBox.fm, if you are a Dropbox user you can now import your media files (along with multi format support) directly in your account, thus eliminating the need to double upload to another service.
This new experimental AudioMash is available on Ultra plans and don’t support subdirectories, but this is going to change in the next few days, so be patient.

Remember, Android feedback is really appreciated.

Rock on!