The Web Server for iTunes

Howdy folks,

pulpTunes version 1.3.0 has been released. Please grab it from the link above for your OS.

Here’s the list of changes:

• Added support for automatic router configuration for Apple routers (through Bonjour protocol)
• Allow search through the URL so you can use the firefox bookmark keyword feature. More info here: http://www.pulptunes.com/support/index.php?fuse=knowledgebase&view=KB_viewArticle&articleId=13&public=1
• Added ability to select initial playlist, in Settings.
• Added ability to have the Shuffle or Repeat buttons be enabled from the start, in Settings. With this you’ll be able to listen to a random song each time you enter pulpTunes.
• Added button to clear iTunes DJ playlist.

Enjoy!

Nice composition from the guys at The Bagazine:

Hi folks,

I hope you’re enjoying the latest release of pulpTunes, version 1.2.0

Just a quick post to let you know that we’ve replaced the “Frequently asked questions” forum, with a complete knowledge base system, located here. This allows for easy search, and the ability to comment and rate articles. It currently contains the same articles that the forum had, plus a few others I’ve just added answering some common questions, and a tip on how to download multiple songs at once.

Happy new year!

I’m pleased to announce version 1.2.0 is out. Just click on the Download Now button above to get it.

The new and improved music platform that you can play all your favorite tunes on. Turn on your computer speakers and enjoy. Choose your soundtrack while you’re working, checking your emails or enjoying a round of a casino game (www.casino.com) . Make your own playlists, repeat and shuffle your tracks to your hearts’ content.

Here’s the complete list of changes since 1.1.2 (note for beta testers: this final release is almost identical to the previous beta3):

New features

• Attempt automatic router configuration (through UPnP) to avoid having to manually add the port mapping in the router.
• Added limited support for iPhone / iPod touch.
• Added multiple languages support. So far English, Spanish, German, French, Italian and Portuguese are supported.
• Revamped player section: Longer progress line, bigger buttons.
• Added Shuffle and Repeat buttons.
• Added ability to download all songs from a playlist.
• Added permissions to enable/disable download. It’ll be disabled by default.
• Added advanced config setting to set timeout for starting to play a song before skipping it.
• Under Mac, no longer show the pulpTunes icon in the dock, just in the menu bar.
• Automatically scroll page back to the top after selecting a playlist. Useful for when you have lots of playlists.
• Added credits in the About window.
• New minimum java version 1.6 (a.k.a Java 6). This will allow us to work with some great Java 6 features.

Bug fixes:

• Fixed iTunes9 incompatibility: crashing when iTunes DJ is disabled in iTunes prefs.
• Rating wasn’t working on Snow Leopard.
• Some songs were not listed when sorting under some rare scenarios.
• When using a port different than the default 1500O or when anonymous access was disabled, the connection instructions window was stating pulpTunes couldn’t receive connections from the outside, even if it really could.
• Albums with the same name but different artists were showing the same cover art.
• When running pulpTunes in Windows, songs in network locations outside the local machine couldn’t be loaded.
• The tray menu was being partially hidden in Windows.
• User Management popup wasn’t rendering properly under IE7

ENJOY!

If there are no surprises, this should be the last beta release before the real deal. The most important fix with respect to beta2 is the improvement over iPhone support. The media support provided by the iPhone in Mobile Safari still isn’t great yet, but we did our best.

These are the links to grab the release:

• pulpTunes 1.2.0 beta3 for Windows
• pulpTunes 1.2.0 beta3 for Mac
• pulpTunes 1.2.0 beta3 for Linux

This is the detailed list of changes since the beta2:

New features:

• Automatically scroll page back to the top after selecting a playlist. Useful for when you have lots of playlists.

Bug fixes:

• Improved a little tray/menu bar icons for Linux and Mac. Reverted to the colored icon in mac.
• User Management popup wasn’t rendering properly under IE7.
• Fixed volume issue.
• Fixed client-side form layout problems (specially with non-English translations with long strings).
• Improved iPhone playback. Now supports real streaming and seeking to any point in the song.

This release addresses some bugs from the previous beta, the most critical being problems when installing pulpTunes on an OS with a language different than English or Spanish. I also realized the rating feature has never worked on Snow Leopard, so this got fixed as well.

Also of greater importance is the drop of Java 1.5 (a.k.a Java 5) support, which will allow us to use some great Java 6 features.

Finally, a couple of enhancements have been added, and now we have translations for German, Italian, Portuguese and French, courtesy of Paolo Fehlmann, Fábio Daniel Azevedo Dias and Jean Pierre Callut.

This being a beta, the homepage will still hold the link for the older stable release, and the windows updater facility won’t grab this one, so you have to get it directly from these links:

• pulpTunes 1.2.0 beta2 for Windows
• pulpTunes 1.2.0 beta2 for Mac
• pulpTunes 1.2.0 beta2 for Linux

I also want to thank Chris Farmer for his kind donation. This is very much appreciated!

This is the list of changes since the beta1:

New Features:

• Added German, French, Italian and Portuguese translations.
• On the iPhone, play songs on a separate browser window to avoid loosing the current location and reverting to the default “All Music” library after finishing with the song.
• When pressing the rewind button, restart the song if it has played more than 2 secs. Otherwise go to the previous song.
• Added credits in the About window.
• New minimum java version 1.6 (a.k.a Java 6)

Bug fixes:

• The Web page had problems when the server’s OS language was not English or Spanish.
• Rating wasn’t working on Snow Leopard.
• The profile section was returning an error.
• When anonymous access was disabled, the connection instructions were stating that the server couldn’t receive requests from outside the network, even if it really could.
• The tray menu was being partially hidden in Windows. Also now we use a standard black menu icon in Mac.
• The “next” link was getting hidden a bit when paginating through large playlists.
• Fixed misalignments in the Groups form and some layout issues in the server-side windows.
• Albums dropdown wasn’t being shown under some circumstances on the iPhone

The beta for the next major version is ready for you to test out. Among the major new features are automatic router config, iPhone support, multiple languages support, shuffle/repeat buttons and the ability to download all the songs from a playlist at once.

This being a beta, the homepage will still hold the link for the older stable release, and the windows updater facility won’t grab this one, so you have to get it directly from these links:

• pulpTunes 1.2.0 beta1 for Windows
• pulpTunes 1.2.0 beta1 for Mac
• pulpTunes 1.2.0 beta1 for Linux

Please post your bug reports or comments as usual at the Quick Help Forum, without forgetting to mention you’re using the beta.

Automatic router configuration
You know that to be able to access pulpTunes from outside the network where it’s installed, you needed to manually configure your router to forward port 15000 to the machine where pulpTunes is running. In this new version, pulpTunes will try to do that automatically for you, using a router featured called UPnP. Such feature is enabled by default in newer routers, and if not, you have to turn it on through your router configuration. Unfortunately Apple routers don’t support this. If you can’t or don’t want to use UPnP, you still can manually configure the port forwarding as usual.

iPhone / iPod touch support
Because of the lack of Flash support in the iPhone, pulpTunes was inoperable in that platform. Now, we’ve bypassed that limitation by providing a slightly modified interface when browsing pulpTunes through Mobile Safari, that simply provides direct links to the songs for the iPhone’s Quicktime to play. This also offers the nice capability of opening other iPhone apps while still having the music playing in the background. Nevertheless, it’s not the best solution yet because you can’t change songs from within Quicktime and the pulpTunes web interface is not well adapted for the iPhone’s small screen. This will be addressed through a future iPhone app that is in the works, that will provide an iPhone iTunes-like experience.

Multiple languages support
With this new version you’ll be able to switch the language in the settings section. Currently only English and Spanish are supported. Please send me a private message through the forums if you’d like to contribute with another language so that I can include it in the final version. Making a translation is pretty easy as you’ll only need to translate two files that I’ll provide you.

Other new features and bug fixes:

New features:

• Revamped player section: Longer progress line, bigger buttons.
• Added Shuffle and Repeat buttons.
• Added ability to download all songs from a playlist.
• Added permissions to enable/disable download. It’ll be disabled by default.
• Added advanced config setting to set timeout for starting to play a song before skipping it.
• Under Mac, no longer show the pulpTunes icon in the dock, just in the menu bar.

Bug fixes:

• Fixed iTunes9 incompatibility: crashing when iTunes DJ is disabled in iTunes prefs.
• Some songs were missing when sorting under some rare scenarios.
• When using a port different than the default 1500O, the connection instructions window was stating pulpTunes couldn’t receive connections from the outside, even if it really could.
• Albums with the same name but different artists were showing the same cover art.

ENJOY!

This only fixes an incompatibility issue with iTunes 9. Nothing more, nothing less.

Grab your copy from the pulptunes homepage, or launch your pulptunes updater (if you’re in Windows).

UPDATE:
After some initial feedback from users we discovered this release isn’t working when you have iTunes DJ disabled through iTunes preferences (it is enabled by default). Make sure you have it enabled until we get 1.1.3 out the door.

I’d like to begin by thanking some great folks that in the past few months have discovered this project and have helped in one way or another. Javier Martinez posted an extensive blog article “Sharing Your iTunes Library Online With PulpTunes“, explaining how to set up pulpTunes, and how to set up a dynamic DNS account, which allows you to forget about IPs and access pulpTunes through a domain name like music.example.com.

Also there are some new faces on the forum that have been giving a hand, like mcascone, blood_of_mine, kingichrist and astevens93. I’ve been trying not to answer all questions immediately like I used to, so to give a chance for others to participate. Ideally I’d hand over completely the forum to the community, so I can concentrate on programming

Charity
Also big thanks to Jonny Bob, Mike in New York, and another anonymous friend who donated to the FirstGiving charity fund. Remember this still goes till October 11th. Please visit the page to see what it’s about.

Moved to Kenai
pulpTunes is open source and its source code, support tickets and feature requests were being managed at sourceforge.net. But that site has been going downhill for a while. I specially regret that day when we made it to the front page of lifehacker.com and the downloads at sourceforge went down. So now I’m hosting the files myself, and the source code and tickets at kenai, which is working well so far.

pulpTunes 1.2.0 progress update and call for help
It’s well on the way. The first beta should come out in about 3 weeks. It will have: automatic router configuration, shuffle and repeat buttons, and will be fully translated to other languages. For that last part I’m gonna need your help. Please send me a PM over the forums or leave a comment here if you want to contribute with a particular translation. It should be a dead easy job, as there isn’t much to translate. I don’t know yet if I’ll give you a text file to do the job, or use an online service for you to post the translated phrases. I’ll let you know when I’ve figured the process out.

Another TV appearance!
This time it was the Brazilian show Olhar Digital, that did a short but cool presentation. The German’s NRW TV one is now published in their archives.

What a wonderful week of releases. On Monday it was Netbeans 6.7, yesterday it was PHP 5.3 and Firefox 3.5, and today is the turn for pulpTunes 1.1.1 !!

This is just a minor release addressing minor outstanding bugs and a slightly improved iTunes DJ. As usual, you can grab the release from the pulptunes.com website. This is the Changelog for this version:

New features

• Have the iTunes DJ playlist start with randomly picked songs.

Bug fixes:

• Search wasn’t returning songs from the same album that didn’t have a track number.
• Better handling of problems with the iTunes music library XML file: shouldn’t fail silently anymore when file is missing or when it’s invalid.
• When renaming a group, the users records weren’t being updated accordingly.
• Under Windows and Java 6, the tray menu was being partially hidden behind the tray.
• Under Internet Explorer, when a popup window was shown, the background was totally obscured instead of being grayed-out.
• Some Ajax requests were being erronously cached under Internet Explorer (e.g newly created users couldn’t be seen in the users management section).