Beta test for version 1.3 is go

The time has come for some more application beta testing. This version contains the following new (and not so new) features:

New radio architecture
The internals of the radio streaming architecture have been rewritten due to the introduction of a new streaming system server-side. The main visible external effect of this is that radio scrobbles are now handled by the app itself and follow exactly the same rules as tracks scrobbled from media players. In other words, they will scrobble after half the track instead of at the end. You're however able to choose when you want tracks scrobbled between 50% and 100% in the Options dialog. There's also an option for manually specifying the HTTP buffer size. You should also hopefully notice improved sequencing and track selection thanks to nova77LF's efforts. So please listen to a lot of radio and let us know if you have any problems! Streaming is now also moved to its own thread which means it should never stutter when moving windows, flipping down menus etc.

Scrobbling protocol 1.2
We've moved to the 1.2 version of the scrobbling protocol which means that the actual submission of a track to the Last.fm servers happens at the end of the track (whether you skip, stop or listen to the end is irrelevant). It does however get marked as scrobbled halfway through as per usual. So it will take slightly longer now for tracks to appear in your Recently Played list. To compensate for this, we've added Now Playing notifications. As soon as a track starts, it will get sent to our servers and a Now Playing message will appear on your profile above your Recently Played tracks.

iPod support
muesli has been hard at work trying to resolve the outstanding issues with the iPod support and also improved the user experience by always telling the user what tracks will be scrobbled from the iPod. When plugging in an iPod for the first time, you should get a question about whether you want to scrobble tracks played on it from now on. If you then go away and listen, your tracks should get scrobbled soon after you sync it with iTunes the next time. A dialog will pop up listing the tracks it will scrobble. Please note that you must let iTunes manage the syncing automatically for this to work.

iTunes boot strapping
This is only intended as a feature for new users and allows you to kickstart your profile by importing an iTunes library. If you use iTunes and are a new user, you'll get a question as part of the config wizard asking whether you want to import your iTunes listening history.

Sidebar improvements
mxcl has enhanced the sidebar with a lot of nice functionality like:
* Launch previews of Recently Played, Loved etc from sidebar
* Tracks draggable within sidebar (love something after you played it)
* More context menu entries
* Bigger station history

Reworked menu and shortcut system
We hope the layout of these is slightly more logical now.

Growl support on the Mac
You can now have Last.fm send notifications to Growl if you're on the Mac thanks to barnacleboy. Enable this through the Preferences dialog.

Vista support (partial)
The app should now run on Vista without certain operations (like plugin installs) failing but it does require administrator rights and will ask for elevation on startup. This is a temporary measure and we're hoping to be able to redesign the app to enable it to run as a standard user on Vista in the future.

Various other bug fixes and enhancements
* Dock icon optional on Mac
* Track bar tells you why a track won't scrobble
* Currently playing track displayed in window title/task bar
* lastfm:// links can be entered into search field on Tune In tab
* Reset tag cloud by hitting Search on Tune In tab with search field empty
* App launches automatically with iTunes on the Mac
* Web requests tightened up with automatic timeout/retry handling and more informative errors

I should point out that for the Windows version, uninstallation of the previous version should not be required.

Please bear in mind, as always, that this is a BETA version and is therefore likely to crash and behave in an unstable manner until we've ironed out the issues. So run at your own risk!

Thanks for helping out.

Get the builds here:

Windows version 1.3.0.57
OS X version 1.3.0.57
Linux version 1.3.0.57 (Ubuntu Feisty)

awesome, thankyou. will get onto the radio soon

I'd like to see that mute option, along with the volume up/down, duplicated to the tray, if possible. They're not there now.

I really like the "now listening" functionality and the option to play tracks (and love or ban them!) from the sidebar. I'm eager to see how well (read: less repetitive) my personal and tag stations play but I'm digging the beta so far. :)

-VVV- said:
Wow, the song skipping is FAST!

Yeah, that's one of the first things I noticed too. Really like this so far, but one thing I would really like to see, and it's not really much (at least I don't think so) is more colours added, as I have quite a few different users who scrobble and listen to the radio from this PC, and it's awkward at the moment with more than one person sharing the same coloured icon.

So is protocol 1.2 actually working now? Yesterday, I PM'd Russ about a problem with 1.2 where scrobbles would show up in Recently Played (and its two week superset), but my Tracks Played count never increased. He said this was a known problem and in addition, the scrobbles would never be counted in charts. Have these problems been fixed in the ensuing 24 hours?

@sharevari I see - thanks! I should have payed more attention to my profile the past week and let you guys know earlier! (I added 1.2 support to iScrobbler last week and had been using it solid for a week).

-VVV- said:
Wow, the song skipping is FAST!
Possible side effect of this being a new system with less load?

mxcl said:
RhYnoECfnW said:
I have quite a few different users who scrobble and listen to the radio from this PC, and it's awkward at the moment with more than one person sharing the same coloured icon.

How many more colours do you need?


Another two or three would be nice, since there's 4 people who regularly use this PC for Last.fm, and another few who occasionally use it instead of their own PC, and it would be nice if they could have a different coloured icon than mine, as I've scrobbled tracks when signed in under their username, and vice-versa. Like I said, not a big deal, but would be nice.

mafflix said:
Thanks for merging those patches! It seems to work well so far.

I see a couple of things that may need fixing in the .deb

1. The i18n directory is missing, so no translations are avail.

They'll be in the final deb. The translations aren't yet ready.

2. There are 2 audio services compiled/installed:
libsrv_output_alsa.so
libsrv_output_portaudio.so
but it looks like the linux client only uses libsrv_output_alsa.


Hmm that's a bug I think. I thought I'd disabled the compilation of it. Thanks.

shrodes said:
So with this new 'now listening' thing, with tracks not being fully scrobbled until the track finishes, what happens if you half-scrobble a track (turn it off after it's been part scrobbled)?

Will the system just update it to say played, or will it be deleted off the chart, or will it just be stuck on 'now listening'

It will be cached, and submitted next time. We'd like to submit on exit, but the current design of the app makes this not easy. So for 1.4 definitely.

Max

sharevari said:
shrodes, I guess you mean if you skip or stop a track after it's reached the "scrobble point" but before it's come to a natural end? In that case, the track will get scrobbled straight away.

Only if you quit the app will it be cached and submitted the next time. I think. :)

Yeah, that's what I meant. Thanks for the explaination.

Thanks. Nice version.
I have no problem submitting tracks and such, but:

1. drag & drop album tagging of fails 90% of the time (for streamed sources)

2. 'Recently loved' OR 'banned' lists expand at times after drag/drop tagging

3. single-click tagging is a bit irritating, plus it will not tag, say 'Jazz' after you've tagged 'Jazz Piano', for instance.

4. on several instances (mainly between streamed tracks) I got an error message saying my soundcard doesn't exist or busy. (this happened over 10 times in 24 hours)

5. Global tag radio still gets repetitive at times, sometimes even in the same session, and replays full chunks of previously played files.
But all in all streamed track selection is better than before, mainly due to the new tendency of playing several tracks from a tagged album at times, which I really like (but some might not).

shrodes: what platform? Windows?