Audio Hijack Pro has long been our flagship product, but it’s been some time since it saw a major update. Today, we’re pleased to Audio Hijack Pro 2.9 for download.

Most noticeably, this update provides a significantly polished UI for our audio recording tool. It now sports a gorgeous status LCD, as well as an improved Recording Bin. It’s also now possible to edit the ID3 tags of recordings right from the Recording Bin, with the file inspector.

In addition to the UI overhaul, Audio Hijack Pro 2.9 features many smaller improvements, including new versions of Soundflower for recording System Audio and the LAME MP3 engine for recording MP3 files. We’ve also fixed many small bugs, including one when using the Recording Bin, caused by Mac OS X 10.5.6.

This update provides both new features and enhanced stability, and it’s recommended for all users. Audio Hijack Pro 2.9 is a free update for all licensed owners of Audio Hijack Pro 2 and can be downloaded right here.

If you’ve never used Audio Hijack Pro, well, what are you waiting for? Learn more about it right on the Audio Hijack Pro page and download the free trial right now.

Our newest product, Radioshift Touch, was released just last week, and already it’s gathering rave reviews. First up, Chris Breen has provided a fantastic in-depth look at Radioshift Touch over at Macworld, and awarded us with 4 mice out of 5.

I spoke frankly and in some depth with Chris about the product, and he really nailed things in his review. We focused on the interface and stability for Radioshift 1.0.0, and believe it shows. Our catalog of streams is smaller than others’ at this time, but we’ve worked hard to make our application fast, stable, and fun to use. We’re very pleased with parts of it (such as Local and Favorites), and working to improve other parts (such as Genres), and that will come over time.

For now, we’ve already got Radioshift 1.0.1 in the App Store review queue. That should appear within a few days (subject to Apple’s approval), and it will fix several minor issues as well as improve the interface further. We’re also hard at work on larger improvements and updates. We’re just getting started, so stay tuned for plenty of updates!

Ladies and gents, we’re very pleased to unveil our first new application in over a year, as well as our very first iPhone application. Today, we’ve released Radioshift Touch on the iPhone and iPod Touch platform.

Radioshift Touch puts the world of internet radio in the palm of your hand. With Radioshift Touch, you can listen to internet radio streams anywhere you like, over Wifi, EDGE, and 3G. We’ve got support for thousands of streams, and the built-in guide makes it easy to find old favorites and great new stations as well. Best of all, Radioshift Touch’s exclusive SmartStream feature automatically chooses the best quality stream for your network connection, giving you the smoothest audio quality possible.

We’ve focused exclusively on listening to live streams with Radioshift Touch. Users of Radioshift on the Mac will be familiar with the powerful radio listings found in Radioshift Touch, as both applications are powered by our friends and partners at RadioTime. However, while Radioshift and Radioshift Touch share a common name and ancestry, they’re fully independent of one another. We’ll be considering ideas to get the two working together in interesting ways, but they were developed, and will continue to grow, as two distinct products.

Radioshift Touch is aimed squarely at listening to great live content on the iPhone. So whether you’re at home or driving cross-country, Radioshift Touch will put thousands of internet radio streams at your fingertips. Check out Radioshift Touch by visiting the Radioshift Touch webpage and purchase it right through the iPhone App Store.

Over on our Twitter account, I’ve posted about some of the testing we’re doing for Airfoil Speakers on the iPhone. We’re currently working to make the iPhone and iPod Touch available as output sources in Airfoil for Mac and Airfoil for Windows, just as we’ve done with our Airfoil Speakers on other platforms.

Discussion of Airfoil Speakers for the iPhone inevitably leads to questions about making Airfoil for the iPhone. We even talked about it way back in February, before the iPhone SDK had been unveiled. Without a doubt, we’d love to make Airfoil for the iPhone. Unfortunately, right now, it’s not feasible. Let’s examine why.

What is Airfoil for iPhone?

People actually have a few different ideas on what Airfoil for iPhone would be. Prior to Apple’s Remote.app, it might have been a remote control for iTunes running on a desktop machine. It could also be a remote control for a copy of Airfoil running on a desktop.

My vision of Airfoil for iPhone, however, is actually quite similar to Airfoil on the Mac. It would enable you to send any audio from the iPhone to remote outputs, just like on the Mac. If you’ve got a great new song, you could send it to your friend’s Apple TV while you visited. You could control audio for your whole house, by transmitting your favorite playlist from the iPhone to multiple AirPort Express units. The control Airfoil for iPhone could provide would be astounding, and it would all be in the palm of your hand.

Desires & Limitations

It sounds great, and we’d love to make it. Better still, we’ve had heard hundreds of requests for it from you, our users. The problem is that due to Apple’s iPhone SDK agreement and the way the App Store works, it is simply not possible for us to create an Airfoil for iPhone worthy of the name.

Failure #1: Getting Any Audio

The biggest hurdle preventing Airfoil for iPhone is that we can’t access other applications’ audio. We want you to be able to transmit Pandora, AOL Radio, and any other audio application. We have code that does this on the Mac and Windows and there’s no technical reason it couldn’t be done on the iPhone as well. Legally, however, it would completely violate the SDK agreement.

Failure #2: Getting iPod Audio

Instead of working with all audio, we could just work with iPod music. That would still be useful to send your own music from the iPhone to remote outputs around the house. Unfortunately, music files aren’t accessible the way things like Contacts and Photos are. With no legitimate way to access the iPod’s music, this too is a non-starter, due to the SDK’s restrictions.

Failure #3: The Only Solution Stinks

Right now there’s really only workable option in creating Airfoil for iPhone, and that’s to handle music storage ourselves. This has all sorts of issues. Users would need to manually manage a second library (in addition to the iPod) and store music twice (in our library and the iPods’). Getting audio onto the device is also bothersome, as there’s no standard way to do this. We know this solution isn’t right. It’s clunky, it requires far too much work on the user’s side, and it wouldn’t work the way we or our users wanted. As such, it’s not really a solution at all.

Jailbreaking

Users often ask if it would be possible to make an application that only ran on jailbroken phones. Doing so would mean that our only limitations would be technical hurdles, just like on Mac OS X, and we love a technical challenge. Unfortunately, we’re also running a business, and making software that requires jailbroken phones simply does not work out for us, from a business perspective.

Where Are We?

So where does that leave us? Right now, we’re stuck hoping that things change. We’ve examined our options, and found them all lacking in major ways. As much as we’d love to have Airfoil for iPhone, both for ourselves and for our users, we simply can not do it right currently. If the SDK limitations change, or Apple at least makes it possible to access iPod music files, we may revisit this. For now, however, Airfoil for iPhone is a non-starter.

We believe both you and we would be best served if we could create this software. In lieu of that, however, we’re simply working on other products. For now, keep your eyes peeled for Airfoil Speakers for the iPhone. When we’re done, you’ll be able to transmit audio from your Mac or Windows machine right to Airfoil Speakers for iPhone, giving you portable pocket speakers. We’ve been testing it for a few days, and it’s very cool. We don’t have a release date yet, but keep watching for more information!