Restarting
If you were playing audio when you quit Radioshift Touch, it will automatically load that same stream on your next launch. This is great for when you receive a phone call or need to quickly drop out of the application for something. As soon as you relaunch, you’ll be listening to your music again.

Taps
In our 1.0.0, we were requiring too many taps to load a stream, including showing an Stream Info page that didn’t provide a whole lot. With 1.0.1, tapping a stream from search results now immediately starts it playing.

Artwork
We’re now receiving and displaying higher quality artwork where available, from our partners at RadioTime, who provide the data for Radioshift Touch.

Bitrate
We had a lot of requests to show the bitrate of the stream you’re receiving, so this is now included on the Now Playing screen. These bitrates changes with our SmartStream feature, so you may notice different bitrates for the same station, depending on your connection.

Minutia
We’ve fixed several bugs, including an issue where Favorites would no longer be sortable, improved stability on bad streams, turned off auto-correct on the search field (so you can easily search for call letters like KBBL), and more.

So if you’re already using Radioshift Touch, be sure to update through the App Store. If you haven’t used Radioshift Touch yet, you can get listening to great live content on the iPhone, with thousands of internet radio streams at your fingertips, right now. Check out Radioshift Touch by visiting the Radioshift Touch webpage and purchase it right through the iPhone App Store.

It’s called Friday Q&A. Each week I take a topic suggested by a reader and develop it into a blog post. So far I’ve posted about:

• An overview of parallel programming
• Blocks (closures) in Objective-C
• When to use or not to use private APIs

If you like those posts and would like to see one on a particular topic, feel free to post your suggestions over there, and I hope you’ll come back for more.

First, let’s get the important information out of the way. Pulsar itself requires Mac OS X 10.5 or higher and you’ll need to have a subscription to XM Radio Online or SIRIUS Internet Radio to tune in¹. Like all our Mac OS X software, Pulsar is downloadable as a free trial. In trial mode, the quality of audio played by Pulsar will degrade after 20 minutes.

While in Public Preview, Pulsar can be purchased for an introductory price of just $15. These licenses will of course work on Pulsar 1.0 when it arrives as well. Better yet, if you’ve got a license for any of our current Mac OS X products, you can receive a complimentary license for Pulsar here. You can read more about Pulsar here and download it immediately here.

Why Pulsar?

So, why did we make a satellite streaming radio client? Most XM and SIRIUS subscribers have access to this content online, through the companies’ websites. However, listening via a web browser is less than ideal, and existing third party clients also left something to be desired. We felt this was a niche we could fill well, with our own client.

Further, many users wish to listen to satellite radio around their house - through an AirPort Express, Apple TV, or even other computers. Using our own Airfoil with Pulsar, this is a snap. Others want to record content to listen to on an iPod, and Pulsar works great with Audio Hijack Pro. Pulsar complements these applications very well, and we’re certainly hoping Pulsar will encourage sales of Airfoil and Audio Hijack Pro.

Why a Public Preview?

We originally planned to release Pulsar earlier, knowing it likely had bugs but desiring to get it into users’ hands. This is something of a difficult application to test, and to find testers for, and we felt a Public Preview would serve us well. I say originally, because we kept finding and fixing issues on our own. At this point, it’s quite polished. There are still several things that keep this from being a full 1.0, so we’re keeping the Public Preview tag, but we believe it’s very solid.

Pulsar is also a testing ground for some exciting new technology, AHKit2, that will be powering many of our products in the future. Quentin will likely talk more about AHKit2 in a future blog post, but that’s part of why Pulsar is a preview release - this is our first product shipping with this major new code.

Notes & Known issues

This is a Public Preview, meaning there are some rough edges. This includes the following:

Mini-mode: Pulsar does not currently have a mini-mode. We hope to add this in the future, possibly for Pulsar 1.0.

802.11n AirPort Base Station issues: If you have an 802.11n AirPort base station and receive a “Stream Playback Error - Connection refused” when attempting to play a station, you should reset your modem and AirPort Base Station. This appears to be a bug in the current version of the 802.11n AirPort Base Station, not a Pulsar issue.

Error reporting: Error reporting is not finalized yet in many places, so some errors may be less than helpful. If you’re reporting an error, please include screenshots of the errors, as well as Console logs.

XM Tuning: XM Radio Online has been having various issues over the past few days, and we’re keeping an eye on this. We’ve improved tuning when their service is working poorly, but there may still be issues to be ironed out.

North America-centric: At this time, XM and SIRIUS are available only in the US and Canada. You can trial the online services, but both require a US billing address to sign up. Unfortunately, this means Pulsar is largely useful for American and Canadian users.

Wrap It Up
That’s the short and the long of it. If you subscribe to satellite radio currently, you should definitely try out Pulsar. If you don’t, why not take a free three day trial? XM Radio Online is just $7.99 a month, and SIRIUS Internet Radio is $12.99 a month, with neither requiring any other hardware. We hope you’ll enjoy Pulsar, and share your feedback by contacting us directly!

Footnotes:
1. If you’re an XM subscriber, you may need to activate online access, free of charge. If you’re a SIRIUS subscriber, you may need to pay extra for high-quality online access.

If you don’t have SIRIUS or XM, you can give either one (or both) a try, with their free 3-day trials. See this link for more details. ↩

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.

The Final Frontier. Now In Stereo.

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!

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.

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!

Thanks go to David Smith and the Adium project for reporting this bug.

The bug was due to improper use of the mach_msg call. The old version of RAOperationQueue didn’t allocate space for a message trailer, which is required. Although we informed mach_msg that our buffer was small, it ignored us and wrote right off the end. Hilarity once again ensued.

For more info on what RAOperationQueue is and why you might want to use it, see RAOperationQueue, an open-source replacement for NSOperationQueue.

Although I do not look forward to porting all the code we have from python 2.5 to python 3.0, I very much look forward to python 3.0 when we get there.