Shuttle (free) finally gets an update

I've finally managed to finish an update for Shuttle..

I've been busy with heaps of other stuff.. Seeing shows at the Melbourne Comedy Festival, watching TV shows, working, reading more Game of Thrones (almost done), travelling over Easter, playing Bioshock (holy shit it's awesome).. all the usual stuff.

I put a lot of effort into Shuttle over the Easter holidays though, and I made a lot of progress.

Best part:

 I've also added Genres, and a quick 'add to favourites' button.

Another cool feature (which most of you reading this won't notice), is language support. I've gone one better than Google Translate for German, Italian, Farsi (and soon to be included Turkish), thanks for those who contributed.

I've also included translations for Chinese, French, Russian and Bulgarian, although those translations are sloppy at best. If anyone can contribute (for any language), please, drop me a line.

Oh and there's DashClock support now!!

So that's cool. I've also tweaked the UI a bit, and fixed about 15 persistent bugs which have been pissing people off for months. Naturally I introduced some new ones, just to keep you guys on your toes.

Shuttle is doing really well, I've almost hit 30,000 downloads. A big thank you to ANOMA for their generous review, /r/Android for all the feedback and support, the various translators, anyone's who's purchased Shuttle+, and everyone who's taken the time to e-mail me with their feedback and suggestions. Shuttle+ has tipped over the 1k mark as well, so that's awesome!!

I'm planning on adding folder support in the near future, so keep your eyes out for that. Yeah that's right. I'm actually going to do it.

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Get Shuttle (free)

Shuttle+ ($AU 2.00)

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AMP+ gets it's first update & AMP hits 10,000 downloads!

Finally, after a ton of testing, heaps of late nights and long weekends, I've updated AMP+.

I've had a heap of e-mails, and I've been busy improving AMP+ accordingly. I try to choose some of the things I'd like to see myself, some of the most requested features, and admittedly some of the stuff that's easier to do, as I've been pressed for time lately. The big one is themes. After a heap of time working on the layout, I'm pleased to say they're ready.

By the way, I saw Django Unchained. I know I'm jumping on the bandwagon here, but it was a freaking amazing movie. I've also been distracted reading the 3rd book of 'a song of ice and fire'.. Watching the AMP/AMP+ downloads grow has kept me focused though, and I'm happy with what I've achieved since the last update.

Here's a preview of the 'mixed' theme:

I've also managed to fix a whole bunch of issues with the equalizer. It's been particularly temperamental on custom roms, but hopefully that's resolved now. If the AudioManager is not accessible on your device, it should still work with a custom preset, and the values of that preset should be remembered by AMP+. At the very least, it shouldn't force close anymore. 

Scrobbling support has been included, by way of 'Simple Last.FM Scrobbler'. Fortunately the developer Adam Renberg has done a fantastic job with that, and it was simple to integrate.

I've also re-worked the settings menu, reversed the gesture controls, added a search function, improved the back button functionality, and ironed out a bunch of other bugs.

AMP has passed 10,000 downloads, which is amazing! I'm overwhelmed at the numbers. Here's a graph and a lovely pie-chart to prove it.. I know you guys love pie-charts.


















Anyway, that's my bit for now. I hope you enjoy the update, and as always, drop in your feedback if you have the time.

AMP+ Google Play Store

AMP Google Play Store

AMP+ Facebook Page

AMP Google+

Theming AMP+

I've been working on some themes for AMP+. Let me know what you think! I've also started up a facebook page. Please check out the link below and show your support!

I'm pleased to say AMP+ is doing pretty well (up to about 70 downloads now), and it's about #40 on 'Top New Paid' apps (at least here in Australia it is)..

Also, here's my personal to-do list: (for the next update):

Hi-priority:


-Create file associations for mp3's etc..
-Song playing through speakers when next track comes up. Reported from 'recently added' list. Only happening for some users on S3.
-Fix all the fucking equalizer crashes (overhaul)
-Fix the damn back button issue (it's ignoring the 2 second rule)
-Add 'all songs' for Artists
-Fix text colour for all themes
-Fix image background colours for all themes
-Make notification ducking optional
-Make search backwards-compatible to API 8
-Deleted songs not necessarily removed from lists (invoke media scanner)
-Prevent shuffle from repeating songs or make this an option
-When a song finishes and playback ends show the album art of the next song.
-Have AMP come up when 'Play Music' is said in Google Now.?? Does that even work anyway?
-Re-include widget transparency options
-Add 'add to favourites'
-Remove party shuffle (what the fuck is that anyway)?
-Add option to sort by album-artist instead of artist, or add tab.
-Add jaudiotagger back in. Fuck native development code just get tagging happening.
-Send music through A2DP (if it's not ridiculously hard to figure out)
-Landscape mode looks horrendous at the moment. DO NOT EXPORT in it's current state.

Other cool stuff to do:

-Add a 4.2 widget

-Add a larger widget with a list.

-Song ratings

-Choose which tabs display

-Progress indicator in notification bar

-Progress indicator in widget

-Gallery scrolling option in landscape mode..

And of course:

-Folder browsing.... (eventually).

Here are the screenshots:

*Themes might only be released for AMP+, at least initially, to provide incentive to upgrade!

AMP+ on Facebook

AMP+ on Google+

AMP+ on the Google Play Store

AMP+ is live!

After testing the waters on reddit (/r/Android), nearly everyone has suggested that a 'donate' version would be the best way to go if I want to make some money from AMP.

I've decided to go with that, and called it AMP+. It's on the Play Store for $0.99.

I'm not sure whether AMP+ will be any different from AMP, but I promise I will never introduce ads, and I will never remove a feature from AMP (unless it's a crap feature!).

So maybe AMP+ will get earlier updates, or maybe it will be more stable and AMP will get the updates quicker.. Maybe AMP+ will get more themes.. I don't know! All I know is that I'll make around $0.70 every time someone downloads AMP+, so if 228,572 people download it, I'll be able to buy this second-hand Porsche:

Anyway, I've been working on adding a search feature for AMP(+), an add to favorites button, lyrics downloading and a couple of other things. Hopefully I'll have the next update out within a couple of weeks.

If anyone wants to test an early release, just e-mail me.

You can get AMP here:
AMP - Google Play Store

AMP+ here:
AMP+ - Google Play Store

And follow me on Google+ here:
Google+

I'm workin' on it!

Still working away at AMP. It was a busy holiday season, and I managed to get quite a bit done considering the small amount of time I got to spend on it.

I've been back at work, running, riding, watching Homeland (awesome), reading, learning Jiu-Jitsu and coding. Man do I love Homeland. I've gone off The Walking Dead, I thought it got really lame and repetitive. It's like the acting is pretty good, the CGI is good, but the plot line freakin' sucks.

Unlike Homeland. Which has Claire Danes.

So all that stuff kept me fairly distracted, but I managed to release a few updates to AMP. The major update v1.2.0 featured:

• Album art downloading
• Equalizer
• Settings menu

As per usual, there were a few bugs. In fact, I made a major noob mistake. In the google developer console, there's a spot where you can view all of the bug reports made by you guys, so when AMP crashes and you send it, I can try and figure out why. Anyway, I thought I'd fixed a major bug where the app would just force close when a user is scrolling the list of albums.. So I pressed 'hide' on the bug, thinking I'd fixed it, and I assumed if the bug persisted and people sent more reports, it would unhide itself and I would be aware. I was wrong!

I was looking at the current bugs, and for some reason I pressed 'unhide', revealing one particular error which had occurred about 70 times! That probably equates to about 50 people who thought 'fuck this I'll use one that works', and uninstalled. Seeing as all I get out of AMP is seeing my user-base expand, I was horrified. Anyway I set about fixing the problem, and AMP v1.2.1 was released. Fast forward a couple of days and I'm getting e-mails about another bug.. It seems adding a single song to the playlist is broken. So I went on a mission and squashed a whole heap of bugs, and learnt a few tricks along the way. Hopefully AMP will crash a whole lot less on your devices now.

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So I've been working on the 'now playing' screen at the bottom (top in landscape) of the main page. I needed to free up the space on the 'Action Bar' at the top of the screen, particularly in landscape mode, so I can eventually add 'search', 'favourite' and potentially 'remove' buttons. Here's a before and after of the landscape view:

I'll probably make a few minor adjustments, but I'm pretty happy with it. I hope you guys are too! I might make the album art 'swipeable', so you can skip tracks that way.

The other thing I've been working on is id3 tag editing. The next major update will hopefully have fully-fledged tag editing capability, so you can modify artist/album/song names. I intend to make it easy to update whole artists/albums at a time, so you can look forward to that.

The other big thing I'm aiming at for the next update is lyrics support. I envisage double tapping on the album would switch it with the lyrics.. Unless I think of some better way to incorporate it.

Favourites and search will also be included hopefully.

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Lastly, I feel I should address the issue of folder browsing:

I had all but given up on the idea of implementing folder browsing, because it seems like a hugely time consuming and difficult task. I've had a few e-mails though and I've been inspired to give it another look. I suppose I'll create a side project for implementing folders into AMP, and start looking into it.

It's on the cards, but I have no idea how far away it is at this stage.

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You can download AMP from the Google Play Store:

AMP - Google Play Store

Follow me on Google+ to be notified of updates:

Google+

Checking in again. So the equalizer has been done for a little while, but I got ahead of myself and started working on album art downloading. Now that's nearly done, and I should be releasing an update fairly shortly.

The album art is fetched from Last.fm, and can be found under the options menu. Album art doesn't download automatically, you'll have to choose 'download album art'.. That way people worried about their data plans, or preserving their current a;bum art don't have to worry. Also, you can download album art for individual albums.

The equalizer is looking good, and working pretty well. The only issue is that although AMP works fine with DSP manager, the equalizer in AMP doesn't. It seems like either you use DSP manager or the AMP equalizer, but not both. Anyway if you've got a stock rom you won't have a problem, but if not, just disable DSP/3rd party equalizers, or don't use the AMP equalizer. Have fun with that!

Now that album art downloading has been implemented, I've got a better handle on how that stuff works. I should be able to add lyric downloading as well as scrobbling pretty soon. I'll have to be wary not to go down the unfortunate path Andrew Neal had to with Apollo (he got stooged by some douchebag lawyers for getting lyrics from a site that a competitive music player was affiliated with). But you can look forward to lyrics fetching soon.

I'll be busy over Christmas, so I hope to get the next feature set out before then.

You can give me an awesome Christmas present by downloading AMP. To make it more awesome, tell all your friends about it too!

Heres a giant list of feature requests, bugs and other stuff, and a bit of a summary of how I have/will dealt/deal with it:

1. Fix album art stretched on larger screens
Done.

2. Add enqueue feature
Done.

3. Editable/renamable/creatable playlists
Done.

4. Make Google Play Music playlists compatible
Harder than I thought.. Not gonna bother for a while.

5. Fix notification controls for all Android versions
Done.

6. Add lockscreen controls where possible
Hmm. I've added them but they don't seem to work on all devices.

7. MP3 tag editing
Looked into this extensively. Probably not too far away.

8 Album art downloading
Pretty much done!

9. More persistent image caching
Well, the image caching is pretty good as it is.

10. Fix bitmaps going dead when service stops
Fixed.

11. Make sure gapless works correctly
Works on 4.1+, not available pre 4.1

12. Fix music skipping on screen unlock
Problem with custom rom. Don't blame AMP!

13. Add stop/cancel button where possible
Meh, no need anymore, pausing idles the service, and it stops after a minute.

14. Add landscape mode
Added!

15. Support tablet screens
Supported!

16. File/folder browsing
<Siiiiiiggghhhh> I genuinely can't be fucked with this at the moment. I know that's disappointing to a lot of people, but it's like telling the Red Bull F1 team to build a giant statue of a penguin. With no funds. Oh and a race is in progress..

See they would probably do an awesome job, but it would distract them from all the other awesome shit they're doing, it would take ages, and the race would suffer for it. They'd probably get sacked from their day job, and lose a lot of race fans along the way.

17. Put the widget text above the controls rather than below
Put.

18. Fix force closing when scrolling in album list.
Fixed.

19. Add 'genius' type smart playlists
Eventually.

20. Add genres category
Later.

21. Sort artists by 'artists album' or add category
Apparently a lot of people want this. I keep forgetting, but I'll try to make it a priority.

22. Recently added list
Done.

23. Add 4x2 & 2x1 widgets
Finished the 2x1, not sure what to do with the 4x2..

24. Lockscreen controls on more devices
I think I mentioned this already. I've tried, not sure how successful though.

25. Change viewpager tab strip to 'less distracting colour'
Changed.

26. Improve the icon
No.

27. Media volume control throughout entire app
Done.

28. Remove lockscreen controls once service is idle
Done.

29. Widget transparency options
In progress..  There's a couple of bugs with this, which I've been working on. In the mean time the widget is 30% opaque.

30. Customisable headset controls (including plugging/unplugging jack)
I intend to add this shortly, I can see that it's useful to a lot of people, and it won't be hard to do.

31. Fix the navigation to conform to Android standards
Fixed. The navigation was overhauled recently and makes way more sense.

32. Artist art for artist list
Meh not sure how much I care about this.

33. More customisation options & a settings menu
Again, lot's of requests. I don't want to make AMP so customisable that it looses it's feel.. I like AMP the way it is, but there is scope for some customisation. Some music players over do it, and they feel bloated..

Anyway I intend to add a couple of themes, and some other options in the not too distant future.

34. Create an activity for viewing the 'now playing' queue
Will do.

35. Add ratings & play counts
A little way off in the distance.

36. Support soft-keys
Honestly don't really know what this means. I'll look into it.

37. Lyrics fetching
Lyrics fetching will be easy now that album art downloading has been implemented. Not too far away.

38. Scrobbling.
As above, easy to implement. Hopefully I'll have scrobbling before too long.

39. DLNA Support
This is pretty complex and beyond the scope of AMP at this stage. I don't have the skills or the time to look at DLNA/UPNP support at the moment.

40. Google cloud music support
When Google release an official API, I'll look into implementing it in AMP.

41. Add an equalizer
Equalizer has been added. Gets a bit funky when used in conjunction with DSP manager, but you can use one OR the other.

42. Support DSP manager
Supported.

43. Replaygain
Complex DSP stuff is again beyond the scope of AMP at the moment. AMP uses the standard android media player and the API's available. Adding these kind of features will require completely reworking the way AMP decodes audio, which mean accounting for all the different filetypes etc. and their handling. This may happen in the future, or not at all.

44. Crossfade
Crossfade is a little easier than replaygain. I don't know if I'll implement it because I personally don't think it adds much value to a mediaplayer.

45. Dynamic range compression
As for 43.

46. Car mode / dock mode. Hehe docking.
This would be pretty easy to do. I should look at it before long. I imagine huge play/pause/next/previous/shuffle/repeat buttons, and not much else!

47. Add a 'search' feature
This probably isn't all that difficult, but not that sought after either. I'll keep it in mind though.

Well, if you got through all that you've done well. Feel free to send in your suggestions/feedback.


Get AMP here:

AMP - Play Store

Or here:
AMP - Amazon App Store

Follow me on Google+
Google+

Here's some pretty pictures:

Jiu Jitsu, The Walking Dead and an Equalizer!

I've been busy - recently started learning jiu jitsu, and did some Thai boxing classes.. I still manage to find time to feed my pet (AMP). The only other thing holding me back - someone put me on to the walking dead, so naturally I have to watch that as much as possible.

[Spoiler] I have to say - judging by his beard, it seems Rick has only been in a coma for like.. 3 weeks. It didn't take long for his wife & best mate to start banging (obviously due to their overwhelming grief). Unless they were already banging from before the whole apocalypse. Also, they probably haven't showered for ages. And what if she gets pregnant? Jeez. [/Spoiler]

Anyway:

I should have another update for AMP by the end of the coming weekend.

I haven't checked in for a bit, but I thought I'd let you know how the progress with the equalizer is going:

I've managed to get it working (mostly), but a few bugs remain, and I haven't looked at landscape mode or optimizing it for tablets yet.

The equalizer currently looks like this:

Obviously I also need to do a bit of work on the UI.

So far, I haven't looked at any advanced features such as crossfeed, dynamic range compression etc. Once the music folder browsing is on it's way, I'll have better control over the audio, and I'll endeavour to implement some of these features.

I've also been bugfixing - A few people have advised that clicking on the notification bar doesn't do anything (3.0+ - 4.0 devices). This has been fixed and will come out in the next update. A Couple of other force close bugs have been fixed as well, and I've further optimized album art loading.

Album art downloading is something else I've been investigating a fair bit, so I should be implementing that in the not too distant future.

Any suggestions on the equalizer (and AMP in general) are more than welcome.

If you haven't got it already, you can download AMP here:

AMP - Google Play Store

AMP - Amazon App Store

Follow me on Google+ if you'd like to stay informed:

Google+