Soo.... I'll just put a short list of the bugfixes and new features added to the most recent ooTunes server release (0.3.1.3):
- Fixed stupid IE7 crash and burn on pandora (although it still doesn't appear to load the pandora mini-player?)
- Fixed loading of pandora query on new search.
- Fixed cleanup code for deleting cached mp3 file from SSPlaylist
- Lower timeouts for MP3Tunes login (it was taking forever!!!) and for seeqpod, and artwork cache code...
- Fixed some of the non-working radio stations from itunes by not making all url's lowercase... (duh!)
I'll discuss each briefly...
- IE7 is by far my least favorite browser to code for. Perhaps it's that my feelings for Microsoft are less than positive, perhaps it's that I've read too much negativity about it, but most likely, it's because a) it is always the browser of the 4 we support that doesn't work and b) because the error reporting is awful! This bug that I fixed was no exception. Basically, when loading the pandora mini-player into a frame on the page, IE7 throws up a totally useless error:
Internet Explorer cannot open the Internet site http://demo.ootunes.com/playlist. Operation aborted.
and then, on top of that, it kills the page completely and gives a blank page... not very helpful. Enter google... fortunately, everyone and his/her dog/cat has experienced this one (been around since IE5.5 at least) so there were some useful blog posts etc. that helped explain the issue... and Microsoft's own bug system (you'd think they'd try to actually fix those but...) So now it doesn't totally croak, but for some reason, the pandora mini-player still doesn't load. Step in the right direction. - Plain and simple, the code to create a new pandora station was being ignored by an earlier request during a page load. Now the new station should appear and start playing correctly. This affected the desktop browsers, not iPhone/iPod touch mobile safari.
- In order to not litter your hard drive with cached audio files when transcoding is taking place, ooTunes deletes the last transcoded song when a new one is played. However, just in case, I make sure they are all deleted when you've played songs for awhile, this wasn't checking in the right directory.
- Yesterday when I was logging in to ooTunes, I found that it was taking FOREVER to load. I tracked it down and it was because mp3tunes was not responding, and the timeout was like a minute long. So, I changed the timeout to be 10 seconds, and did the same for seeqpod searches, as well as for checks for external artwork (typically by searching amazon).
- Finally, I figured out why several of the streaming radio stations from iTunes were not working in ooTunes but were in iTunes... I was using lowercase to find the url's for the streams, and accidentally converted them to lowercase.. but apparently some of those url's are case sensitive. I fixed it and every one I've tried so far works in ooTunes now (as long as it also works in iTunes). If you find a station that doesn't work, please let us know here and we'll try to get it working!
That's all for now...
Steve
