What happened to Simplify Media for iPhone?

One of my customers pointed out to me today that Simplify Media pulled their apps from the iTunes app store AND may be shutting their doors in the next few months, or at least taking it "in a new direction". Anyway, I find it a bit sad that such a promising product would disappear overnight, but I can't really say that I'm surprised at all by this. I've never understood the "give things away" model. While Google can seemingly give and give and give for free, they a) have a HUGE source of revenue (namely advertising) and b) have ways to make money already in place for many of these freebies (ie, ads in gmail, youtube, etc.).

I suppose that the part that surprises me most is that it took them so long to realize that they didn't have a sustainable business model... I watched (at first with joy) as they dropped in ranking as the raised the price of the app, and charged again for a very minor update, but as they kept dropping with what was (in my opinion) a great product and with enormous amounts of press, something more seemed to be wrong. The server part of ooTunes is really not a blockbuster and I attribute that primarily to 2 things: 1) it's really a niche market... there simply aren't that many people who have huge music libraries who aren't okay just syncing songs selectively with their devices and 2) the setup for remote serving is a tricky proposition. Simplify made it "just work" but they did so at the cost of centralizing it, meaning they were footing the bandwidth bill for all that streaming... doesn't take a genius to know that when you give something away that encourages using lots of bandwidth, and you're paying for that bandwidth, you're going to run out of money! The ooTunes server can (and will) keep working for years to come, because the cost to me to keep it up and running (other than development time, etc.) is miniscule compared to the bandwidth bills of Simplify (who, if you don't know, gave away their product to probably 10s if not 100s of thousands of users before ever charging a dime!)

Simplify probably could have started selling ads to cover some of those costs, except that they'd then started selling the app, and that kinda doesn't make for happy customers either!

So, I guess we'll know what they come up with in the next 3 months to overcome their current problems, and I do hope they don't just drop all those of us who've paid for their app (or paid twice or even thrice).

So if you're reading this and you're wondering what life would be like without Simplify Media, I invite you to give ooTunes a try. I can't promise the same setup simplicity or sharing your friends music, but I've been using ooTunes every day for over 2 years now, and it's very solid and powerful for those who want all their music on their 16 gig phone.

If you're at all unsatisfied with the ooTunes Server, I have a 30 day refund policy, and I'm not afraid to use it! I'll be the first to admit that it's not for everyone...

Apple Lala and what it means to me (and ooTunes)

As many may have heard, it appears that Apple has indeed purchased Lala. This is bittersweet news to me for many reasons.

First off, I was a very early user of lala (back when it was a CD trading website, I did about 100 trades to help me get a lot of music that I'd been meaning to buy, in exchange for some old cd's I didn't like much anymore). I was very impressed with the openness and the talent of their founder(s) and engineers. So impressed, that I even sent them a Résumé (my first ever non-academic Résumé to be sure). It was a fun experience, and I got replies from at least 2 founders, the most notable one from Bill Nguyen (co-founder, successful serial entrepreneur, CEO and someone I respect very highly).
Here's part of his response:

I'll bite on your interest in being a part of lala, but here are my concerns;

1. It's really expensive to live in the Bay Area. You've got a family including a young daughter. Have you considered the lifestyle implications.

2. The ootunes demo is pretty slow and buggy. What's with that?

(mind you this was back in May of '08 shortly after I launched the ooTunes server).

So what did I do? (Well I actually had 3 kids, and now a 4th on the way, something that certainly would have been tough)

I thought it was awesome I got that response from him, with a valuable bit of feedback. I took a hard look at how long it took to login/use the demo (and found some severe IE bugs), and a bunch of unnecessary network calls that were too slow for services like mp3tunes (and even at the time, to lala.com itself, more on that later) and fixed them asap. (FWIW, I just timed full load of lala.com vs. full login/load of demo.ootunes.com and the winner was... ooTunes, by 2 seconds, but that's neither here nor there ;)

Anyway, I say this more to say that I believed in them from the beginning. They changed along the way (got a little less "transparent" about what they were doing, and moved to some more mainstream features than cd trading, but that's what happens when you have millions of dollars in VC money and the accompanying strings). Interestingly, at that time, ooTunes actually had integration with lala.com, even allowing you to listen to your LaLa uploaded tracks from the iPhone through my (then jailbreak only, remember this was before the app store even existed) iPhone app, or even the Safari browser on the iPhone. This was (unsurprisingly) broken about a week after they checked out the demo (and I took that as a sign that this wasn't welcome, so I let it be).

So, while I have no clue what (if anything) will become of lala.com as we know it, so far I know that the CD trading is officially gone (as they've been referring people to another trading site).

I don't think the lala.com app is going to suddenly show up in the app store (and this may have been part of the reason for the buyout, iTunes couldn't have survived this, I don't think, though I've also been told that LaLa.com didn't have the rights for mobile streaming anyway so I'm sure that's not the only way to prevent accepting it).

I personally think that Apple will one day do something similar with mobile.me or some way to stream your iTunes tracks to your phone (they've got related patents filed, for instance, and it makes sense to do). I don't think it's going to be anytime soon though.

So I'm thrilled that something I instantly loved and knew would succeed was bought by "the who's who" in this field.
I'm excited for what it *might* bring to Apple (streaming, subscription services, free preview listens?).
I'm exceptionally happy for those guys who worked so hard to make it happen. They're very talented and deserve a big payoff.
And, I'm terrified of what it means for ooTunes (not just the server, but the radio playing iPhone app, at least in the short term). However not for the reasons some people may think... let me explain:

a) Apple's never followed the "one app at a time" rule that 3rd party developers have to follow. Apple can make an app that does what ooTunes does, but let it run in the background like their own iPod app. That seems a bit unfair to me (given the number one feature request for ooTunes is just that) but that's the breaks.

b) If Apple's going to be competing in this area, that might hurt my (very meager) sales of the ooTunes Server (something I'm not too worried about since it's really at hobby level for me at this point anyway).

c) Here's the one that's got me scared... I recently added "lala" as a keyword for my app in iTunes (apple now gives developers 100 characters of keywords to make the app more searchable in iTunes and the app store). That wouldn't be a big deal except that I've submitted a much needed (and AWESOME) updated version to Apple, yet received their dreaded "this review is taking longer than expected" email from Apple indicating *something* needs further review. There are horror stories of people who get that email only to find their review is still in limbo even months later. So let's hope this isn't ooTunes' fate (especially given that the features of the ooTunes server are very similar to lala's offerings, IMHO justifying the keyword, and news of this acquisition only surfaced in the last day or two, and the app was submitted long before that!)

But as the communication channels between me and Apple consist a pretty uninformative email when they feel like it, I'm left worrying about it all...

ooTunes Radio iPhone Review

Well, this last week has been phenominal since the release of ooTunes Radio 2.0. From the start (Apple never actually notified me that the update was accepted... still waiting for an apology from them on that), to now (over 2,000 downloads later!) things have been a bit unexpected. It's currently at the number 14th most popular paid Music application in the US app store. Some people might say "so what?" but to them I say... I've gotten there with absolutely no paid advertising, almost exclusively word of mouth advertising and google web searches, a ton of help and suggestions from friends, customers and beta testers, and a lot of late late nights... To this day, as far as I know, I've had ZERO reviews of ooTunes on even any smaller (or possibly even personal blogs!??).

So, since it's been out for almost 3 months now, and the Outstanding 2.0 update has been out for a week now, and I've even TRIED to get someone to review it this time... (to be fair, there are a few people who say a review is in the works :/), I've decided to capitalize on the google search traffic that apparently has nowhere to go until SOMEONE posts a real review... so here is my totally unbiased review of ooTunes Radio 2.0.

It's AWESOME, especially when you look at where it came from. 4 months ago, I'd never written a single application in Objective-C (the programming language most used for developing iPhone apps). I wrote it in my spare time (such a thing used to exist for me I think). I did it ENTIRELY without using a real iPhone (I have an iPod touch thanks to both the most expensive Christmas present I've ever received, as well as the longest lasting). In fact, I did it almost entirely without using the iPhone OS Simulator since about a month into development, it just stopped working on my computer... go figure :(

So, keeping that in mind, the first released version was far from perfect... the start was even more rocky when I found out about 2 hours before the app was accepted for sale, that I'd have to remove one of the cool features! (Note to others with no business experience... get something in writing BEFORE you decide to use a 3rd party's services...)

Also, many of the reviewers were angry because they had assumed that the ooTunes Server was included in the $4 iPhone purchase... so beyond bugs, it also had a bunch of negative reviews in iTunes for that... I quickly changed the description to use ALL CAPS and ******'s galore to make it so any rational individual who glanced at the description should grasp the features that required the server and those that didn't.

So, I realized that I'd catered a bit to those who were willing and able to buy and run the ooTunes Media Server and left some of the features of the plain old iPhone app lacking... so with version 2.0, I concentrated on making the app the absolute best radio player in the store... and it turned out, even better than I could have hoped! I knew as I was finishing up beta testing that this version was going to go somewhere (the earlier versions had a couple of short stint's on the top 20 music apps, but nothing lasting...)

So here we are, ooTunes Radio 2.0 is NOT the last word, by any means. I have a huge list of additional features to add, improvements, customizations to settings additional audio formats, etc. I'll be working more on the next update as early as this coming week, as long as I can get to it between providing the VERY BEST customer support anyone could ask for, and taking my son on an outing to celebrate him not peeing the bed for 3 consecutive nights! (You rock Herbie!).

So, was this really a review? No. But it was long, and it was pretty positive, so I'll rate this post 3 stars (out of 5).

And if you happen upon this while searching for a review of ooTunes Radio, why don't you tell someone at a REAL website that you'd be interested in seeing a review, I'd assume there are other people who listen to user's feedback :)

P.S. Buy ooTunes..

Live Video Streaming on iPhone 3.0!

Title says it all. My job just became a million times easier to get that working. No more porting FFmpeg, SDL, etc. or paying for a 3rd party streaming sdk. This is quite simply awesome!

That's all, can't say more since it's still under NDA.

App store reviews now separated by version!

Since the last two posts were complaining (about apple) I'll restore some balance...


Apple really does seem to be listening to developer feedback. One of the annoying things for developers and reviews of their apps is that they are cumulative for all versions of the app, so if someone has a rough start, it's hard to shake the early reviews. Well, now in the reviews, they've added "Average for all versions" as well as (presumably) average for the current version! This will of course also mean that it works the other way, if for some reason your app blows up after the second update (after having lots of great feedback) then would-be buyers will also see that the the current version maybe isn't as good as it used to be. It doesn't go as far as letting developers actually RESPOND to the feedback, but it certainly is a step in the right direction. Here's a couple of images from my own app's page.







Also of note, it appears that they now show the total number of ratings, not just those with actual textual reviews. Though I still think they should separate the non-text reviews from the averages since they are highly biased downward by asking for a rating when an app is deleted :(

Note, I haven't yet upgraded to iTunes 8.1 yet so this is a feature for everyone, not just the newly upgraded.

I hope they also made the dang thing load a bit faster (and cache old pages a bit less) but I won't hold my breath since those are typically mutually exclusive demands.

Oooh, it also has a last modified date by all the reviews, I like it!

One more request (since I'm pretty sure steve jobs read this blog): LET DEVELOPERS SEE THE INTERNATIONAL REVIEWS FOR THEIR APP please, instead of having to resort to some crazy screenscraping hack which is undoubtably slowing the store down for everyone else...

Performance improvements...

One of the reasons that I originally wrote ooTunes was because I was very put off with the poor performance of other alternatives.  I tried DOT.Tunes (it was using 10% of my cpu all the time, and resyncing with my iTunes library took minutes).  I tried slimserver and found that in order to keep the slimserver database in sync with my iTunes library I had to run a 1 hour long sync.  I chose to do this during the night, since it bogged down my computer and made playing music from the library skip and buffer.  I spent a lot of time tacking on additional functionality (like marking songs played when I played them, etc.) but it was obnoxious not to be able to see changes to a playlist for as much as 24 hours.  So, ooTunes was born.  I spent a lot of time writing and optimizing the code that reads the iTunes library.  It now is parsed in under 5 seconds, without freezing up my computer, and that's on a library with 14,000 tracks!  This means, what you see through ooTunes is basically what you have in your iTunes library.  If it isn't, reload  the page, and it will be.  

Well, I spent several of the last few days further increasing the pageload speed.  I found that a lot of the time when refreshing the page (usually re-reading the iTunes library is the biggest part of that, though it only re-reads it if there have been changes since the last read), was spent reading online playlist from mp3tunes and pandora.  Many people don't use these so they wouldn't be seeing the slowdown, but for me, it was taking an extra few seconds each time I reloaded.  So I made changes to do a better job caching those as well.  (the demo will now load about twice as fast as it used to, on a fresh login!)

The other area that I've spent (probably too much) time optimizing in the last few days is the load speed on the iPhone or iPod touch.  I found it a bit frustrating on my large library (granted, I also have a not-yet-released feature of my photo library being loaded, which is something like 2000 more playlists to render) but I still thought it could use some speedup.  So I've reduced the image sizes using some cool compression tools that compress images losslessly, and more importantly, I ditched the dependency on Scriptaculous/prototype on the iPhone!  I seriously regret ever having started using Scriptaculous, it brings in something like 60kb (compressed) of javascript libraries for a few tasks (mostly the drag and drop of songs on playlists, etc. in the regular browser)... and there's no fine grained modularity (no way to say, I only want this feature, give me the bare minimum javascript library!)  So, the iPhone interface now loads in about half as much time as it used to (at least on my own library).  There is still a lot of room for improvement, but I'm pleased with the progress that's been made.

I also made some needed changes to the interface on the iPhone.  No longer do you have to tap 10 times to get a song to play (it's still more than anyone would like but I've reduced it as much as I can, tapping a song once now loads the song and one more time on the quicktime play button and it should begin playing).  Radio stations and movies are even better.  One tap and they are playing!   (the reason is that they don't do back to back playlists so they don't require the little play button to be pushed).  I wish apple would give us some REAL javascript controls for the embedded quicktime player, but it doesn't seem to be top on their priorities.  However, it's much better now that I fixed my own problems.  

Now if only I could have made more progress on MooTunes.  It's coming along but my love for "speed optimizing" just overwhelmed my love of making tons of money!

Also, please send me your suggestions and requests for improvements!  I would have probably never made some of these changes if someone wouldn't have spoken out about it!

Why you can not play live video on the iPhone

The question I and many others have about the iPhone is: 

Can we make it play live video?  

I'm not talking about prerecorded video (that's doable, and really easy, ooTunes does that already, along with tons of other apps, including the youtube app).  Also, I'm talking about this in the context of an officially released app in the app store, built using the iPhone SDK.  The problem has already been solved using the jailbreak toolchain, but doesn't work for official apps because of 3 and 5 below, and 4 below is still very applicable. 

I'd be ecstatic if someone would prove me wrong on any of this... so put in your comments, please!

So, nothing's impossible, but it's extraordinarily difficult for the following reasons:

1. There is nothing built in to the iPhone to handle true rtsp streaming
   
2. The only formats available to be played on the built in video player are .mov, x264 or mpeg4 all of which require a frame index in the moov atom at the beginning in order to be played as they're downloaded.  Unfortunately, for a live stream such information is simply not available until the encoding is finished.
   
3. Should you desire to build your own video player, the SDK doesn't give access to the private frameworks that apple uses for video decoding or the raw framebuffer that a player would need to have fast display.  There are workarounds (that are suboptimal) but no one can show source thanks to the developer NDA that is still in effect. (technically this comment is probably out of line, though I've gleaned it from reading/searching the web, NOT from the sdk). 
   
4. Without proper hardware optimized methods, you're going to be a battery hog, and probably limited in resolution.
   
5. Now, imagining that all of the above is somehow overcome (which I am sure it has been by some)... now the question is: "Will apple accept your app into the store?"  It is against the terms of most (if not all) service provider's agreements to stream live anything (and video isn't going to be low bandwidth).
   

So, the options are:

• Figure out a way to encode live video with predictable metadata (fixed frame boundaries and packet sizes)
  
• Write your own video player from scratch to decode whatever type of stream you want (remember 3, 4 and 5 above)
  
• File feature enhancements and otherwise petition Apple in hopes that they'll add support for RTSP or change their SDK to allow for this.
  
• Encode in short snippets and try to play them back to back seamlessly, with no breaks... this way you almost have live video (delayed by the amount of time to encode and start playing a single snippet).
  
• Give up on it?
  

So for ooTunes, I've learned the hard way all of the above.  My latest efforts have been in porting the ogg theora video codec.  I've gotten as far as decoding, but can't yet display fast enough due to 3 and 4 above.  It's questionable due to 5 whether it's even worth anyone's efforts.

Hope that helps someone, and I also hope that someone can prove me wrong on some of the negative stuff above. 

Woohoo! Apple finally drops NDA on iPhone development!

See mac rumors note here:

Apple Drops iPhone Non Disclosure Agreement (NDA)

This is a wonderful thing for ooTunes!  I'm about halfway to getting video working (live video that is) but one of the libraries needed didn't have source available due to the NDA.  Now I don't have to reinvent the wheel!  Example code will be much more available, etc.  now if only I had 26 hours a day!  

Had to say something... after the meanish stuff I've said in the past.

hallelujah!

I finally finished going through my latest list of radio stations from the ooTunes demo to mark them as working or not!  This resulted in about 2897 stations confirmed to be working with the iphone (and this is by no means a complete list of stations that will work).  This is good for at least 3 reasons:

1. It forced me to finally get Real Audio streams to work
2. It made me realize I really need a way to add streams directly from ooTunes (it's about half implemented already)
3. I can FINALLY get back to listening to my own music and streams (instead of having to listen to conservative talk shows, sports shows, religious shows, and boring political news)

So, coming soon:  search and add stations from the your iPhone/browser, lots more radio stations (including BBC stations that didn't work before due to using Real Audio), Genius Playlist creation (even from songs you don't yet own, but like, ie, from seeqpod), and some bug fixes.

list of radio streams that work on your iPhone with ooTunes

I spent a bit of time today exporting and making searchable the list of radio stations that I've confirmed to work on iphone and ipod touch via ooTunes.  This is (of course) an ever growing list, which I've built mostly by requests from folks who are wondering how to listen to streaming radio on their iphone, usually with a favorite station or two.  There are some great programs out there for streaming certain streams (AOL radio, Tuner, Flytunes.fm, etc.) but to my knowledge, ooTunes is the only one that allows windows media streams (.asf, .asx, .wmv, .wma, mms, etc.) to be streamed to iPhone.  So, without any further ado, check out the new searchable station list (I'll try to update it every few days), and as always, if you want to know if your favorite NPR station or specialty stream works, drop us a note and we'll look into it!

 

Pandora on iPhone

Well, the news just hit that Pandora.com (finally) lets people listen and create stations, etc. from the iPhone. This is fantastic! This was one of the reason's I created ooTunes! Sure, ooTunes has let you listen to pandora on your iphone for almost half a year now, but with Pandora officially sanctioning and providing an app (funny how their app got accepted but ooTunes hasn't yet... thanks apple!), this can only be a positive thing.

Anyway, does this mean ooTunes is over? Not for me it doesn't. It does set the bar a bit higher though. ooTunes can scrobble your Pandora plays (I kinda doubt Pandora will do that, since last.fm is kinda a competitor) but we'll see. ooTunes also lets you play non-music streams (like npr news, and pretty much any stream you can play in iTunes or find in the iTunes radio stations section... just drag it to your library or a playlist, and ooTunes will pick it up and stream it.) ooTunes streams pandora, but ooTunes has other tricks up it's .. um.. pocket protector.

So, check out the new official pandora app! It suffers the same fate of all official SDK apps, in that you can't listen to music and switch apps (ooTunes lets you do this, with some caveat's, if you're playing ooTunes from mobile safari).

I guess I should list here the things that ooTunes will need to improve to catch up:
easily starting a new station
thumb up/down
stand alone application (come on apple!!! you know you want to email me!)
Pandora doesn't require you to run your own server and mess with your firewall.

Anything else I'm missing? Let me know!