It’s no secret that the Streampad Desktop has been difficult to set up. In addition to requiring an advanced networking degree, you also needed to make sure the Java on your computer was in a good mood.

Well, that’s no longer the case!

I’d like to announce the Alpha release of the new Desktop, done in Adobe Apollo. In addition to being easy to install, this Desktop does not require you to open ports on your router or disable any software firewalls. It just works.

The current release requires you to have iTunes. Future releases will scan folders for music but for now this one piggybacks off your iTunes library.

Another major feature is that it is now multi-user. Many people have requested that they be allowed to add their wives, husbands and/or kids to the Desktop so they can all access the household music remotely. You can also run a Desktop from multiple computers in your house and access them all at the same time on the site.

If you would like to get your hands on the new Desktop, email me (dan at streampad.com) and I’ll send you instructions on how to set it up.  Happy listening!

For a while now you could get a direct link to any song or playlist inside of Streampad. This meant that you could send a link to someone which when clicked on would open up Streampad directly to a song or playlist.

I’ve started adding direct links into every section. Most of the sections are done, although there is still a lot more to do as I drill deeper into the app. Here is a direct link to my profile - http://www.streampad.com/#profile:dan

The nice thing here is that you can copy the link directly from your broswer’s address bar. In the past, you needed to grab it from some text on the page somewhere
Building an AJAX app is very different from building a traditional web app. I realize the somewhat ridiculous nature of this post. LINKS TO PAGES?? HOW ORIGINAL! But the truth is that it is not very easy to do for an AJAX app. You have to map strings (URLs) to states inside an application. But it is absolutely critical to do this. People send links to each all the time. Links are the currency of the web.

Just added some new cool stuff to the Current Info box which is found on the right side of the Now Playing section. In addition to seeing who else is listening to your current song, albums reviews and grabbing embed codes, you can now see photos from Flickr and recent blogs posts about your song or artist.

I just had Kruder Dorfmeister on and here is a photo it showed me:

And here are a few blog posts:

It’s well known that one of the hardest parts of building a webapp is scaling to many users. Ever since the Techcrunch article, I have had to tweak and change many things as they no longer functioned fast enough once the database grew larger.

The thing about scaling is that it is not just about adding more servers, putting in a load balancer or caching data (it is about ALL of them!). Sometimes you need to completely re-think how you want to do something as the old way just will not scale.

The way I was loading people’s library was to make a call to the server every time they clicked on something. So if you clicked on the “Rock” genre, it would go ask the server to return all of the artists, albums and tracks under “Rock”. It would then try and cache this so that subsequent requests did not have to go to the server. The problem with this was that every new request took a long time, since the database is pretty large. And if you added new songs, it would have to destroy the cache and make a new request.

So a deep re-think was in order. I knew that if I could download all the library data to the browser, I would not have to query the server each time. But I thought that this dataset would be very large and not really feasible to download each time. I also did not know how I was going to make queries on the data. I could index the hell out of it, but then that would just be an even larger dataset. I decided to download as little data as possible with no real index and see how fast javascript could traverse arrays. To my surprise, javascript was extremely fast.  So fast in fact, that I was able to traverse arrays with thousands of items, thousands of times in under 1 second.

You will now notice that your library loads extremely fast when you click around. Basically as fast as iTunes. This is a complete win for everyone. The server gets a huge break and everyone’s library loads real quick. All it took was a complete re-think about how to do it!

Just so you know - when you log in now, you may find that your library takes a long time to load. This will only happen once. Then it will be fast fast fast.

Long time request finally in there. You’ll notice a little green icon on the player next to the track count. If you click it, it will shuffle your Now Playing list. You won’t see the actual list change (that would be no fun!). But the songs will play in random order.

This was harder to implement than I thought it would be. There are so many cases to deal with; like what happens when a song is removed or more songs are added. I think I got it all though. If something acts weird, please let me know.

A staple of any good social network is the friend comment section. The internet is a communications medium after all, right? Well now Streampad can fully call itself a social network with the addition of the Billboard.

Each member has their own Billboard where other members can post comments as well as songs. These comments are public and can be seen by anyone by clicking on a member’s name.  Each member can also delete or mark as spam any comment they receive by clicking on their own Billboard in the Friends section.

Two cool features of the Billboard are:

1. Near real-time. Comment notifications will appear within 2 minutes from the time they were written. Look for a number next to “Friends” in the left panel to indicate that you have a new comment
2. You can post songs to a friend’s Billboard by clicking on “Share” next to any song. Then just choose your friend, add a message and hit submit. To get to share, just right-click on any song (or click on the little blue arrow next to the song)

Many people have asked me if they can store their music on Streampad or even another web server instead of running the Desktop software. This makes a lot of sense and fits nicely into Streampad’s vision of a ubiquitous player that can play from ever source imaginable.

We’ve taken one step closer to that vision with the integration of MP3Tunes’ online locker service Oboe into Streampad. Mp3Tunes debuted their locker service earlier this year to mixed reviews. I tried it out and was unable to upload my music. Recently, they released version 2 of the Oboe download client and I must say that I am incredibly impressed with what they have done. It just works!

You’ll now notice a new “Locker” section inside Streampad that allows you to log in to your Mp3Tunes locker. It will fetch your locker and allow you to play your music right inside Streampad. Better still, it is fully integrated into Streampad’s social/stats engine. Other people can see what you are listening to and the songs you play go right into your stats!

Mp3Tunes currently has 3 service plans that are all very reasonable. You can get 1GB (about 1000 songs) for free. 2GB for $20/year or unlimited storage for $40/year. Go sign up now!

Some time ago, I watched a screencast for Songbird and really liked what I saw. Not only was the content great, but doing a screencast was a brilliant way to show off all the cool and advanced features packed into Songbird. So I got inspired and decided to make a screencast of the Web section inside Streampad. Even if you are familiar with the Web section, I suggest watching this as there are some new features and you may be surprised with some stuff you didn’t know was in there.

Watch the Web section screencast

Set the volume, refresh the page, close the browser, restart your computer, whatever. That volume will keep its position! Thanks Albert!

One of the nice features of a desktop music application is that if you close the app, then open it, it saves your last playlist. Since Streampad aspires to replace said desktop app, we now have that feature too! You can close Streampad, refresh it, open it in a new tab, whatever, and your Now Playing section will always have what it had on close.

To make sure this works properly, go to settings->optimize and drag the cache slider to the right. I highly recommend dragging it to “Unlimited” as you will notice a huge increase in load times that way.