The Wii is mine!

Thanks to all of you who signed up for the ActionThis trial... I won the Wii by lets say a large margin! :)

It is still on order apparently, so its not actually in my hands yet, but will be soon :)

In the meantime, I'm working on SharePod 3.8.3

We're moving...

Hopefully you will have noticed that SharePod has moved to www.getsharepod.com!

Along with a nice new domain name and style, the SharePod blog is now at http://www.getsharepod.com/blog

Its not styled yet (will be soon), but that will become the blog to check for SharePod news and upcoming features.

I'm not sure what will happen with this blog yet - hopefully I'll make time to update it once in a while.

SharePod 3.8.1

This is a bug fix release. You only need to get this if you are having these following problems:

• Unable to delete track because missing ArtworkDB
• XmlException while loading a Shuffle

Download

SharePod 3.8 released

3.8 is out:

• Add/remove album artwork
• Videos now auto-resume from last position
• Shuffles should now work again
• Videos dont play in random mode in the media player

Download

Help me win a Nintendo Wii

During the day I work as a developer on ActionThis - a web and Outlook task management system.

We've just started a bit of a competition - the person with the most signups using their referral code wins a Nintendo Wii!
I would love to win this, so if you have a spare minute, please signup for a free trial with the code INT577. Heres a link. I hope you'll find it useful.

I'll let you know if I win!

SharePod 3.8 coming soon

So I've been adding/removing album artwork on my 5th Gen Video for a couple of days now and it all looks good :)

I'll try to finish it up over the weekend - so expect SharePod 3.8 within a few days

SharePod 3.7

SharePod 3.7 is out :)

New features:

• View-only Album Art support! (Full read-write Album Art will be in the next version)
• The album art is displayed in the Track Edit window.
• SharePod should now be able to detect your iTouch/iPhone if you are using appropriate mounting software (iPhoneFS etc).
• Should be able to view your songs, and hopefully add/remove them too.
• Please post on the forums if you have tried v3.7 with your iTouch/Phone.
• Fix for iTunes import: sometimes tracks were put into the wrong playlist. This was caused by some versions of iTunes interpreting the import xml file differently.
• Generally faster load times

First album art shown in UI

Live view of my SharePod tasks

The Artwork support is coming along nicely, I hope to complete the majority of it tonight :)

I use ActionThis to keep track of all the things I have to get done, and I've made a little widget for my website to show all the tasks I'm currently working on for SharePod!

Hopefully it will be interesting to see how many small bits go into a SharePod feature/release.

See the live view here

Artwork support coming to SharePod...

You won't be seeing it this week, but behind the scenes I'm working on adding Artwork support for SharePod! The first version will be read-only view of artwork, the following version will be full add/remove artwork.

I've got a working ArtworkDB parser, but haven't converted the binary images into anything viewable yet. Making progress though :)

Vista issues

Regarding these (never-ending!) Vista issues, I have got a Vista machine up and running now, so in the next week I will be trying to replicate some of the crashes that have been reported.

I've just checked the www.sturm.net.nz stats - it was its busiest month in January with 47GB transferred!!

SharePod 3.6.4 + more

Hello everyone, its been a while since I've written about any updates! Christmas/New Years is usually pretty busy for me. Kate and I spent a week in Melbourne over new years. It was great fun and 42c several days in a row :)

Now things are back to normal, I've been making some significant changes to SharePod, and tonight (well morning, its 1.30am local time...) 3.6.4 is available.

So whats new? I've replaced my old mp3/m4a tag reading dlls (the sharepod_input.dll, in_mp3.dll, and mp4v2.dll with TagLib. This means SharePod can now import the Year, AlbumArtist, Album Track Count, Disc Number and Number of Discs properties.

It also means SharePod now supports importing .wav files :)

I have added [AlbumArtist] and [DiscNumber] to the available tags for copying music to PC.

Down the bottom of the SharePod window there is a space used/free indicator.


Its really hard to answer questions in the blog comments, so I've just created some SharePod forums on my site. Please ask questions/post bug reports/comments there!

Thats it for now - its bedtime

SharePod 3.6.3

SharePod 3.6.3 is available!

Changes:

• Fixed: Cant select songs from the menu on new iPods for people still affected after 3.6.2
  
• Added: 'Part of Compilation' flag to Tag Edit window
  
• Fixed: Few small bugs
  

More info on the Classic/Nano menu bug

After the 3.6.2 release, it turned out some people were still seeing the menu bug.

The bug is that songs added by SharePod are visible but not selectable in the iPod menu.

After some more investigation, I have found the field which the new iPods expect and that SharePod 3.6.2 doesn't create. A beta has been released to a number of people with 100% success rate :)

3.6.3 will be out hopefully tonight!

SharePod 3.6.2

SharePod 3.6.2 is available!

Changes:

• Fixed: Cant select songs from the menu on new iPods
• Fixed: Drag/drop to playlists and playlist reordering
• Fixed: Could not save when a track tag (eg. Artist) was made empty
• Added: Workaround to not need admin rights when using SharePod with an older iPod. This will also solve the 'iPod Handle' errors for most people. See the Faq for more details.

I am aware of some issues with Vista/XP in non-admin mode for copying files to the iPod and will check it out.

Fix for iPod Classic / 3G Nano menus bug!

After lots of investigation, I have a working version of SharePod which doesn't break the menus on iPod Classics and 3G Nanos.

It will be out this week :)

Phew, Apple, that was a tricky one!

Please try out the 3.6.1 Beta

As promised, here is the SharePod 3.6.1 Beta. Please try it out if you have any of the following issues -

• Running on a 64bit OS
• Using an iPod Shuffle and getting an Xml error
• System.ArgumentException on load

Either post your feedback as a comment to this post, or email me for more complex feedback :)

Outstanding 3.6 Issues

From your emails and comments, there are 4 main issues with v3.6:

1. Lack of 64bit support

• This might be really easy or really hard. Expect a test release tomorrow.
  

2. On new iPods, cannot select songs from menus after using SharePod

• Currently under investigation!
  

3. iPod Shuffles give an Xml error

• Will be fixed in 3.6.1
  

4. System.ArgumentException on some iPods

• Will be fixed in 3.6.1
  

If you have experienced any of the above problems (except #2), please check back here tomorrow to try a test candidate with hopefully fixes for problems #1,3,4.

For those of you waiting for a SharePodLib release, I will be releasing that once SharePod itself is stable again.

thanks for the feedback!

Get SharePod 3.6

Yep, its available!

Only 1 new feature, but its a big one - Support for new iPods and iTunes :)

Get it from the downloads page

Where is SharePod?

Over the last few days SharePod 3.6 has been with beta testers. The good news is it works perfectly with the new iPods!

There are a couple of small issues with Windows Vista (SharePod needs to run with Admin rights) , and I just need to work through these in the next few days before the release.

Things are looking good for a weekend release :)