JukeFly Blog

It has been a very busy couple of months and we finally have a revamped UI with a brand new logo (Juke - the Fly:)) and a cool landing page. One of the major new features is the easy access of historical Billboard charts allowing you to browse song and album charts from as far back as 1955. I can finally get all the music from the 80s :).

The video/lyrics/artist-info integration is much better with the always-visible panel with a much bigger video player. Video playback in fullscreen mode is also supported. After lot of deliberation we decided that the best location for the player controls is at the bottom - so that the top panel can be used for navigation. The left-tree control that was previously used for navigation was cumbersome especially when you had many playlists.

We decided to simplify the skinning by allowing just a “Bright” or “Dark” option with a couple of options for the top background. We might add additional backgrounds later. As always this release has a bunch of bug fixes based on all your feedback. Please let us know if there is something we missed.

Thanks to everyone’s support and suggestions, JukeFly is maturing into a robust, slick, music app. Please keep the feedback coming!

-Dinesh

I’m on a mini-vacation right now with some family for the holidays over thanksgiving, we were using JukeFly to play some music for a little get together last night (mostly 80’s dance) and found we had a search bug, a pretty nasty one.

When you changed the search type from say Artist to Title etc, it was using a stale cache and the search results were completely bogus.  This is fixed now (thanks to my trusty Macbook Pro) and all is well again.

I also found that we got requests from people for music I didn’t have, in which I hit the Video tab to find the tunes on YouTube to play.  It became clear very quickly that we should be able to queue up a YouTube video like any other song possibly in a playlist so it’ll just keep going whether the song is on your library collection or over the netsomewhere.

What do you think?

We had a hardware failure which caused us some downtime today.  The problem has been resolved and we’re putting in redundant measures to make sure it does not happen again.

We upgraded our server software to use Phusion Passenger instead of Mongrels for better server performance.

One side effect however is we can’t really use Apache’s ModRewrite anymore which means the form and blog are no longer at http://jukefly.com/forum and http://jukefly.com/blog

Instead, they are now here:  http://forum.jukefly.com and http://blog.jukefly.com

Technically it’s cleaner this way anyhow.   However, this means RSS feeds from the blog will be broken, so if you subscribed, you’ll need to re-subscribe again to the new RSS feed.

We spent the last week heavily optimizing our database and code to speed up syncing by about 50x faster.   You can now sync any reasonable number of songs (say 100,000) and it never slows down.

We can in theory handle about 600 new songs per second (too bad your PC can’t get the id3 tag info out that fast).   So in one hour, we could import 2.1 million songs versus before about 43k songs.

We changed a lot of code, and did a lot of testing, but if you do find something odd, please let us know on the forum or the feedback tab of the site.

Thanks to our user uncleramsay we fixed our sort by Album.  The problem was, if you had multiple artists on an album, it would sub-sort the artists first before the track number.

So now, if you sort by Album, it’ll sub-sort the track number next, then if there is no track number, by Artist.

Thank you uncleramsay for figuring this bug out!

If you see a blank page where all your music is supposed to be, please send us feedback.  We had a caching issue that caused this.

A huge thanks to our user bruce_bardis for giving feedback on this problem, without him many new users signing up may of been affected by the problem and not stuck around on the site!  Thank you!

We added a Listening History button to the main music tab to show you what you’ve listened to in the last 24 hours.  You can copy this as plain text or as XML to the clipboard then use that data somewhere else if you wish.   Eventually, we want to be able to automatically call an external URL when you play a song on JukeFly thereby you can push your activities to another site and even render the results of that push inside JukeFly.com.

For now, if you want to know what you listened to in the last 24 hours, press the button.   A user named BUBBLES on our site requested this feature as he runs a radio show where he needs to know what he played so he can publish that to his listeners.   We figured, if he wants it, someone else might want it too.

Keep the feature requests coming!

Both the “Remember Me” on the login box and uploading photos are fixed!   Remember Me currently will remember you for 2 weeks, after that time you’ll have to login again.   If you disagree with 2 weeks and think it should be longer, let us know.

After our big infrastructure framework upgrade a few days ago, a few things stopped working.

1. “Remember Me” on the login box doesn’t work.  So, if you completely close your browser, you’ll have to always log back in again.
2. Uploading photos doesn’t work, so no uploading an avatar photo for yourself.

We’re working on both of these issues and they’ll be resolved shortly.