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

We are pleased to announce the release of JukeFly 2.0. It has been a hectic few months, redesigning the entire site. Over the past year we learned a lot about the online music space and how people like to access music online.

JukeFly 1.0 was totally geared towards only listening to your personal music collection. Even though we thought this was an awesome application, it had many limitations. First and foremost your PC at home (your music server) had to be running and online at all times. Also, listening to friends’ music was limited by their upload bandwidth. This was OK for people with lots of music and only wanted to listen to their own music.

One of the cool things with JukeFly 1.0 was the ability to watch music videos from YouTube. You could do this even when your music server was not online. Extending this idea, we decided to redesign the site based on online sources of music – YouTube right now – but hopefully more sources in the future. Also, we wanted to have the newest music easily accessible. We did this by gathering the latest charts and albums from a host of online resources and presenting them in a way that makes it easy to save any of the albums or singles in your playlists. The whole UI has been overhauled and feels a lot better than 1.0 (I personally miss the dark theme – but Jeff has promised to put it back soon ☺). Also, the UI colors are now customizable – so all you guys who wanted a pink background can go crazy now ☺.

JukeFly 2.0 features:

• Listen to/watch a wide variety of online music without even having to download the JukeFly Music Server.
• Stream your own music using the lightweight and efficient JukeFly Personal Music Server app. Once you have synced your songs, you can switch between streaming your songs and watching the video version by toggling the ‘Video Mode’ button. If your music server is not online it transparently starts streaming the video versions of your songs – that way you can always access your music.
• Easily drag any song/album to a playlist. If you don’t have a certain song/album, the player will automatically search for the video versions and play those.
• Listen to video versions of all your friends’/community users’ music/playlists. If you find some music you like you can easily save it as your own playlist.
• Friends’ playlists appear under your own playlists and are easily accessible now.
• Music search– You can now search for any artist, album or song and use the results to either get more information about the artist, browse the albums by that artist, save the music in your playlist or browse similar artists.
• MusicNote– This feature makes sharing your music a breeze. If you find a song you like anywhere – be it in an album, somebody’s music collection or playlist – with just one click you can email a link to that song to a friend or family. When the MusicNote recipient clicks on the song link – he/she is on JukeFly listening to the same song and reading your message.
• TuneTweet– For all you Twitterers out there, this feature allows you to Tweet about any song. Just like the MusicNote, the Tweet will include a link to the song.
• Invites and MusicNotes allow you to import contacts from your email. We use OpenInviter – so almost all email providers are supported.
• Equalizer– There is a 10-band equalizer with a bunch of presets and the ability for saving custom settings. This will only work when streaming your music collection using the JukeFly Personal Music Server.
• The UI colors are customizable. Only the bright theme has been enabled for now, but we have the dark theme almost ready.
• Music store- we have partnered with Amazon to bring you the cheapest music available online. So please use the buy links if you really gotta have that mp3 and support us !

These are all the major things that have kept us so busy and we think all the hard work has paid off and JukeFly is an app that will appeal to all music lovers. We are already busy working on the next set of features like iPhone app, chat, concert information etc.etc. Let us know what you think and if you have any questions or suggestions.

I checked out a new Macbook in the Apple Store today, loaded up JukeFly and saw that in Safari with the default setup, couldn’t even see the whole page!

So, I drove back to the office, and shaved off another 40 pixels or so from the mininmum height of the site.   The big problem is we have these old left over controls for the community page and to see your friends etc.  The checkerboard grid is the problem.  It doesn’t resize well, and it’s just not very useful.

If you see any problems or wierd scroll bars where you don’t think they should be, send us a message (feedback tab, forum, or comment on blog, we’ll get it).

We just noticed an error pop-up when the the lyrics window was being displayed. This was due the addition of an extra tag by lyricwiki - one of the sites we use when searching for lyrics. Its been fixed. Please let us know if we missed anything.

We did the beginnings of an overhaul to the user interface.

• Scalable: Size smaller than before and as large as your browser
• News Ticker: Shows some recent activity on the site, more to come
• Visualizer enable/disable by clicking on it

With an update of this size, there may be some little issues here and there, please use the feedback tab or the forum to report any bugs you find.

Thanks for your support, please tell your friends about us!

JukeFly.com Changes:

• Random Play feature for your music library and playlists
• “Mod Song” added, if you edit the meta-data id3tag of a music file, it will automatically sync those changes to JukeFly after a few seconds
• Fixed caching issue with IE6/7 sometimes replaying a song could often result in the song stop playing early
• Playing music would sometimes stop and not continue to the next song
• No longer allows gif’s to be uploaded as a photo
• Increased photo size upload limit from 400k to 5 megabytes

PC Server Changes:

• Fixed JukeFly.exe crash with rare id3 mp3 tag (Thanks marshall mellow for helping!)
• Track # is being scanned from the music tags now so we can later sort by track
• iTunes music folder added automatically on “Scan My Folders” to ensure it adds only one path and not a path for each album in your iTunes folder

After some good feedback, it became clear to us we need to do automatic sub-sorting by track number. This is so all the albums will come in sorted correctly in their intended order by the artist/CD.   Also, it should sub-sort by Album after Artist by default so Album’s are not interleaved.  Technically though it will be by header click, so you can subsort as you wish just by the order you click the headers on.

We’re working on it as well as a number of other bug fixes and will post as soon as they go live.