JukeFly Blog

The JukeFly iPhone App was approved this morning and is available for download from the app store. It is FREE for a limited time. So please get it ASAP :). You can stream all the music in your home PC through the iPhone. In case the home PC is unavailable it will stream video versions of your songs - just like the website. The iPhone app lets you navigate through your music collection by playlists, songs, artists, albums or genres.  You can also listen to the video versions all your friends’ and the community library/playlists. Other features include lyrics/artist info/videos. Please download it and let us know what you think (reviews in the app store will help :)) - the JukeFly app does a lot more than other paid apps like Simplify Media ($7.99)

-Dinesh

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 just updated the JukeFly Personal Music Server to build 1028.  We had a bug with the equalizer code that causes the JPMS to crash.  This has been fixed, so please use the 10-band equalizer if you like to use an EQ.   Remember, this only equalizes audio coming from the JPMS (pc server for personal music) and not YouTube videos.   Enjoy

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’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?

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 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!

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!