Sep 14

Integrating Home Automation Apps

How To 1 Kommentar »

SqueezePad 1.10.0 comes with improved Home Automation Integration.

Those of you doing home automation, typically use a different App as their main remote control App. Typical examples are CommandFusion , iRule, iRemoteControl .

These tools often allow you to start a different App with a short URL, so you are able to directly start SqueezePad from them.

Unfortunately there are some problems with this approach (well not anymore with SqueezePad):

  • your home automation tools are typically centered around rooms, so just starting a Squeezebox Controller with an arbitrarily selected room is confusing
  • at some point you want to get back to your Home Automation App. Pressing the home button of your iPad and selecting the App on the iPads main screen is inconvenient.
When you you’ve done everything right, you will be able to have the following new icon in SqueezePad:
squeezepad-return
So how does all this magic work?
Actually quite simple. As an example in CommandFusion you can configure the following:

squeezepad://?returnURL=iviewer://&defaultPlayer=00:04:20:27:91:1f

Let’s explain the different parts:
squeezepad://? the beginning of the URL tells iOS to start SqueezePad
returnURL=iviewer:// the URL to return to, when the user presses the icon in SqueezePad.  If you leave out this parameter, SonoPad won’t show the icon to return to the original App.For most other Apps (except CommandFusion and TPControl) you need to URL-encode this part ( so it would read iviewer%3A%2F%2F)
& separator, to tell iOS the next parameter starts
defaultPlayer=00:04:20:27:91:1f MAC-address of the player that should be selected by default, when SqueezePad starts.
This address MUST be configured in lowercase!To find the MAC-address of your players, enter the settings screen of your Squeezebox-Server. On the “Information” Tab all MAC addresses are listed.If you leave out this parameter, SqueezePad will revert to it’s default behaviour, i.e. on start it will select the SqueezeBox that was selected when you left SqueezePad the last time.

 

Here some other examples:

iRule squeezepad://?returnURL=irule%3A%2F%2F&defaultPlayer=00:04:20:27:91:1f
tpcontrol squeezepad://?returnURL=tpcontrol://&defaultPlayer=00:04:20:27:91:1f

Hope you enjoy this new feature! If there are any questions, don’t hesitate to contact me via support(at)squeezepad.com

Jan 04

SqueezePad and AirPlay – this is how it works!

Allgemein @en, How To 50 Kommentare »

I’m getting some comments on the AppStore now that people  miss AirPlay integration (AirPlay is a streaming technology from Apple).
But guess what: it’s available already – just well hidden 🙂

Prerequisites:

  • To allow airplay streaming, the music needs to arrive on your iPad first. This is possible with the new playback feature of SqueezePad 1.7.x. After you have activated/bought it (use the ‘activate playback’ in the player selection popup in the top right of SqueezePad), switch over to your iPad and start some tunes.

Now let’s move this music over to your AirPlay devices !

  • do a double tap on the home button of your iPad (the button which typically closes the current running App).
    A bar with all running applications will appear on the bottom of the screen.
  • swipe right in the bottom bar – you will now see a new dock, which will allow you to turn on the screen-lock, change brightness, volume … and … if you have any airplay devices … a control to route the Audio to your AirPlay device.

Voilá !

Have fun …

Oct 16

How to upgrade coverart to a higher resolution

Allgemein @en, How To 6 Kommentare »

Now with Apps like SqueezePad around one soon discovers, that the resolution of album art matters a lot. And if your collection is like mine – you never really cared and have all types of resolutions in there.

I recently stumbled about a program that claims upgrade all your coverart automatically: Bliss

I’m always a bit sceptical about programs that claim to do stuff automatically – but let’s give it a go. Installation (on a Mac) was a breeze – the program then works in the background and you access it via the browser.

For my first try I configured it to the folder of my music library, turned off coverart embedding (I always have a folder.jpg for each album) and also turned off automatic mode. You can also configure what your minimum and maximum wanted resolution is – I used 500×500 as a minimum.

Bliss then starts to scan your library and tells you if your files are ‘compliant’ or ‘not’. With my easy settings it’s just telling me if the cover art is below 500×500 – but that’s exactly what I need: all albums that need some work on the cover art !

Clicking on the small edit icon, Bliss then tries to find good cover-art for you from different sources (MusicBrainz, Discogs, Amazon, Google) – and with a single second click your album art will be replaced.

For finding album art I used MediaMonkey before (which searches on Amazon as well) – but changing a cover there involves much more clicks (and if you have constraints like a minimum artwork size actually with MediaMonkey it sort of gets an unsolvable problem).

Unfortunately sometimes the found images are a complete mismatch. No problem in manual mode of course – just cancel. But as there isn’t much documentation on how the automatic mode works I don’t dare to activate it. I spent too much time in the past with tagging and finding (maybe to small but correct) coverart.

One should also note, that Bliss is only free for your first 100 covers. 1000 additional covers will cost you a 10$ license. Unlimited covers 30$. Quite fair prices I think considering the time you will save if you really start changing all your coverart.

So my conclusion: Though I’m only using Bliss with it’s minimal feature set right now (manual mode, just looking for covers) I really find it very useful. I guess I’m not brave enough to turn on automatic mode – but if you don’t have many covers yet at all (Classic, Boom, Transporter-users ?) this might be an option for you.

What other tools are you using for this task ?