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Enhanced Control of More Sources with Airfoil

February 10th, 2012

When we unveiled Airfoil 4.5 last year, it included some handy new functionality. In addition to sending audio, Airfoil now also passes along metadata for many sources. That means the when you transmit from a supported source, you’ll see album art as well as track information.

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As well, when you’re sending audio to Airfoil Speakers, Airfoil Speakers Touch, or an Apple TV, you can remotely control the source. Audio can be paused, and you can skip forward and back between tracks on your playlist. It’s very handy, and makes for a great experience when listening to audio.

Today, we’re very happy to announce compatibility with several new applications. We’ve worked with these developers to integrate their applications with Airfoil, and we’re delighted to have them on board.

spacer First up, we’ve now got support for the MOG music service and their Mac client. MOG is a subscription service with a catalog of over 14 million tracks. If you’re already a MOG user, just be sure to grab the latest Airfoil and the latest version of the MOG client, then get streaming. If you haven’t used MOG yet, you can get started right here. They have a free ad-supported plan, as well as an ad-free computer-only plan for $4.99, and a $9.99 plan that includes access on mobile devices too.

spacer Meanwhile, if you’re a Pandora fan, several new clients have popped up to make using the service on your Mac better than ever. First up, we previously mentioned Muse Control, a remote control for Airfoil. It’s since added Pandora playback to its Mac portion, Muse Controller. When transmitting Muse Controller via Airfoil, enhanced metadata and remote control are now available

spacer The popular Pandoras Box application, from Francisco Garza, runs right in your menubar and provides Pandora audio playback. It’s been well-reviewed in the Mac App Store, and we had several requests for support. Before we had a chance to contact Francisco, however, he emailed us. To our surprise, the integration was already done and it worked like a charm. Excellent!

spacer spacer Finally, Jason Perkins from Industrious One worked with us to add support to both his audio playback apps, Muse and Musicality. Muse can be found exclusively in the Mac App Store, and is a stand-alone Pandora player. Musicality, meanwhile, is something of a big brother to Muse. It supports Last.fm and Grooveshark playback, in addition to Pandora. With the newest versions, to be released within a few days, they’ll both work great with Airfoil as well.

We’ve got a full list of supported sources, so take a look. If your favorite app is on there, great – just stream it with Airfoil to get enhanced metadata and remote control. If your favorite audio player isn’t listed there, get in touch with the developer, and send them to this page. That’ll get them started integrating with Airfoil.

Posted by Paul Kafasis | No Comments »

Recording Skype With Audio Hijack Pro or Piezo Is Again Fully-Functional

February 8th, 2012

Last week, we had an issue with Skype and our two audio recording applications, Audio Hijack Pro and Piezo. Mac OS X 10.7.3 broke the ability of these applications to launch Skype and record its audio. Using the Instant On extra, Audio Hijack Pro was still able to capture and record from Skype. However, Piezo users and Audio Hijack Pro users who hadn’t installed that optional component were left unable to record Skype.

spacer spacer First, let me say that we’ve already resolved the problem. Download the latest Audio Hijack Pro from our site, or the latest Piezo from us or from the Mac App Store. Get that set, then read on for more information.

We know many users depend on these two apps to record Skype, including hundreds of podcasters, so we set to work on getting this fixed right away. The problem was quite bizarre, as our applications hadn’t changed at all, and neither had Skype. The only difference was Mac OS X 10.7.3 itself. Our audio capture code is very robust, so minor updates to Mac OS X almost never have any impact at all. Something was most certainly amiss here.

To figure out what was happening, we actually had to look back to January of 2011, when version 5 of Skype first shipped. The executable code for Skype 5 is strange, due to some incredibly non-standard code obfuscation measures they’ve put in place. Specifically, the actual binary file in Skype.app/Contents/MacOS/Skype is encoded, and only decodes itself at runtime by rewriting itself as it runs. In short, the program seen on disk is not the program which actually runs. This causes the library-loading order in Skype to be rather odd; libraries would appear to load at launch, but not be truly loaded until later in the launch process.

spacer Unfortunately, this non-standard behavior confused our audio capturing code. Problems occurred when things our code expected to be there (like the important-for-audio-capture CoreAudio library) weren’t loaded. We investigated, and fortunately, the workaround at the time was simple enough. We made Audio Hijack Pro ask dyld, the dynamic linker for Mac OS X which loads all code, to notify it whenever a library was loaded. Audio Hijack Pro then waited until CoreAudio was present before going off and doing its thing. This cured the problems with a minimum of fuss. That fix worked just fine on Mac OS X 10.6 (as well as the later-released Mac OS X 10.7), and we rapidly shipped a small update to restore recording from Skype.

Alas, with the release of Mac OS X 10.7.3, Apple made a small-but-critical change to the aforementoned dyld. The explanation of this change is a bit technical: In an apparent attempt to fix some threading issues, Apple added a thread lock to dlopen(). While this likely fixed their bug, it had the unintended side effect of causing a deadlock when our apps launched Skype, as the previous Skype fix used dlopen() from within a dyld callback. The end result was that with the existing versions of Audio Hijack Pro and Piezo, launching Skype to record audio did not work correctly on Mac OS X 10.7.3.

Not wanting to leave our customers hanging, we again worked rapidly to solve the issue. The new workaround is actually very similar to the previous one – we simply delay calling dlopen() until Skype is further initialized and we are no longer in a dyld callback. The fix took a few hours of hard work, and shortly after, we shipped Audio Hijack Pro 2.10.1. However, we also ran straight into one of the downsides of the Mac App Store as it stands now – we couldn’t ship a fix for Piezo nearly so rapidly. Our update was eventually approved, and Piezo 1.1.2 also restores the ability to record Skype on all compatible versions of Mac OS X.

Ultimately, while capturing audio from Skype at launch time can be a tricky proposition, it’s well worth the effort to satisfy our users. While these hassles have been frustrating for us, they’ve really just been a two small hiccups throughout years and years of quality audio recording. Our users can be confident that our tools will work, and that if a problem does arise, we’ll work rapidly to get it fixed.

So, if you need to record audio from Skype on your Mac, either the latest Piezo or the latest Audio Hijack Pro will get you set.

Posted by Paul Kafasis | No Comments »

Come and Get Airfoil for Windows 3.2

February 3rd, 2012

spacer Following a month of beta testing (and a couple dozen new builds), we’re finally ready to release version 3.2 of Airfoil for Windows. This update isn’t flashy or feature-packed, but it’s important nonetheless. We’ve made a slew of improvements under the hood, to make Airfoil work better than ever.

Those improvements start with an all-new audio capture engine, for better performance. Airfoil can now capture audio from a lot of edge cases that previously failed. It’s now also fully compatible with the FMOD audio library, powering many games as well as the Qobuz music service’s desktop application.

For users of Windows text scaling, Airfoil’s interface is now fully resolution-independent. We’re not through with these updates, as we’ll be working at making the same updates to Airfoil Speakers in the future. There are also myriad bug fixes and minor improvements, from the ability to mute all output at once to improvements to the Equalizer, and more.

We want to get everyone using this version of Airfoil for Windows, so in addition to working better than ever, it’s also a free update. Just visit the Airfoil for Windows page, and you can download it immediately.

Posted by Paul Kafasis | Comments Off

2012 Macworld Events

February 1st, 2012

Macworld | iWorld, the new name for the Macworld Expo in San Francisco, took place last week. As mentioned before on this very blog, Rogue Amoeba was there exhibiting. In addition to showing off Airfoil and Piezo alongside Quentin, Jose, Chris, and Christa (who designs a fabulous booth), I had a chance to participate in two panels on the Macworld Live stage. If you missed the show, read on for more information on the panels.

First, on Thursday, I sat down with Macworld Senior Associate Editor Dan Moren and App Cubby founder David Barnard to discuss Apple’s App Stores. Our discussion covered some well-worn territory, but also included some new thoughts based on our own success in the Mac App Store with Piezo. You can check out that discussion here, but only if you promise to ignore the goofy poster frame for the video.

On Saturday, just before the show ended, I got to have a spirited discussion with several friends. The group consisted of Guy English, Glenn Fleishman, John Gruber, and Dave Wiskus, and was led by Macworld Staff Writer Lex Friedman. We talked about some of our favorite apps as well as their flaws, and discussed software development in general. This might be one of my favorite panels I’ve participated in – preparation ahead of time led to great content. You can check it out here. You’ll again see me in the poster frame, looking slightly less goofy but also failing to notice Guy controlling an invisible marionette.

If you’re already regretting missing the show, be sure to mark your calendar for next year, when Macworld will take place January 31st to February 2nd, 2013.

Posted by Paul Kafasis | Comments Off

Airfoil for Windows 3.2 Is Nearly Complete

January 23rd, 2012

As we posted about before, Airfoil for Windows 3.2 is currently in development. We’re just about ready for release. If you’d like to test what we believe will be the last 3.2 beta, get it here.

Feedback

If the beta works, excellent – that’s just what we expected! Keep using it until the official Airfoil 3.2 arrives. However, if you run into any problems, use the in-app support form in the Help menu to let us know.

Posted by Paul Kafasis | Comments Off

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