Qloud’s Plug-ins

As some of you may know, we’ve had some issues with our plug-ins. Early users of Qloud will remember a tag browser that was part of the iTunes Visualizer. This allowed users to tag tracks in their library and even sort their music and create playlists based on those tags. Unfortunately we found the iTunes Visualizer environment to be unstable for this type of functionality. So we scaled back quite a bit, completely ditching the visualizer and tag browser. Now, visually the plug-in runs in your system tray or menu bar, and we’ve streamlined a lot of our processes to make it more lightweight. These plug-ins were released in January.

Since then we’ve been improving our “historical upload” process, song recognition, and user recognition. We’ve also improved our error reporting a great deal which has allowed us to make several bug fixes (so if you are a user out there still experiencing crashes and aren’t submitting the error reports, SUBMIT THEM).

As always if you have any comments or questions about the plug-in, please shoot an email to feedback@qloud.com.

Doing More with Tags

Last week we did another release of our iTunes for Windows plug-in.

This release responded to lots of user feedback that people wanted to do more with tags. So we made the following cool stuff possible:

• Users can rename a tag in a single batch process that changes it on every track that it is on.
• Users can delete a tag in a similar single batch way
• Users can filter their tracks library with tags in a new way. To date when you clicked on one more more tags, the tracks that have ALL the selected tags (’AND’ logic for Boolean junkies) were displayed. In other words, you could see all of the songs that are tagged both “bossa nova” and “dance.” Now there is a radio control at the top of the tag window that allows you to switch between matching ALL tags and matching ANY tags (’OR’ for the junkies). So you could filter down to the tracks that have either been tagged “bossa nova” or have been tagged “dance.”
• User can export their tags into an XML file. Your tags are yours, and we don’t intend to keep them captive. So this feature lets you get up and take your tags with you if you choose. It also is the beginning of lots more cool stuff that we’re going to do . . .

In addition to these tag features, we spent a lot of time trying to make the plug-in easier and more enjoyable to use. We’ve made make transitions smoother. We’ve given you clearer indications of what is happening when the plug-in is performing certain functions. And we’ve cleaned out some visual garbage that was floating around.

Thank you for the feedback that guided these changes, and we are always looking for more.

iTunes & Playlists

Today we released a new version of our iTunes plug-in for Windows. The biggest new features revolve around playlists:

• Smart Playlists
• This is an often-requested features. Now in the Qloud view of iTunes, you can click the create playlist “+” button and create smart playlists based on criteria that includes tags (see image above). These are smart playlists that will update automatically. The best part of this feature is now you can benefit from your tagging on your iPod: you can create smart playlists based on tags and then synch those playlists on to your iPod.
• Playlist Submission to the Service
• Now every playlist you create in iTunes will live also on the Qloud service as a Channel. Automatically. This allows everyone to discover more music through one-another’s playlists. And pretty soon it will allow you to do some more cool stuff with playlists on our service . . .

Really more important than this new stuff, however, are the fixes we’ve made to existing functionality to make things more reliable, more stable and easier to use. Too many fixes in this version (yikes!) to bore you with all of them, but here are some:

• We cleaned up oodles of UI issues, from inaccurate information to random graphics to font sizes
• We eliminated certain conditions when tagging tracks crashed iTunes
• Thanks to some particularly great user feedback, we fixed issues with inaccurate submissions of data to the service
• Lots of other stuff . . .

As always, we’re just at the beginning with Qloud and what we plan on doing. We appreciate your feedback and always welcome more! Our next push with iTunes for Windows is on continued improved usability and stability.
Importantly, the iTunes Window’s plug-in’s little sister, the Mac plug-in, is about to be born. We’ll be releasing an alpha to a closed-group in about a week. Please put yourself on the list if you’re courageous enough to be in the alpha group.

New iTunes Plugin

We’ve been working hard to make our iTunes plugin more stable and faster. We released a new version this morning that addresses many of these issues. Specifically:

• If you’re connected to an iPod, this version will no longer hang or freeze your iTunes. One known issues is that if you’re syncing your iPod and try to go into Qloud, we have to wait for that’s done before loading the tracks and tags. You should see a message window pop up telling you this too.
• Displaying all tracks in the qloud plugin view. We’ve changed how we display this so the plugin is much faster to display tracks - especially for users with a large library.
• Many, many small bugs such as:
• we now correctly display ampersands
• Removing a tag always works now. It didn’t before if the track had a apostrophe in it.
• Scrolling in the qloud view is much smoother
• Popular tags are always displayed now (no more little “box”)
• Adding tracks does not cause any problems (it used to for some users)

As always, thanks for all your comments and keep ‘em coming. We need to know about any problems, your suggestions and things you like.
You should be prompted to download the new version when you startup iTunes. Or, if you don’t have the plug, you can download it here.