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.

Trouble Updating Mac Plug-in

It’s been brought to our attention that some users are experiencing a problem updating their Mac plug-in. If you are encountering errors with the update messaging please download the latest version of our iTunes plug-in. We apologize for the inconvenience.

Finally Tamed the Leopard

A week and a half ago Apple released Leopard. There have been many known problems with Leopard. Among them has been the fact that it broke our plug-in. And our plug-in in turn broke users iTunes.

We have been working on this since the release, and today we finally released a new version with all of the bugs killed.

Please download this new version if you are a Mac user. We apologize for the problems we’ve caused, thank you for your patience, and hope you enjoy the new build.

Leopard

Leopard (aka OS X 10.5), the much anticipated new Mac OS from Apple, was released today. Unfortunately our plug-in is causing iTunes to crash for users with Leopard installed. We’re working as fast as we can to make a compatible and stable version. Stay tuned for updates and fixes…

iTunes Mac Update

It’s been a long time but we finally released a new version of the Mac plugin.  There are quite a few fixes and new features in this latest version.  Let me try to list them all out.

• Speed should be much better
• You can tag an entire artist, album or playlist all at once
• Ability to view and tag a track that was just added
• Ratings are now captured and sent to your Qloud profile
• No longer displaying unnecessary playlists such as “Movies” or “TV Shows”
• An “Options” link next to the Qloud logo which will allow you to logout or change your login info
• Going in and out of Qloud will now put you on the correct playlist. For instance, if you are in “Party Shuffle” in iTunes and you go into the Qloud plugin, you’ll be in “Party Shuffle” there too
• Ratings inside the Qloud plugin now work correctly

As always we have only so many machines that we can test the plugin on, so if you encounter any bugs or problems email us at feedback at qloud dot come (spelling it out to protect against spam).

Also, you can still delete any play if you don’t want it showing up on the service.  Just go to your profile and all of the tracks listed below it have a “delete” button.

We haven’t blogged much lately as we’re in the middle of doing quite a large redesign and update to our entire service.  Stay tuned though, we think it will be great and take Qloud to the next level.

Download the Mac Alpha

We’ve now put the mac plugin up on our web site if you’d like to try it out (download here). With it you can organize your library using tags and browse your library using tags.  The plugin will also populate your Qloud profile with your tags and plays.  This is still an alpha so there are still some bugs existing and not all the features are fully implemented.  Please let us know what you think and if you have any problems.

Known bugs:

• Does not work on 10.3.9 or below
• Multiple monitors can cause some problems
• If you have a g-force graphics card, there are some issues
• Adding tracks to your library will not be recognized in the Qloud plugin until iTunes has been restarted
• Playlists inside Qloud are not in the right order

The Alpha Mac

Today we’ve released the alpha of our iTunes for Mac plug-in via email to a list of interested recipients. It still is quite early and it has a lot of warts. But we’re very excited to get it out as many of you have been asking for it.

If you have the interest–and the courage–to participate on the alpha, please let us know via the email form on our download page and we’ll email out to you the next build. We look forward to your feedback. We’ll quickly get stuff fixed and soon thereafter have something to release to the wide, wide world.

And particular thanks to the Flying Olariu for making this happen.