Author | Thread |
User 29.03.2008 14:04:26 |
This posting is older than 6 months and can contain outdated information. Hi, I recently set up an airtunes system where I stream music from my powerbook (which acts as my media center), to my kitchen radio. The concept is great, no more fooling with CD's etc... and the idea to control it from my iPhone tops it of. The thing I'm experiencing is that it's pretty unusable for some reason. It's really really very slow. I have my itunes on shuffle all the time (also don't understand why the shuffle icon in the ajax remote is different from the one in itunes, this is not very intuitive). Skipping a track is more or less ok, it responds within a few seconds. But the problem is when I want to browse my library, this literarly takes minutes after each button press. It's never clear if a button has been pressed or not, and it is just frustrating. Why does it take so long. I admit I have a huge library (all my CD's are in my library), it's about 75Gb in size. I already upgraded my network with the new n-draft airport express and airport extreme, but this did not help anything. I'm pretty sure it is not a network problem. I also have the firewall off on the powerbook (remote buddy sometimes does not accept connections, even when I give permission in the firewall)... Since I can't find any posts about this, I assume I must have done something wrong, but just out of curiosity, I just tried a competing product (Signal), and it responds instantanious. I don't want to be a prick, but Signal is a joy to use... Maybe it's because it focuses on one specific task, where remote buddy has a much broader use (too broad in my opinion). Would a native iPhone app react better than the Ajax remote ? | These entries from the FAQ may be relevant to this topic: Behaviours - Support for iTunes® & AirPlay®
The content of the radio category of iTunes® is always dynamically loaded from the net and not accessible by scripts. Accessing this category directly is thus not possible.
Nonetheless, it's still possible to choose radio stations and start their playback. Therefore create a new playlist and drag the radio stations you want to listen to to that playlist. Just like any other playlist, that playlist and the radio stations it contains are now available through Remote Buddy's menu.
This functionality is only available if you have access for assistive devices enabled.
Here's how you can do this:
- Open /Applications/System Preferences.app
- Click on the "Universal Access" icon (filled, blue circle with stylized human in the middle)
- Make sure the checkbox "Enable access for assistive devices" is checked. You find it at the bottom of the Univeral Access pane.
Hardware - Apple® Remote
To enable you to use all capabilities of the IR Receiver of your Mac®, Remote Buddy is using its own driver. In contrast, all other applications with integrated Apple® Remote support usually use the OS X Apple® Remote subsystem.
As long as you're running Remote Buddy, Remote Buddy and its driver are responsible for turning the received button presses into actions. As soon as you quit Remote Buddy, this task is again handled by the OS X Apple® Remote subsystem.
If other applications don't use the interface to the OS X Apple® Remote subsystem correctly, this can lead to the effect that nothing happens when you press a button on your Apple® Remote. For as long as you're running Remote Buddy, issues like this are covered by Remote Buddy and it's driver and are therefore not visible to you. However, as soon as you quit Remote Buddy, the OS X Apple® Remote subsystem is back in control and any issues caused in it by other applications become visible.
Therefore Remote Buddy is neither the cause of the issue nor is it responsible for it. Instead, the cause of the issue exists independently of Remote Buddy. It's located elsewhere and can also only be solved there.
Although our products can't cause any such issues, we're regularly contacted about such issues and asked for help. In order to make locating and fixing the cause of such issues as easy and efficient as possible, we've developed a free diagnostics tool: Remote Control Diagnostics. It can locate issues with a single click and will provide you with information about the issue as well as with instructions on how you can fix it.
Hardware - iPhone™ / iPod® touch / AJAX Remote
These are the most frequent causes for this kind of problem are:
- The AJAX Remote is not active. Please check in Remote Buddy's preferences, that you have enabled the AJAX Remote and that it shows the status "active".
- The OS X firewall is active and blocking incoming connections. Please read the entry "How can I define a rule to allow access to port 8888 with active Firewall?" for a step-by-step howto for fixing this problem.
- Bonjour® only works LAN-wide. In order to reach your computer by its Bonjour® name, it needs to be located in the same IP subnet - which in this case means that it must be connected to the same WiFi network. If your computer is connected to the same LAN (wired connection) as the WiFi Access Point, but not to the WiFi Access Point itself, your computer and your device are located in different subnets, whereas Bonjour® services usually can't be announced beyond the boundaries of subnets. Furthermore, the iPhone™ does only support Bonjour® addresses starting with firmware version 1.1.1. Older firmware releases can't make any sense of them.
The solution - in both cases - is to directly enter the IP of your computer on your device. Complete URLs for all network connections/interfaces of your computer can be found directly within Remote Buddy under "Preferences > AJAX Remote".
- A firewall / router does not forward connections. If you are trying to access your computer from the Internet, only a direct connection using the IP of your internet connection is possible.
- If your computer has a direct connection to the Internet without any intermediate router, Remote Buddy will show the correct IP address of your computer under "Preferences > AJAX Remote".
- If your computer is connected to the Internet through an intermediate router, only that router knows your current IP on the Internet. Furthermore, you need to make sure, that it forward connections to port 8888 to your computer. Please consult the manual of your computer to learn whether your router supports that function and how you can set it up.
- Our service for you: you can let our server tell you your current Internet IP at http://www.iospirit.com/myip/.
Currently, these browsers are officially supported by the AJAX Remote:
- Safari® on iPhone™ with OS 3.0 or later
- Safari® on iPod® Touch with OS 3.0 or later
- Safari® 4 or later
The AJAX Remote is using the latest web standards (like CSS3, which is often only supported sufficiently by Safari®) to utilize the available bandwidth and CPU power efficiently.
IMPORTANT: to use the AJAX Remote, your setup needs to meet all of the AJAX Remote requirements!
Thanks for your interest in the future of Remote Buddy. Of course the iPhone™ SDK is also of interest to us.
Please understand, though, that we don't talk about future products or plans prior to to their close-to-complete-realization or release.
If you want to stay up to date on this topic, we recommend to follow us on Twitter or subscribe to our newsletter or RSS feed (find all links at the footer of the product page). News will be available here, first.
First of all, setup the AJAX Remote as described in the FAQ entry "How do I setup the AJAX Remote?".
Then follow these steps:
- In AJAX Remote on your iPod® Touch or iPhone™, tap on the "Music" symbol.
- Now tap on "Library" (upper-right corner) and navigate to the media file you want to playback on your iPod® Touch or iPhone™.
- Tap on the blue play button.
- If QuickTime® thinks that it can playback the file, you can now start playback by tapping on dark-blue playback button.
All preference settings are already set correctly by default. If you don't see any playback symbols: the remote access to files is only supported if you have set a password ("Require password" is enabled) and the option "Allow access to the files in your iTunes® library ("streaming")" is enabled as well. Both options can be found at Preferences > AJAX Remote.
Mac App Store
Since Apple does not provide us with any information on Mac App Store customers, we are not able to implement an upgrade-path from the Express version to the regular version.
| User 29.03.2008 18:39:01 |
This posting is older than 6 months and can contain outdated information. Hello Peter, thanks for your feedback. I found a bug in the music library part of Remote Buddy (used by both the AJAX Remote and built-in on-screen menu) that will reload the iTunes XML library with almost every item you access through Remote Buddy's interface, which - with a PowerBook G4 and a collection as huge as yours - can highly likely mean a very noticable performance hit. The bug is already fixed in my private build, though and even on my Intel machine and "only" about 40 GB of iTunes media, that gives me a noticable speed bump. That still does not explain though, why the execution of a simple action like "next track", should be so slow. These actions do not involve the library objects at all and also don't need much bandwidth. So I guess that this may be a network issue. In general, a good way to check whether it's a network performance problem (f.ex. due to packet collissions with other near-by WiFis using the same channel) is to access the AJAX Remote localy via Safari ( http://localhost:8888/ ) on the Mac you run Remote Buddy on. If you need help to diagnose and solve the most common WiFi problems, be sure not to miss the FAQ on the Remote Buddy site - especially the one on interrupting and breaking down WiFi connections. Best regards, Felix Schwarz
| User 30.03.2008 10:47:17 |
This posting is older than 6 months and can contain outdated information. Hi Felix, Thanks for the quick reply. I'm glad you found a solution, and I will look out for the update. I'll have a read through the FAQ as you mentioned, improving network speed is always a good thing. Many thanks, Peter
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