Tunemark User Tutorial: Background Play

I've received a few queries from people who are having trouble getting the "Background Play" option to work in Tunemark Radio.

Below is a very short video clip demonstrating how it is done. The most important not obvious step is to press the Home button on the iPhone after Safari starts playing the audio. You can not press the "Done" button, otherwise the audio will stop. Also, this does have the side-effect that you cannot use Safari while the music is playing, but you can use any other app.

Tunemark Radio 1.5, now with visualization

Tunemark Radio 1.5 is now available on iTunes. This update includes a new streaming music visualizer. While you are listening to a radio station, you can tap on the animated volume bar graphs to see a full screen animation that is affected by the music.

Here's a video demonstrating the visualizer



Given the iPhone limitations, it will never be as fancy as the visualizers you have on the desktop, but it's decent, and the performance is fairly smooth on actual hardware.

Tunemark Radio is an iPhone app which supports playing over 30,000 radio stations in the Shoutcast directory. It is available for FREE on iTunes and contains no banner advertising.

Visualizing music

I’ve been experimenting a bit with a way to add some visualization to live audio streaming on the iPhone. Here’s a very rough demo showing bouncing bars representing the left and right channel levels of the audio. It’s not much, but I think I might be able expand on it to have more advanced visual animations that are influenced by the music as it plays.

I’m not sure how much of a demand there would be for such a feature on the iPhone, but depending on how the experimenting turns out, I may include it in the next release of Tunemark Radio. Give that it will have some affect on battery life, it will definitely be an optional feature that can be toggled on or off.