Snowtape 1.2.2 with AAC and OGG Support
One day before all of you are installing Snow Leopard, I am publishing the latest innovations of Snowtape. Since I will be on vacation in early September I really focused on providing a very reliable version of Snowtape. I tested again any major feature I integrated lately and tried to apply as much user feedback as I could. I also optimized syncing with SnowRemote since it turned out that it wasn't that obvious. Plus I added two major features: AAC and OGG.
Support for AAC
You may have read the article "The State of AAC+". In that article I tried to find out if the additional cost of decoder royalties and patent fees for AAC+ are worth spending. It turned out that at this point it doesn't seem to be economically wise. While some of you guys really care about AAC+, most of you don't and not many would buy a paid extension for US$ 5. That's why I decided not to integrate AAC+ into Snowtape 1.x anymore. That doesn't mean that it won't ever be available, but simply not in this major iteration. Instead I am going the inexpensive way for now and integrated support for AAC, which means that most AAC+ radio stations are playable but simply do not provide the quality they could have. I am not saying that I am happy with that solution, but at this point there is simply no way to provide AAC+ in such an inexpensive product.
Support for Ogg/Vorbis
OGG on the other hand is free and after having a beta version of the VorbisDecoder extension for download for a couple of weeks now, I am integrating OGG into Snowtape without the need of installing additional plugins. It just works out of the box.
Radio Directory
Having the possibility now to also serve AAC and OGG radio stations there will also be an update for new radio stations later this day. I will also make some quick improvements to the directory to be able to serve new radio stations more quickly in the future.
SnowRemote 1.0.2
I will also upload SnowRemote 1.0.2 to Apple for review this weekend featuring a lot of bug fixes and localization support.
Snowtape is fully compatible with Snow Leopard and is available in English, French, German, Japanese and Italian. You can find the complete list of changes in the release notes as usual. I hope you like it and make sure you update today! This can be done via the integrated update mechanism or directly from the Snowtape website.
August 27th, 2009 • Permalink
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