TapeDeck 1.1 Released!

I suppose I should have blogged this sooner, but on Friday I released TapeDeck 1.1 with some exciting new sharing features.

The YouTube export feature was especially fun to add. It took quite a bit longer to develop than I originally thought it would, mostly because I had to do fight with QuickTime and YouTube to get a suitable video format. In many cases, it took about a half an hour to wait for YouTube's servers to finally tell me that my videos could not be processed!

Once I got that sorted out, I had to work extra-hard to shrink down the animated tape video track so that users wouldn't have to wait to upload huge video files for short audio recordings. In some cases, I had video files that were 50MB at the end of the rendering—not pleasant if you have a lousy upload rate.

In the end, I'm very happy with how the feature turned out. I'm sure we'll see some really cool stuff on YouTube made with TapeDeck in the future.

TapeDeck's new import/export feature (which lets you import/export to a multitude of audio formats) is also powered by QuickTime, but it only took about a week or so to implement, including testing. I must send an extra shout-out to Mike Ash for publishing his straightforward QuickTime code to CocoaDev. That certainly helped the medicine go down…

In addition to the above, we also kicked up the highest recording quality to 320kbps. Looking back, I can't really recall a solid reason for limiting the highest quality compressed AAC recording to anything but the maximum that the APIs would let us capture to. So, problem solved!

Finally, I went through and fixed a great deal of little annoying bugs. One of which was the lack of a scroll indicator to show where you are in your list of tapes. I tried to make it look similar to the one on the iPhone, but didn't go overboard with it (e.g. it doesn't increase in height depending on the size of your tape library, nor does it shrink when you hit the extents of the library).

Anyway, get over to the TapeDeck website if you haven't already, and give it a whirl. I'm sure you'll have fun with it.

Now that I've got TapeDeck 1.1 out the door, I need to do a few easy fixes for some harmless bugs, and then give FuzzMeasure some much-needed love again.