PatioTunes - 1.9

I am looking at my own comments further down - which I also sent directly to Mindola - and wonder why we don't see any development on this product. Is the vendor not interested in increasing the capabilities of this product? I trust that this must be a good decision based on time/resources, alternative projects and projected ROI.

In any case, I want to now recommend Signal from Alloysoft over PatioTunes. Especially if you own an iPhone or iPod Touch and want to remote control your home's iTunes installation from your patio ... give Signal a try. Their demo is fully working, just displays "please register" for a third of the library content.

One feature I like is that I can change the rating from the remote - something I asked to be included in PatioTunes 1.5 years ago. *sighs*

I am using PatioTunes for remote controlling my iTunes on a Mac with a Sony PSP using the wireless network. Together with 3 AirportExpress in various rooms of my flat I have a setup that is similar to a Sonos implementation, only for much less cost.

For remote controlling iTunes via the PSP I also considered and tested / trialed CoverBuddy and DOT-TUNES. PatioTunes came out first. The others I could hardly use, and cannot recommend them for this purpose in their current versions.

THE GOOD THINGS on PatioTunes:
To pick music I use one of the 3 basic tabs: Music by Playlist, by Artist or by Search.
No matter what tab is picked, there's always a the "Prev", "Pause/Play" and "Next" buttons together with an album cover art displayed at the top.

I like the search best - it takes any text and searchs in the fields that you can select. The result is a playlist, hence it is really easy to play all tracks that were found during a search. Being able to search any combination of Artist, Album or Track title field is great. For example I click to search my text in Artist and Track, but not in the Album field - by checking the appropriate boxes.

The playlist tab is easy: just pick a playlist and off it goes. It will also show the next 5 songs (or more - that is an option) below, so that you can jump ahead in the playlist.

In the artist there is an optional grouping by first letters available - it helps to reduce load times in large music collections. Once you are at an Artist, it shows his albums with their cover arts. You can click them, or click the little plus to expand. Then you see the songs, and you can click to listen or to add to the "PatioTunes" playlist. All good.

The volume control is at the bottom - I never use it. It is always set to 10, and I use each room's amplifier to control volume.
I like that the options (like "preferences") are available in the web interface itself, so I can change those without returning to my Mac. The only other settings available on the Mac are the TCP port number and which amazon site to use for retrieving artwork (which I don't use).

THE THINGS THAT COULD BE BETTER
Obviously using the software for while also makes me stumble across things that could be improved. Below is a list. There are quite a few things, but in total nothing that had stopped me from buying it.
1. The Random and Repeat mode options of iTunes are not available in the PatioTunes interface. I love random, hence my workaround it to have it set in all playlists. It would be good if I can change that from within PatioTunes without returning to the Mac.
2. I find it difficult to play a complete artist or a complete album. Picking from the Artist tab only plays 1 song and then goes somewhere else in the library, because my library is set to random (see 1). I could use the Search, but entering the text to search for is not ideal on the PSP. D'oh.
3. Large playlists cause very very long response times. I can easily reproduce page loads that take more than 1 minute. During that minute the Mac seems to cycle through all or some of the songs (of the playlist) - hard to tell exactly, as I only tell by the sound of the disk. Picking a playlist with less songs (lets say 20) brings response times down to around 1-2 seconds per click. This is anoying when you don't like the song that plays, want to change it, but have to wait for the HTML to load. D'oh!!!
4. The PatioTunes does not allow to change rating or check/uncheck the tickbox of the current song. In my mind that is a feature badly missed.
5. The PatioTunes interface has nothing to pick songs / albums or artist based on their *genre* or by *year*. I'd love that. To work around it, I have some SmartPlaylists, but it's not the same, and suffers from the issue 3) above. Ideally I would like the search tab to have all the options of the SmartPlaylists dialog. With the same tool I would like to modify my existing SmartPlaylists from within PatioTunes. Maybe I'm dreaming.
6. The current version re-indexes the iTunes music at every startup. It takes a long time, during wich PatioTunes is not available yet. I think it would be nicer with an option to use a cached music database, and look for new content separately while the main application is available already. Not a big deal, as both my Mac and my PatioTunes run 24x7.
7. Some very few album covers don't work, even though in iTunes I see the cover. It's not consistent, and I checked that JPG, GIF and PNG formatted cover art is displayed correctly - which they are. Small annoyance on some albums only. Ignoring it, since I don't know how to trouble shoot the app. Is there a log file?
8. I'd like to disable the amazon.com/de cover art search, and instead use a custom "no cover available" image or one built in (compare to GimmeSomeTune). This is currently not implemented.
9. Screen usage! Well. The interface works OK on large displays, but on the PSP the screen could be better used. An appropriate screen width needs to be set in the options manually. Available are 250 to 400 (steps of 50) and up to 800 (steps of 100px) - that's not ideal for the PSP's 470 pixel width. I use 500px, which is better than 400, but sometimes I need to scroll to the right. The option of the screen width is not session or client based, instead its one setting for the PatioTunes server. Hence when I use a big screen and set the option to 800, next time I use the PSP it shows there in 800, too, and I need to set it back. It would be better if the PatioTunes server checks the http user client and has some better defaults. Also the large album cover (which I like) is in a row on its own - all other details in the html gui are above or below - which I don't like. It's a waste of space, and means I always need to scroll down on the PSP. Note that I have to scroll down after every click, as the whole page reloads with each click. That brings me to ...
10. I'm not sure if refreshing the whole screen is the best solution? I think the PSP can do some javascript and some flash6 content. Other browsers work great with AJAX.

OK, that's it on "areas for improvement".

It still gets "almost 5" stars ;) because it is indeed the best remote tool for my setup by a mile. The setup I have through the flat wouldn't be complete without it.
I hope the good guys at MindolaSoftware will improve some of the things I wrote about as soon as SuperNotecard doesn't keep them so busy anymore. Thanks in advance!

PS: you guessed it - English is not my native language. Well, I hope all is understandable... if not, let me know.

Downloaded PatioTunes and it wouldn't work on my iBook, quick email to Mindola and despite it being from Australia and a different timezone I had a reply in 10minutes which fixed the problem, firewall permissions for the patiotunes port.

Nice to have to solve using a computer on the network to control iTunes on the computer hard wired to the stereo without investing money in Airport Express.

Tried in Safari, Firefox and Internet Explorer. The only thing I get are error messages.

I have a mini which is connected to my stereo. I use Chicken of the VNC (<ul>http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/14099) to control iTunes remotely from my iBook when listening in another room. Perfect.