XiiaLive v2.2.3 - release notes

Release date: 08/22/11

Version: v2.2.3

Update v2.2.3 brings in a lot of performance updates along with some minor bug fixes and a couple new features.  The performance updates are most noticeably found when using the "Internal stream engine" and the "Android stream engine".

The internal stream engine has been optimized to start AAC/AAC+ streaming incredibly much faster. Metadata support and percent loaded has been added along with a bug fix for streaming OGG stations where after the song was over it would stop streaming.  The engine should also be a lot more stable and should recover a stream a little more gracefully.  The internal stream engine is still a work on progress and might work perfectly on some phones while on others it stutters and is unreliable or unusable.

The android stream engine is our default stream engine which uses the Android media framework.  This is still our preferred choice since its performance plays nice with battery life but it doesn’t work equally on all phones as we would like it to.  On some phones streaming just doesn't work or a proxy patch is required.  Also, some phones might play a little of the stream and than just stop playback unpredictably. Going back to the actual update the AAC streaming has been improved a lot.  On slower phones this should be more noticeable.  Also, for streaming MPEG stations we have improved this and hopefully it works great on all phones! We hate to make changes on our stream engines to avoid breaking it but we need to in order to support all phones and increase the stability and performance.

Another great improvement has been applied to the stations lists.  The downloading on the background is now very efficient and much faster.  Be believe it’s a lot smoother specially on devices running Android 3.0 or greater.  We created a better download updating mechanism that makes you find and play a station a lot faster!  A few key features I want to let you know about if you didn’t know. 

1. 1.Press the selected menu button again to go back out of a sub list or press the back key to get out of a sub list.
2. 2.If the list is currently not at the top pressing the selected menu button will take you to the top of the list.
3. 3.Press the selected menu button when the list is scrolled all the way to the top and you will refresh the content of the list.

The new features are just a few.  Character encoding selection is a new feature that allows the user to specify what character encoding to use when decoding the incoming metadata.  This helps avoid displaying bad characters for some languages.  This is mostly useful for South American and European stations.  You can access this option by long pressing one of your favorite stations and selecting edit.  A minor change was the sleep timer.  The max time has been increased from 60 min to 120.

The following is the list of the changes gone into this version.