Coming soon... The iPeng teaser thread

[erland]

the idea of this App was kind of to take it to extremes to make sure you really don't have to care about your guests taking any real control beyond adding what they would like to hear.

I think I'll go on collecting ideas for how playlist management could be improved for a while and then probably go for voting+more rights for your own additions - if I can nail the "identify your tracks" problem.

If you want to avoid guests destroying the party, maybe it would be good to have some kind of restriction on how many tracks in a row a certain guest can add ? Or maybe a minimum time until you can add next track ?

Would of course be hard if there is only one device at the party but if each guest or group of guests have one iOS device for themselves it might be interesting to have a restriction, so you have to wait a few minutes before you can add another track with the same iOS device. That will make sure everyone gets a chance to add something they like to hear.

Or maybe restricting by genre or artist, making it impossible to several tracks in a row from same genre or same artist.

[epoch1970]

What if Party had a "tray" where users can drag the song(s) they want to submit. Then they push the whole set to the DJ holding iPeng.
Would that resolve the "who added what" issue ?
(I think the DJ holding iPeng should further be able to do whatever he sees fit with the submissions, according to his plans, Party users votes, … before the sets really becomes the SBS playlist.)

On a Party "now playing" screen, what about :
- a "Love the DJ" button
- a "Take this home button", that stores info on a song I don't know but find interesting. So the next day, away from the host's library, it's possible to check again on that find and perhaps buy the song etc.
(sometimes I do that w/ Shazam, but it's not fast and not too reliable.)
- a button to take a picture. With the time, song and art added to the snapshot. And the Coolio icon of course

[erland]

Some further thoughts from me:

It's fairly easy to come up with a lot of cool ideas, but when I take it one step further my dilemma (if I should be honest) is that I can't really see the situation where I would use it.

The reasons are:

1.
At more or less every big party I've been the music has not been controlled by a Squeezebox. And if it was using Squeezebox often less than half of the participants have a iOS device in their pocket.

2.
At small parties with 3-4 friends it's not that often that we have a need to think ahead and create long playlists. I have been in situations where we have discussed music and someone has said "have you heard the song by ..." and we have tried to find it either on YouTube or Spotify. It kind of feels like it could be of interest in this scenario. However, for this kind of situation it's very important that the playlist doesn't grow and become too big, I would even say that it needs to be limited to maximum 5-10 songs because if I add a track and it's 20 songs away, I have no idea if we are even going to listen to music when the playlist reaches my song.

The problem with long playlists are going to be even worse in big parties, my track is always going to end up at the back and not be played until several hours in the future.

So for me personally, I could see situations in a small party where it could be of interest to use iPeng Party, because it lets everyone browse and search for songs by themselves, but it feels like I would like it to either:

* Be impossible to add more than 5 tracks, if 5 tracks are in the playlist, you have to wait until there is only 4 tracks in the playlist before you can add another one.
or
* Some kind of turn based algorithm were each connected iOS device get a hole of 60 seconds where it can add a track and if the user of that iOS device decided either pass or doesn't add a song during that time, the turn goes to next iOS device running iPeng Party.
or
* Have a select tracks period for 30 seconds where all iPeng Party instances can select one potential track and then after this have a voting period where all iPeng Party instances can vote on the selected tracks (but not on the one they added themselves).

Basically my feeling is that for this to become something really useful it's critical to introduce features that limits the length of the playlist or somehow makes sure there is a way for me to get my track played at least during the next 30-60 minutes.

Another thing that potentially could be really useful is to make it possible to browse information related to what's currently playing, but unfortunately this is something that doesn't seem to exist in iPeng Party at the moment, unless I've missed some hidden Now Playing screen that offers this functionality. I thinking about things like, other albums/songs by same artist, artist images, biographies, reviews, similar artists, wikipedia, post to facebook/twitter, ...

Finally, not sure if this has been mentioned already, but some way to click on a track and see the remaining time until that track will be played would also be good.

[garym]

agree on needing to easily see now playing info. I thought I was missing something. I think I can use this app quite a bit. I often have friends over, especially to the weekend house, where we spend a lot of time on the deck listening to music. I end up passing my ipad around and folks search a bit and choose songs they want to play. Since most have iphones, this will become even easier with this app....while I still have most control with my own actual ipeng.

[pippin]

I believe for most algorithms that really make sense I would need some server side or at least iPeng (normal) side support because even tracking what's going on on other iPeng Party devices will be hard.

First: a list of stuff that sounds doable, some of this is stuff I did already somewhat plan for:

* more info on the current track - will come
* better visualization for current track - will come
* different play time info - time to track and time since track played, for example - will probably come
* make tracks you added yourself removable - hard and kind of spoils the "hand the device around" model but then this is not the idea.... so: will come if it turns out doable
* vote tracks up that get voted on more than once. Probably with some algorithms like "more voting power if voted for on different devices" and "no additional votes for xxx seconds" - Same limitation as the last one, otherwise probably something that will come
* dupe detection and avoidance - same as last one
* Vote current track down - planned anyway.
* define additional exclude menus in iPeng similar to the party mode setting - planned
* move iPeng Party settings to a different submenu
* timeout after each added track until another one can be selected.

Another thing I believe could be doable is to define (through iPeng) a maximum "play ahead" number of tracks in the playlist. If the number of pending tracks exceeds this threshold, some random track gets removed from the list with, say, a 50% chance and maybe a prompt to the extent of "do you really want to remove xxx, upcoming in yyy seconds to add yyy".

For the fun of it it would also be nice to see which device added/removed a track so you could notify others "hey, xxx just removed this track!" or "xxx just added this track", will think about it.

What would be better is a straight voting system but I doubt this is feasible without server support.

Now I have to remember adding tickets for all of this before I forget it....


Oh and: please comment!

[epoch1970]

Oh and: please comment!

Can voting displace the need for removal ? For example, voting down twice the most recently added song removes it, but the song right up next needs 10 votes or so to be removed.

This being said, I'd like to shut up a bit and leave more analytical/brighter minds reflect on the world of opportunities that's been opened for Party.

Also, while I have offered ideas towards a sophisticated system, I can fully subscribe to what (I believe) Garym, Treble, and Erland have suggested to some level : just adding a few finishing touches to a casual, friendly and foolproof SBS remote.
After all I don't run a bar, but I destroy my playlist regularly

[garym]

After all I don't run a bar, but I destroy my playlist regularly

;-)

[pippin]

Even when sized the same ipeng party's art isn't as sharp.

OK, iPeng Party 1.0.1 is now out which fixes this and adds retina support for iPad 3.

[)p(]

I just installed it mostly out of curiosity. I must say I prefer this dark skin over the regular ipeng skin.

What really stood out to me was the big unobstructed artwork list view in vertical mode. I think it looked really great with my spotify artists lists:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/11639801/foto2.PNG