Tuesday, February 4, 2014

Qualcomm's Skifta and the TuneIn failure.

I was all excited. Then  I was really quite deflated. It seemed I had reached my Nirvana only to find myself filled with a desire that can only lead to suffering. Ok I am getting a little carried away, but I did have something in my hands not that long ago that made me think I had the Audio playback answer to the world the universe and everything.

Qulacomm, not that long ago launched an App that is available on both iOS (iPhone) and Android platforms that allows some audio apps on your phone like Shoutcast, Soundcloud, RadioFeed, to play directly on a UPnP or DLNA enabled device. This includes Smart TVs and many many more audio devices now available for the home. you just press play on your Smart Phone or Tablet and it plays on your music system. You can even take music from your drop box and any locally stored on computers/servers around your house. The fact that they also included the TuneIn App on one of their channels is what made me really excited. This meant that I could send radio from anywhere on the planet directly to my enabled music centre or hifi.

GREAT! But it doesn't work. Well it sort of does. But not really. I'll explain.  I set up a list of favourites on my TuneIn app which were mainly local station to me, like BBC radio 4 and 5 live, Absolute Radio and 96.4 Eagle as I live in Guildford. I also added Jack FM as that is local ish too. Fabulous, I thought and I pressed play on BBC Five live only to get, 'This stream is not compatible with your device. Contact TuneIn.com to get a compatible stream.' Hmm, I tried another station and the same. I tried Absolute Radio (quite local) and it said, 'This stream is not available in you country.....'. Jack FM worked fine! So I went on to the TunIn App proper to double check and all was OK. It, indeed, was. Deflated! So I set a task to contact all involved to see if it was something really silly that could be fixed. The  Qulcomm Skifta forum was my first port of call and it seems the chatters are all saying the same thing. A poor old engineer from Qulacomm is spending a lot of time telling everyone that it's not their fault and that TuneIn have terms and Conditions...blah blah blah...can't do anything about it. I have 10 pre-sets and only one works. That is a major fail in my book.

OK, so time to talk to TuneIn. Surely this would be important to them as if this works them it is truly the holy grail to access all network  audio playing devices without having to be embedded in them all and also have them at your mercy as you are on show in the palm of their hands. This is in effect a free global broadcasting channel. TuneIn are clever enough to know where you are so, even better for their advertising. So surely they would jump on this and fix it in an instant? I mean this is manufacturing Gold isn't it? well you can guess, 'This is a third part app and we are not responsible...blah blah blah....' IDIOTS.

Dear Qulacomm and TuneIn, Talk to each other. You could make squilians. Otherwise someone else will make this happen. Anyone else make a good Radio app? Want to DLNA enable it? The first one to do it gets all the cream.

Right I'm hungry.