SHAPE Services is starting a beta testing of the well-known xPlayer.

xPlayer v.1.1 was improved with a totally new functionality and we want to hear what you think about it:

• Internet radio support:
  * All data plans supported
  * Wi-Fi in OS 4.2. and 4.3 is supported
  * Full radio stations management
  * Pre-loaded stations
  * Create or remove a station
• Forward/Rewind feature is now available
• Recent list integrated:
  * Files
  * Folders
  * Playlists
• User Interface improved:
  * Navigation
  * Shortcuts

Your thoughts about the new Internet radio functionality are highly welcome!
Tell us what radio stations you listen to. We might add them to the pre-loaded stations list in the official release version!

You can download the beta version at http://www.shapeservices.com/freedow...layer_beta.zip or over-the-air at http://wap.shapeservices.com/downloa...ta/xplayer.jad

Send us your feedbacks, comments and suggestions about the new features to . You can also forward support requests with application logs from xPlayer -> Menu -> Support & About.

As always, most active beta-testers will be rewarded!

[cross-posted Beta You Than Me]

Can't get the radio stations to work. Keep getting disconnect errors on my 8330.

It works on my 8310, but it is a little choppy. I'm trying some different buffer settings to see if I get get it to work any better.

The radio works for me, some drop outs on EDGE, I'll try Wi-Fi later. the problem I am having is when I try to play from my SD card, I get a message

The Application X-Player has attempted to open a connection a location inside the firewall and outside the firewall which is not allowed by your IT policy.

the only option I have is OK which just takes me back to the player screen. I'm on BIS, so I don't know about an IT policy. All the premissions are set to Allow. If I turn off the firewall, it works, but that causes other problems.

Since I am only trying to play from my SD card, why would it need to contact anyone anyway?

I've tried all the buffer settings now and Internet Radio is still choppier than when I use Moodio. However, I sometimes get high pitched noise when using Moodio and I don't get that with XPlayer even on the same exact station.

two things, I don't like the audio outout setup, if it's set to handset and you plug in the headphones, it does't auto switch. 2nd for the radio if you set it to Wi-Fi, it seems that means WF only. WF Preferred or use EDGE if WF not available would be much better.

I'm downloading it, now. Always been a fan of SHAPE Services' products (I use IM+ and VR+), so I'm looking forward to it!

I have an 8310 device, in Mexico, using EDGE, conection to the radio station are slow, I can't listen a complete song, I listen like 30 pieces of the song even if I set 500kb for the stream and even when I have all the bars of the signal in my device.

The player is the same than the last version, couldn't find the forward and rewind function, the time counter for the song stands in 00:00 and doesn't moves, in earlier version I had the headset output but automatically changed to handsfree when it was not plugged in. Anyway this player is waaaaaaaaay better than the bbplayer. Sorry for my grammar, I speak spanish and a little english.

Wirelessly posted

The radio is the same on my 8100. No matter which buffer setting I use, or no matter what my signal strength I have, it's still choppy.

It's working fine, howerver it stops from time to time. An interner radio search would be great!

best

Wirelessly posted

I'll probably play around with this this weekend, does this version fix the little issue where it would skip to the next song while in the middle of a another one?

Edit: Nope, still tends to start a new song while in the middle of the previous song. O well. The new interface look real good a great improvement from the original version.

Does it support sirius or XM? That would be a deal sealer for me and I'm sure many others. Of course having it work well would be nice too!

I'm getting the same error on my vzn 8830.; the bb player works fine, but xplayer.....???

i was able to fix this by using JL CMDR and the resettofactory option to clear all IT settings. After restoring, now under the setting for RADIO I no longer have any of the options such as adding stations or setting the connection. All I have are SAVE and BACK. I have uninstalled and reinstalled several times but it's still the same.

All in all, so far, seems like a capable substitute for the regular Blackberry media player.

I wish there were some type of thing in which I could see the album art for albums, just because I'm big on stuff like that. But the Blackberry hardware occasionally has issues with album covers and album titles, so I can understand that.

Also, I think that the default filename sorting should be alphabetical, just because that's how the default player is, and that's what people would be used to. Glad that there's an option to change it, though.

Otherwise, I like it so far.

It would be nice if the preloaded radio stations indicated the streaming rate, or if it was possible to find out the streaming rate.

I think there should be clarification of the connection options, particularly since they're in two places.
Current options:

• Default (What does this mean?)
• Direct TCP (does this include WiFi? What if the Use WiFi checkbox isn't checked? If WiFi isn't checked, does this mean use BIS? Is there a non-WiFi, non-BIS option that I don't know about?)
• Force MDS/BES (is pretty clear - go through my office)
• Use BIS Transport (is pretty clear - go via EDGE & RIM's servers)
• Does the "Use WiFi" checkbox allow the use of WiFi or require the use of WiFi? (Appears to require the use of WiFi)

I had one crash in it, but once I switched to allowing WiFi use and bumped the buffer to 500 it was pretty decent.

Going to try this out now.


Edit: Everytime i try to play a station it gives a error connection broken then says playback error.
Sprint 8330

Oh, here's something big...It also won't let me play music on my headphones on my 8800. When I plug em in, it just keeps playing on my blackberry speakers instead of in the headphones

I think they will have to lower the quality to make it work on EDGE. Otherwise it seems EDGE just doesn't deliver. Anyone used it on EDVO.

I can't get the application to start up today. Error saying, "error starting media player: class multiplayplayermainscreen.<private> ref member out of range...


8310 TMO 4.5.0.46

I gave up on it and deleted it. I was hoping that the internet radio would be at least workable, but since it wasn't I got rid of it.

xxxmerlinxxx, could you please specify what you mean by sirius and XM?

Sirius (SIRIUS Satellite Radio - The Best Radio On Radio) and XM (XM Satellite Radio - America's #1 Satellite Radio Service) are satellite radio stations.

Dear users,

We have updated the beta version!

Thank you for your feedbacks, still there is always a space for striving for perfection.

In this build we investigated and fixed some connection issues, among them are:

We have discovered that BIS data connection type has one restriction: the amount of bytes per one connection used – about 1024 Kb. So we’ve implemented a reconnection algorithm, which reconnects immediately after the carrier disconnection when a specific number of bytes achieved from the radio station. Some jumps in the playback might occur still we hope they would be minimal.

Also when BIS connection is used some timeouts might occur when data is being transferred. We will try to eliminate this issue in the next updates.

Regarding the speed of data transferring, it depends on the speed that your carrier provides you with. If you face pauses when playing back any radio station, try to use some other data connection type or select a radio station with a low bitrate. At the moment we are working on improving of data flow loading. With the next update we will provide you with a list of radio stations with a low bitrate.

Still we recommend using Direct TCP/IP in Settings -> Connection for better connection.

Please consider that some of your data plans might be limited by traffic and/or be paid. Internet radio uses a lot of traffic and this might lead to extra charges.

You can update to the latest 1.1.8 version at http://www.shapeservices.com/freedow...layer_beta.zip
or at wap.shapeservices.com/download/xproducts/beta/xplayer.jad

Looking forward to your feedbacks, more and more)

Then you are welcome to try these stations and see how the work for you. We don't have any limitations for radio stations.

We have updated the beta version. Please see the list of updates and recommendations at http://www.blackberryforums.com/afte...tml#post999045

The direct comparison at the moment (for me) is between this application and moodio.fm. At this point, xPlayer does not deliver the same quality of stream as I am getting on Moodio, for the same station.

I do like having a application on my phone (rather than via the browser) so I am hoping xPlayer can catch up, because I would gladly switch. I will keep trying the betas as they are released.

Also, one small note for some folks. When you do find a URL to a stream, it does not mean that you have a working stream URL, or that the stream URL is for the stream itself. Often times the URL users try is the web player URL, this is not the same as the stream URL. So in some cases you are getting an error due to the stream and not because of the application. I would recommend trying the URL in two streaming apps (i.e. moodio and xPlayer) before scoring it as a true error by xPlayer.

see my post #6 you have to manually set the audio output location to get it from the headphones, hand set, etc.

would be nice if you can select a folder with other folders in it and add them all, nice looking player but i dont want to open up 30 different folders to add all my music. also i just noticed that when it goes to the next song with headphones on it starts playing from the phone and i have to unplug and replug the headphones back in. maybe im missing a setting somewhere idk.

Yup I get that too.

I also tried adding a station in two different bitrates (56k and 128k), but xplayer wasn't able to play either one.

Also, when adding the same category ("Drum & Bass") to both new stations, a new duplicate category was created on the library, instead of placing both stations inside the same folder.

One more thing was that I wasn't able to edit the station details once I saved it into the library. Would be nice to do this using the existing "station info" command.

Keep up the tood work guys! I really like the new look and features.

No change for me, the radio still cuts out...

TMO EDGE 4.5 8310

I've been able to listen to 24kbps streams (talk) with no serious problems, though I haven't spent a long time listening to them.

I've sent a few pieces of feedback to them as well.

On thinking about it, I'd actually like to see them redo the audio destination settings - initially I was just thinking about having it use the headset if one's available, but I think this would be better (if possible):

A sorted list (by preference) of audio destinations to use if they're available. This assumes that there's a way to check the ones where availability is questionable.
Example (as I'd sort it):

• Headset (requires check)
• Speaker (NOTE: Nothing makes it past this point unless there's no speakerphone capability - any models lack that? Effectively items below "speaker" are disabled)
• Bluetooth Headset (requires check)
• Handset (NOTE: Nothing would make it past this point. Effectively items below "handset" are disabled)
• Headset + Speaker (speaker only if no headset plugged in)
• Bluetooth Headset + speaker (speaker only if no BT headset connection)

If I can't have this, then at the minimum I'd like to be able to select the destination while it's actually playing radio.

Then in the options, let me change the order in which these appear. If I want a bluetooth headset before the speaker, I can do so by moving it up on the list (I don't do so because of battery in the headset).


Other changes I'd like to see:

• Buffering based on time not size, possibly with a maximum size. If I set my buffer to 500, then start a talk station's stream it seems like it doesn't start playing until the buffer is full which takes a while.
• Better (text-based) display of buffer status, etc.
• The shading on the battery indicator at the top (I assume that's what it is) seems nonintuitive/reversed
• I'd like to see the actual bitrate of the audio stream shown somewhere. As it is, if I want to know I have to fire it up in a PC player. If I'm having problems with a stream and on looking see that it's 128kbps, I'm not going to get so annoyed because it's one that I should expect to only work on WiFi.
• I'd like to see the summary playlist time (which seems inconsistent on very little experimentation) to show hours:minutes:seconds rather than LotsOfMinutes:seconds when I have a long playlist.
• I'd like to see radio connections have failover methods or prioritization. It seems that if I'm using it with WiFi but leave the building I then need to stop playing, change the setting, restart xPlayer.

How do you know the bit rate of the stream?

I loaded the same stream in WinAmp on my PC and checked it there.

Additional feature I'd like to see: an option to stop playing and warn before starting if the battery is below a user-specified percentage. It could be really annoying to be using your BlackBerry as an MP3 player, then suddenly discover that your battery was dead when you needed to make calls.

I just tried this and didn't see any fast forward or rewind. HELP

Quick update on this: The duplicate folders issue was corrected automatically once I restarted the app, so it looks like it's not so bad after all.

i can still only get 1 of the preloaded stations to work, and i tried to create a blues station to bellyup4blues.com, but it wont work. i tried every option there is, but no luck on any of it. guess ill have to wait for alltel to release the 4.5 OS for my 8830....might take them another 3 years to do it.

Did you use http://64.62.252.134:5100 as the URL for BellyUp4Blues? That's what you actually need to be providing, not the URL for the Winamp or Windows Media files.

To get the URL for the actual stream, right-click on the "Listen" link and save the target as a local file. Then open that file in a text editor (like Notepad) and find the link there.

Since I seem to be posting wishlist items, here's one more: tie into whatever system event the volume control buttons send anytime audio is playing, not just while xPlayer has focus.

Not sure how feasible this one is.