pouët.net

Many of you may already be familiar with 4champ - iOS mod player application that connects to amp.dascene.net. It started as a project to get familiar with iOS development, and I'm now at version 1.8, which was released to app store just a couple of days ago.

4champ connects your iPhone/iPad/iPod to Amiga Music Preservation site for searching, downloading and listening to the most comprehensive collection of tracked music in the internet. It has support for playlists and very neat Radio feature which will play you mods from the vast collection at random - nice way to bump into something new. It also notifies about new mods added in AMP database, so you can check on the latest stuff easily.

4champ is free, background play is provided through an in app purchase. During the Assembly weekend the in-app-purchase is free - just activate on About page of the app. Check http://bit.ly/1a8Xnjm

i can confirm it's fun

Can I has Win version ;)

Clickable link for app store page: 4champ in app store

very cool - great work!

who maintains the radio?
would it be possible to add a decent loop support? many mods nedd that :)

great app I often use. Nice work, Florist!

about the radio: It is always your "personal" channel, there is no-one selecting the tunes.

In practice the app checks the id of latest amp database entry at startup, and when radio is turned on it starts buffering random songs from the database (when "All" option is selected). If you select "New in AMP", it buffers the list of recent additions, and local plays the tunes that are available offline in your device, i.e. the mods you have downloaded in search or favorited in the radio view.

@farfar: About playback / looping: I know some songs would need the looping, but that should be possible to set per module. Can you elaborate a bit more what is your expectation regarding this - basic looping (indefinitely) or something else? Sample mods for reference?

hey =)

re: looping, I was thinking of stuff like...

supernao (Michiel Krop) - "insect boogie" or "bicycle pump world"
coma (Daniel Johansson) - the "skogens djur" series

my expectation would be that they loop seamlessly, so that it seems like one continuous mod even though it's just the same 15-second insect boogie loop again and again :)

.. not sure how you would implement this in the app interface, exactly.. I quite like how songs are added to your playlist at the moment.

IC - for this sort of tunes the looping would be perfect, I agree. There's something to think about for the next update ;)

florist: looks cool, found a minor bug, if you click restore by mistake it won't allow you to click purchase afterwards until you kill and restart the app fresh.

"error, product info not found" when trying to buy

@farfar pls try again - haven't heard of in-app-purchase issues from anybody else.

@psenough will need to look into that, thanks for the report.

@Everybody: I have a twitter account for the app (@4champ_app) where I post some random musings, share great tunes and tweet about other related topics; I recommend following that. Mentions are a plus too.

florist: Found the issue.. my own fault, I had set restrictions to disallow IAPs (under settings/general/restrictions)

*HM.iOS.PFH*

florist: a quaint issue.. if you "buy" the full version, and then disallow IAP's, it reverts to being the base version lf the app. Not much of an issue fr now but if you were to start charging for the full version, it would be necessary to fix that bug :)

(but again: great work!!)

farfar: That is indeed a good finding. I located the bug and fix is underway.

Thanks for the free in-app! Florist, you rock!

florist: a feature request: it would be super neat if we could share playlists :)

farfar: I've been thinking about that myself - and actually I built some enablers already while implementing the in-app playlist feature. Sharing playlists would require keeping them synced to cloud though, which would take my server side complexity to the next level - especially if I want to stick to the plan to release for Android as well at some point (can't use iCloud then). I agree that it'd be very nice feature.

well I was thinking I would just go and look through the file structure and see if it's possible to manually copy/paste from one device to another.. =)

maybe an import/export function would be feasible?

or just do the "proper" cloud syncing stuff which sounds totally awesome :)

Just got notified from App Store that version 1.8.1 is now released - it contains the fix I put together during Assembly2015; it rectifies the issue with full version status detection, so if you have done the in-app purchase the app will be working in background mode regardless of the in-app-purchase allowed setting in general settings.

nice one :)

another feature request - a button to download all songs from a search query (e.g. when searching for an author so that I can grab all Muffler tracks and listen through them with a few clicks :))