Box as a Music Service added: Get Free 50GB Accounts

You talked and we listened. We have loads of users using Dropbox as their main storage cloud, but due to recent promotions of Box, we had been getting a surprising amount of requests to add Box integration into CloudAround. This year(as well as some of last), Box’s Android users have been allowed  to upgrade to a free 50GB account for life for free and have increased file upload limits to 100MB by simply logging into the Box app on an Android device.  According to Box, Xperia or LG Android devices can take advantage of the 50GB storage until the end of the year. We did some research to see why Box would be requested so much and price per feature was really impressive based on the competition. Some examples are that 50GB on Amazon Cloud Player costs $50, 40GB  on mSpot costs about $48, and 50GB on Dropbox costs $99 annually.  Box has the most attractive price; Free.

In this release we also added a few other highly desired features as well as bug fixes. They include:

• album/artist addition to playlists
• ability to play all songs from a particular artist
• Last.FM integration for scrobbling support
• social sharing of currently playing songs
• improved sync reliability.
• memory issues on accounts with hundreds of album art fixed

We would like to thank all of our beta testers from Twitter, Google+, direct emails and Facebook for helping us get Box out the door and on the market to end users.  We had a lot of testing to do and our beta users were able to help us pin down some rogue bugs.  If you helped out and would like a free upgrade to the ad free version, just download the premium version on Google Play and let us know via email we will refund your money.

CloudAround plans to add support for several more clouds, but do not currently have release dates set. For release dates, and everything else CloudAround, follow on Twitter(@CloudAroundApp).

CloudAround v1.2.0 Released with Beautiful New UI and Much More

We’ve had hundreds of email requests that have really driven the direction of what settings have been added, the colors/screens/use of the UI, the types of clouds that we support, and even the occasional bug or two. With version 1.2.0 we have delivered a beautiful new interface with loads of new features.

All New Settings Section:

• Caching limits
• Cache Clearing
• Ability to toggle hiding duplicates
• Force album/artist art scan
• Wifi download only settings
• Artist art download quality
• Completely new beautiful UI based on user feedback

Default Background Images

If artist art is not enabled or found for a particular artist, we have delivered a smooth, non-intrusive background art to spice up the look.

Default Album Art Covers

The border around the album art isn’t an error, it’s a CD case. For those that don’t remember, these are what used to hold the CD’s that music was played from.

New Mini Player

We have wanted this from the very beginning but haven’t have the right design for it. This mini player allows users to see the album art, song information, song progress as well as control the playback of the currently playing song.

Enhanced for Tablet Sized Interfaces

That’s right, you can now stream Dropbox at the party on the big screen and be the coolest party host. You can even use the new settings menu to download HD artist images to get an even more crisp interface!

Landscape AND Portrait Displays

Now all of the pages (even the player page) support both Landscape and Portrait viewing. Previously, playing music on a landscape dock, or from a tablet was really annoying.

Artist Image Backgrounds

Why not make CloudAround more interactive by displaying background artist art while playing or browsing your music? You can even change the quality size, set theme to randomly display, or even turn off this setting.

Cleaned Up The Mess

We found quiet a few memory hogs in previous versions. We have since cleaned this up and put the power back into the users hands. This will increase battery life, meaning our users can use CloudAround longer. We especially improved the time and reliability of syncing for massive Dropbox accounts. Thanks to our 100GB users for helping us fix this.

Ability to Hide/Unhide Artists/Albums/Songs

A lot of the time you use your cloud account to backup your entire computer. That means CloudAround will sometimes pick up a lot of music files that you’ll never want to see or listen to. Now you can hide those song, albums, or artists simply by long clicking on it. You can always show them again in your settings, as CloudAround will not alter you actual songs.

Ability to Hide Duplicates

No other cloud music players on Android do this, but we have enabled users to decide if they want CloudAround to intelligently hide duplicate songs if they are found after syncing. This is especially helpful when adding multiple cloud accounts in which you have dupicated backups. This can always be turned back off if the users wants to see everything again.

10,000+ Downloads and ROLLING

Today CloudAround is celebrating a huge success of 10,000 downloads on the Android Market. This comes at a great time, just before the launch of our newest release of version 1.2.0. We cannot thank the thousands of daily users enough for all of the support and feedback they have given us. Our users have shaped what CloudAround has become today and we promise to continue to innovate and bring you more surprises along the way. We don’t have stats from other cloud music apps, but the number of repeat users of CloudAround for streaming cloud music is amazing. Many of them are daily users.  We are going to continue to add more clouds as we gather the interest and work toward the direction of becoming the interactive cloud music player of choice for Android users.

Thank you for the feedback and keep it coming. We have some big surprises in the works for you all. Stay tuned bigger and better features and improvements!