We have also fixed Last.FM scrobbling on pause.  Thanks to Kyle over at @GoneMADSoftware for pointing this out to us!

In addition to these great improvements, we have also added full headset control support!  This has been one of the most requested features from our users, and we have made this compatible for all versions that we support now, not just the older versions.  We will give a more in depth writeup on how we overcame Android fragmentation to give the same headset functionality following D.R.Y. principles.  Keep checking back to read more about how we solved this issue and more.

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• Support for m4a files – You can now sync m4a files as well as mp3′s.  After you update CloudAround just go to the menu and hit ‘Update Library’ to see all of your m4a files appear.
• Folder view – We have heard this request many many times so we have finally added it.  Just swipe the top tab bar horizontally to see the folder tab.  Now you can search through your songs as they are sorted in your cloud account.
• Search view – After the folder tab you will also notice a search tab.  Just start typing to find the song you are looking for.
• Selective Sync – We’re very excited about this one.  You can now select which folder you would like CloudAround to sync.  This will drastically decrease sync times for users with many other files in the cloud account.  If you are an existing user, just hit the menu button and go to ‘Add or Edit Accounts’ then select the account you would like to change and hit ‘Update Sync Folders’.  From there you can pick the folder you would like CloudAround to search for songs.

We’ve worked very hard on these features so we hope you enjoy them!  Of course, with as many features as we have added there may be a few bugs that pop up.  Please let us know if you run into any issues or if just to tell us how you’re liking the update at feedback@cloudaround.com.

Enjoy!

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A big thank you to everyone who has contributed to this milestone!  Stay tuned for more exciting updates!

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For a while now, we have been putting off bug fixes in exchange for larger features.  This release, we decided to fix a couple of those small bugs that have been annoying us for a while.  Hopefully, you will notice a difference in stability and performance.  As always, email us at feedback@cloudaround.com if you find any issues we didn’t catch.  In version 4.1 of Android (Jelly Bean), the media player functionality was slightly changed.  This caused a lot of songs to stop being able to be streamed.  We’ve fixed this as well in 1.4.3 so we’re sure our Jelly Bean users will be happy!

We also knocked out a bunch of small features that people have been asking about for a while now:

• We added the ability for users to increase the font size
• You can now change the song information (title, artist, album, track number) directly from the music player page
• We have added two more widgets: a 1×1 and a 4×4
• There is now a volume bar on the media player page for tablet users without a physical volume button
• You can now edit the track numbers of songs to make sure they are in the right order in an album
• We made some small tweaks so the UI looks a little better on tablets

Of course there are still a bunch of other features we would like to add so keep an eye out for future releases.  Coming up next we will have support Google Drive!

Let us know what else you would like to see…we wont know unless you tell us!

Enjoy!

The post Version 1.4.3 Released! appeared first on CloudAround - Your Media From Your Choice of Cloud.

How much is SugarSync integration to CloudAround?

Currently, we do not charge for SugarSync integration.  Our free version of CloudAround offers one free cloud.  If you would like to have multiple clouds, you will need to purchase the premium version, but hey, we are not charging much – just a one time $1.99 cost.

What does this partnership mean?

We will be working closely with SugarSync to improve our offering for our users.  When we run into issues, we will be sure to address them from a partnership angle rather than a support angle.  We already dedicate quite a lot of time to supporting our other partner’s application integration, providing feedback to them, and referring more users to move to the cloud.

Why SugarSync?

First off, you are getting 5GB of free storage – who can complain about that?  SugarSync has enough faith in it’s cloud offering to take such a large storage tier and offer it for free, competing directly with Google Drive.  You have access to all of your data all of the time with offline file access.  SugarSync really cares about having their files integrated across all of the major platforms and they have great followers to prove it.  They have been around for over 4 years and continue to gain popularity in the cloud world as well as locking down impressive partnerships with giants such as Best Buy, Lenovo, and San Disk. SugarSync provides a great feature comparison that will topple any doubts  you may have in moving over to them - http://www.sugarsync.com/sync_comparison.html.  If you aren’t a believer, give us a tweet @CloudAroundApp and let us know why.

The post CloudAround Officially Partners with SugarSync appeared first on CloudAround - Your Media From Your Choice of Cloud.

Many users will decide to migrate onto MusicHub but there are a large percentage of users who will be looking for cloud alternatives. Trends show that most users are pushing all of their music to the cloud, and there are several ways to do this such  as to use a storage service like Dropbox or Box that supports desktop sync or multi-file upload interfaces such as Windows Skydrive. Most of the clouds supported by CloudAround have a free tier as well as premium options. When other cloud players boast about free storage, we simply reply “we have more and will provide a faster and better experience”.  Our users have the ability to add multiple free tiers together which makes CloudAround that much more powerful.

We want to be able to give our users choice and avoid a cloud storage lock-in. Afterall, who has time to waste reuploading 5000 songs to a cloud provider because they raised pricing or lost data?  Our partnerships allow users to simply type in their API keys or login credentials and CloudAround does the hard work of syncing that data faster than anyone in an beautiful interface that remains intuitive with extensive user testing.

CloudAround is free of charge with no recurring fees. Supporting CloudAround by purchasing the premium version enables you to add as many accounts as you want as well as removing all ads. It will also provide our users more premium features as they are rolled out to production.

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The main feature that we have added in 1.4.1 is a new Download Manager.  In our previous version, we gave you the ability to download individual songs, however, there was very little feedback about what was happening.  With our new download manager, you can now add and remove songs to the queue as you wish as well as see the progress of the currently downloading song.  Not only have we added this download manager, but we have given you the ability to to download all songs by an artist, all songs in an album, or all songs in a playlist.  We have heard many requests for this feautre…so enjoy!

We have also added better repeat functionality.  Previous versions only allowed you to put the current song on repeat.  Now you can choose between repeating the current song or repeating the entire album.  We’ve also fixed a few bugs, including an issue when renaming an artist.  We’re always trying to find and fix bugs as quickly as possible so please let us know if you find any.

This release has prepared us for adding the very highly requests cloud Google Drive.  It shouldn’t be too much longer before we have this one wrapped up, so keep your eyes out for our next release.

As always, let us know what you think of the new release and what features you want added.  Email us anytime at feedback@cloudaround.com

Enjoy!

The post Version 1.4.1 Released! appeared first on CloudAround - Your Media From Your Choice of Cloud.

Not only will you notice an improved UI during the sync process, but we completely re-engineer and optimized the syncing process.  You should notice much faster syncs(often times up to 50% faster).  We are really pround of this and continue to monitor the performance of the syncing engine.

One of the long awaiting features our users have requested is a widget.  Well, now we have one.  We wanted to keep the first version fairly basic since there are quiet a few things that can go wrong with having a widget in charge of so much backend material.  We currently only have given our users access to a 4×1 sized widget, however we are working on a porfolio of different sizes and themes.  Several users have dropped our rating on Google Play because we were missing a widget, so hopefully those users are now pleased.

Finally, we fixed several device specific bugs.  One of the biggest ones our users were not happy about was updating accounts on Box.  We have fixed this bug and it is ready to rock.  We apologize that it had taken this long and we will continue to get on them faster.  In addition to fixing the Box updating bug, there was another nasty bug where some tablet Honeycomb users were not able to add Box accounts without getting a force close.  We have also fixed this one.  There were several device specific bugs that did not pop up often, but often enough for our concern.  We have patched them up and will continue to test our own product as well as gather feedback from our users to remain as stable as possible while still pushing our cloud music service to the max.

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Provider	Free Storage	Promotions	CloudAround Supported
*	5GB	50GB for life on certain devices	Yes
*	2GB (up to 18GB on referrals)	Referrals and Product based incentives with HTC, Samsung, Sony, LG and more	Yes
*	5GB	None, but cheap storage after the free tier	Upcoming
*	5GB (referrals up to 32GB)	Impressive referral bonuses	Upcoming
*	7GB	Opt-in legacy users have 25GB	Alpha-Ready
*	5GB	None, but solid intergation with iTunes	No
*	2GB (up to 10GB referral)	Educational Discounts	No
*	0GB ($0.10/GB storage + transfer rates)	None	Yes
*	5GB (with limited number of requests)	None	Yes

So Which Cloud is Right for You?

This is a tough quest for several reasons.  Let’s face it, most users are going to want free storage with no bandwidth restrictions and unlimited data storage.

Price
The cloud computing industry is transforming closer to this as it evolves over the next few years, but we aren’t there yet.  We have noticed some of our users are creating their own networks of clouds by signing up for several free cloud accounts, such as one at Box one at Dropbox, and then have all of their local phone storage as well.  If these users were to max out the free capabilities of Box and Dropbox at the time of this post(50GB Android promotion on Box/25GB promotion on Galaxy S3), they would have access to 75GB of remote storage and potentially 16GB of storage on their new S3.  That’s a lot of storage for music on a phone, considering smart phone storage could have been measured in megabytes just a few years ago.

Many users want a true pay-as-you go model, if they are only interested in accessing their data remotely for quick bursts.  Clouds like like Amazon S3 or Rackspace Cloud Files would suit these users.  Keep in mind, Dropbox is essentially a SaaS on top of Amazon S3.

Speed
We have not heard any issues of streaming speeds from our users, so we tending to think they are all about within the threshold of acceptance for our users and ourselves.  We have taken benchmarks of the times it takes for large accounts to sync remotely from the cloud to the users’ device, but most of the time the results vary based on the time of day the sync occurs.  We have done quite a lot of optimizations to insure music is delivered to the device as soon as possible.

On the flip side of this topic, different clouds do have different upload speeds.  We have not done comparisons, but there are plenty of them out there on the internet.  When we have uploaded music files for testing on clouds, it’s typically in lots of several gigabytes.  There are so many factors to consider when measuring this amount of data that the time is better spent on just making our product better for our users.  For purposes of music, one song upload will not be a drastic difference.

Ease of Use
Most of our users love free and easy.  Dropbox has hit the nail on the head in the free tier of cloud storage.  They offer up to 18GB of free storage and provide desktop sync for free as a service.  They have loads of sharing and collaboration capabilities and plenty of 3rd parties have built apps that work with Dropbox to make it even easier to use.  Box provides the most free storage but they do not yet offer a free syncing service.  SpiderOak is another which is very similar to Dropbox and does offer a great deal of options, including a Windows/Mac/Linux desktop sync.  This is quite rare amongst the crowd of clouds, since Dropbox is really the only contender on that front.  On top of that, they offer quite a secure data encryption process with their storage and are very transparent about how it works.  All providers will allow a UI from the web that allows file uploads and API’s for the tech saavy, but this is nothing special and is almost a requirement for a cloud storage provider to survive in the market today.

From CloudAround’s perspective, we want to make the sync process as easy as possible for all clouds.  This means that we do not want you pressing more then 2 or 3 buttons, adding in some text and letting the sync to just work for you.  If any of our users feel we have failed them, we encourage them to email us at feedback@cloudaround.com and we will make it happen.

Conclusion
There is no clear winner in personal remote music storage, but you do have options.  It will depend on what operating system you typically use, how you are used to uploading your music, how much you want to pay, and how much you care what other people think.  For us at CloudAround, free rules the ring.  We do not have a clear winner, but we will wait to see what the cloud giants will evolve with next.  Let us know what you think on Twitter @CloudAroundApp and try CloudAround today with or without ads.

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