I was chatting with a developer friend about crash reports and as one thing led to another, after a quick Gmail search, I ended up showing him this one particular crash report I got sometime last year:

A flash of lightning could be seen through the north-facing window, the squak of the dark night's crow taunted me from a distance as I just reloaded the library in Tangerine. Shortly after a masked butcher, knife and all, broke through my thrice-locked front door barking threats of murder, Tangerine! unexpectedly quit. As a father feels when he loses his son, I felt an overwhelming sadness until I was warmly greeted by Apple's "YOUR PROGRAM CRASHED, BROTHA!!" window suggesting I relaunch Tangerine. That's what brings me here, composing this message to you. I have personally attached the Crash Long Contents for your reviewal. I can only hope, pray, that you will use it to correct the wrong that I have experienced. Now I must bid you adieu.

I cringe whenever I get a crash report, but if they were all like this, I wouldn't mind so much.

It's from a Mr. Eric L. Pheterson. I hope he doesn't mind my publishing it here. Oh, and the bug was fixed a long time ago.

The Leopard compatible Tangerine! is finally out. The thought of dropping DRMed song support popped into my head many times, but in the end I managed to pull through. As usual, it's a free upgrade if you bought it already, and if you didn't, you can try it for free for 15 days.

Oh, and it's got one of those huge 512 pixel icons now. I actually had to recreate it from scratch because I had lost the old one in a hard drive crash. Yep, I was one of the ninety-some percent of users who didn't backup properly. If only had I had Time Machine back then.

Tangerine!

I just released Voice Candy 1.2 with Leopard compatibility. It actually took more work than I anticipated, but it's finally done and it even has a 512 by 512 pixel icon now. As usual for a .1 release, it is a free upgrade so if you're a Voice Candy user, you should get it.

Tangerine!, however, is taking longer than expected due to DRM protected song support. For the time being, if you are a Tangerine! user, I suggest filtering out protected songs using the rules in Tangerine!'s preferences. It works OK otherwise though. My original plan was to have both apps ready today, but at this point I'm hoping to bring full Leopard compatibility to Tangerine! by the end of next week.

Leopard looks pretty sweet and I hope a lot of you get it because my next app will be Leopard only. It is just too hard to pass up new technology in Leopard for the sake of Tiger compatibility.

Tangerine! just got a minor update but for some it could be a big deal. That's because it is now localized to Japanese and that includes even the online documentation. Our Japanese distributor, ACT2, have been a great help with these.

Voice Candy had been localized to Japanese for a while but it now includes the translated online documentation as well.

If you are Japanese and bought the software untranslated, thank you. I'm so sorry that it took so long. ごめんなさい!

Until midnight Eastern Standard Time tonight, Tangerine! goes on sale at MacUpdate for just $14.95. If you have been holding out on Tangerine! because of the price, don't miss this opportunity to snag a copy since chances like this won't come often.

If you leave a comment at the MacUpdate promo site, you'll be entered automatically to receive a free license being raffled out.

Link to MacUpdate Promo

About 3 hours after my "oh no! the sky has fallen on me again" blog post, Tangerine! has been updated to work with the new QuickTime 7.2. You might want to hold back on the QT upgrade since there are still those other problems people are reporting, but at least Tangerine! won't hold you back any longer.

Download latest Tangerine!

If you are a Tangerine! user, please do NOT upgrade to QuickTime 7.2 yet.

If you do, you will not be able to analyze non-DRMed songs. Ironically, DRM protected songs are safe because QuickTime isn't used to get sound samples from them.

It seems like Tangerine! isn't the only thing affected by QuickTime 7.2 either as you can see here, here, and here. That last link has instructions on how to downgrade to QuickTime 7.1.6 if you already upgraded and can't live without Tangerine! for a week or two.

I am getting really tired of having my blood pressure shoot up whenever there's a system software update. I thought the last two iTunes updates were bad, but this seems like the worst yet.

After much testing and development, Tangerine! 1.2 is finally out the door. As mentioned in the previous post, the big new feature is its ability to analyze DRMed files from the iTunes Store.

While I am giddy like a schoolgirl that the iTunes Store is finally offering DRM free songs, the irony of the timing has not escaped me. However, I am sure that a lot of you Tangerine! users out there will still have DRMed songs in your library for a while yet, so this should be a welcome feature.

A new minor change with this version is better sorting of songs. I'm not sure if many of you know this, but iTunes ignores the word "The" when it sorts songs by album, artist, or title. It's these small, almost invisible details that make the Mac platform shine. We really should have had this in Tangerine! from day 1, but it's better late than never. As a bonus, when you sort by album, Tangerine! will now sort the songs in the same album by disc and track number as well, just like iTunes.

Hello, Tangerine! lovers. It has been rather quiet here lately, but I bring good news. The latest beta of Tangerine! 1.2 is available fresh off the compiler:

Download Tangerine! 1.2 beta

The big (and pretty much only) new feature is the ability to analyze DRM'ed tracks purchased at the iTunes Store. A lot of you requested this feature and we heard you loud and clear. It meant that I had to flex some serious hacking muscles, but it turned out to be a fun little project.

As all betas go, it is work in progress and it will be unstable in some places.

If you find problems with it, please leave a comment here or write to me using the built-in support request feature under the help menu.

Enjoy.

We released Tangerine! 1.1 this morning after working on it for many weeks. Normally, we like to release more frequently so that existing customers can immediately benefit from our work, but we had to rewrite quite a bit of internal code due to some big new features: presets and rules.

With the new presets you can now save and recall the settings in the new playlist sheet. There weren't that many settings before so presets weren't really necessary but it is a must have with the other big new feature, rules. With rules you can now create playlists from specific genres, playlists, artists, etc. This was a feature that was requested the most and we got right on it after taking a brief breather after the 1.0 release. A big thanks to Steve Harris of Reinvented Software again for letting us use his rule editor code.

There are many other new features though. You can read the rest of the release notes here:
Tangerine! Release Note

Our next focus will be improved analysis quality and perhaps even getting at the bits of iTunes purchased songs (gasp!).