Sunday, 6 January 2013

Alternative last.fm radio player Liquid Bear adds features and bugs



Since last.fm slammed the door shut for mobile listeners, KLastFM and CoboltFM stopped playing. Fortunately Liquid Bear plays last.fm radio by using a smart trick. It gets the playlists from last.fm and the music from vk.com. The app has a simple and effective tab layout, and it pulls lyrics in if you long-tap a song in the play queue or hit the drop-shaped button in the playback tab.

You need a vk.com account to listen, but you can simply make an account with a fantasy name and never visit vk.com again.

Liquid Bear shows the remaining track time in addition to elapsed time since the December 31, 2012 update, and you don't need a last.fm account anymore. It helps to have a last.fm account, though. Without an account Liquid Bear plays music, but it won't use your personal music library or scrobble anything to last.fm.

The January 6, 2013 update adds an equalizer and a button to choose which version of a song to play if vk.com has multiple copies. Unfortunately this makes Liquid Bear force-close on my phone.
Edit: sort of fixed in an update. Now it doesn't crash the app, but just restarts the song.

Liquid Bear still won't let you change the sort order of the play queue. Maybe in the next version?

The January 6 update made the app misbehave on my phone. Removing tracks ahead or after the currently playing song stops the current track, and now it crashes the app too. Closing the app with the exit button keeps the music playing until the app force-closes. The latter two bugs made me go back to version 1.1.1 of December 31, 2012. These bugs may bite you too, so make a backup copy before you update Liquid Bear. Or just have a bit of patience, because the developer of Liquid Bear responds fast.
Edit: fixed in an update. You can now remove tracks from the queue without stopping the music or crashing the app.

• Liquid Bear


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5 comments:

  1. P_King6 January 2013 at 22:11

    This is my hurry to release new important feautures.. my bad. I try to fix bugs tomorrow in minor update. Thanks for posts, always interesting for me, unfortunately :)

    ReplyDelete
  2. android underground6 January 2013 at 23:27

    Wow, that's a super fast response! Keep up the good work.

    Maybe you can keep older versions on your site, so people without backups who get bitten by an update can go back to a working version?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. P_King7 January 2013 at 07:18

      My perfect strategy is to make new working versions :)
      It will be a good experience for me, I will test my updates better next time.

      Delete
  3. P_King10 January 2013 at 13:58

    >Edit: sort of fixed in an update. Now it doesn't crash the app, but just restarts the song.
    It restarts the song only if there is no another results in vk, try long click on this button to see possible variants.

    ReplyDelete
  4. android underground11 January 2013 at 00:43

    Ah, I see.

    But wouldn't a message along the lines of "can't find any alternative, it's this version or nothing" be more user-friendly than just stopping the song?

    ReplyDelete

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