As I had announced two weeks ago, Muze is now ready for its submission to the Windows Phone Marketplace. The last paperwork needed to be done and hopefully everything will now go as planned. I will update you on a release or any other news as soon as possible.

Yours,
Marius

As promised last weekend I have put some information together about Muze that might interest you.

Firstly the list of v1.0 features of Muze:

• Scrobbling of songs to Last.fm (app must be running, more information below)
• Queuing of scrobbles when there is no network connection
• Control of your media playback in the app, this includes:
  • Ability to browse and select songs in your Music+Video Hub library (music uploaded via Zune PC software)
  • Play/Pause, Forward/Backward,Shuffle and Repeat
  • A convenient menu item to shuffle all your music
• Viewing of your total amount of Last.fm scrobbles in the main screen.

Future features:

• Fast list navigation via alphabet buttons (like in your Windows Phone contacts list)
• View your top charts on Last.fm directly in the app
• View Artist Information directly in the app.

If you look at the current list of features, you might notice that the app currently needs to be running to be able to scrobble your plays. This has to do with API restrictions when working with background tasks on the Windows Phone platform. Locking your screen however will not pause the app, but rather the app will still be running behind the lock screen.

If you are interested in what Muze actually looks like, take a look at the screenshots below. I hope you'll like what you see.

Yours,
Marius

Last.fm scrobbling is a feature that many apps on operating systems such as Android or iOS already support. Spotify is one of the apps, which enables scrobbling to Last.fm, however this app does not support scrobbling on Windows Phone. Over time some other Last.fm apps have appeared on the platform. Some of them profile browsers, but also a very basic scrobble app was published. This scrobble app however lacks the ability to browse the music library and relies on the Music+Video Hub to select songs for playback. These limitations inspired the creation of Muze for Windows Phone.

Muze for Windows Phone is a scrobbling app which enables you to browse your collection of songs on your Windows Phone and allows you to control which song you are playing without having to switch back and forth between the Music+Video hub and this application.

The development of Muze is nearing its completion, and the app will be ready for certification within 2 weeks. In a few days I will be posting some screenshots and a list of current (v 1.0) and future features of Muze. So stay tuned!

Yours,
Marius

Because most of our projects require us to learn new things we sometimes test some small things before using them in the real application. We decided that we will from now on provide some of these small projects for you. We will call these projects Minis.

The first Mini I would like to present to you is a small media player. This simple program was made with Windows Presentation Foundation. I created this Mini because the Last.fm Gobbler application will need to play media files later on. The Mini called Simple Music Player, demonstrates the insanely simple implementation of a media player in WPF.

You can download this Mini here.

Playing media files in WPF is easily implemented due to the MediaPlayer class, which is already in the library of WPF. This class is very straightforward, with some of the methods being called for example Open, Play, Pause and Stop.

We hope you enjoy this and future Minis.

Yours,
The Gobblers

As you may have noticed, there has been a communication silence from our side. This is mainly due to the fact that our Bachelor Projects are currently taking most of our time. The next few weeks will then be spent on relaxing and other such things. After that we will be back and hope to give you some more updates.

Thank you,

The Gobblers