Blog
Read about our development plans, upcoming features and improvements as well as tips and tricks.
Sneak preview of the upcoming Helium Streamer for iPhone
We are proud to announce a sneak preview of our new iPhone application, Helium Streamer.
Helium Streamer interacts with your Helium Music Manager database and let you stream and playback your entire music collection from anywhere!
You can play any track on your device, even those which are not natively supported (in this case the application will transcode them in real-time for you).
The user interface allows you to see information about the currently playing track, view and manage the Play Queue, search for tracks, view artist and album information, access your Helium Music Manager Playlists and much more!
Helium Streamer fully supports the background mode features available in iOS4.0, meaning that you can play music with Helium Streamer in the background when using other applications, playing games and similar operations.
You can also double-tap the home button to get full access to the player menu to pause/play and skip tracks.
Instead of inviting you to just read about the product, we have published a sneak peak video.
If you are interested in reading more about the Helium Streamer, please click this link.
2010-07-06Helium Remote 1.1 for iPhone soon to be released
Helium Remote, our iPhone/iPad/iPod Touch application, is soon to be released in an improved version. It has been submitted to Apple for approval and as soon as they accept it, it will be available and of course free for all Premium & Network users. Many things have been improved in this version (called 1.1), some of the changes are mentioned below:
- Support for iOS 4
- Asynchronous downloading of data, so that the User Interface will not be blocked
- Refreshed User Interface, presenting more information
- Possibility to not only play tracks directly but now tracks can also be enqueued
- Larger album cover support
- The top information bar can be hidden/shown on demand
- Support for lyrics presentation
- Possibility to search your Helium Music Manager database to find tracks to play/enqueue.
- A new Artist view, which lets you see general information about an artist/group (with picture support) as well as all releases and appearances from the artist in an easy to use grouped user interface. By selecting a release, you can browse it in the second new view, the Album view, decribed below.
- The Album view lets you see general information about an album (including picture) as well as all the tracks in the album. The tracks are grouped by CD for multi-CD albums. A track can be played/enqueued and you can also browse a specific artist from a track in the Album view.
All these features and other minor fixes and corrections have created a new more powerful and easier to use version of the Helium Remote client.
We are currently seeking translators for Helium Remote. Please contact us if you are interested in helping us out!
2010-06-06New section for video tutorials
We have just launched our first video tutorial for Helium Music Manager. This first screencast video will show the benefits of the Album Picture Manager which is a tool that greatly simplifies the task of downloading and attaching album picture to the albums of your music collection.
We plan to release more video tutorials as time goes. This gives us great opportunities to take you to the depths of what Helium Music Manager has to offer, which often goes unnoticed.
Make sure to either follow the HeliumMusic Manager YouTube channel or the Video tutorials section on our site.
We look forward to stunning you with feature guides, tips and tricks and in-depth tutorials of the very best of what Helium Music Manager has to offer.
Look at the first video tutorial - Introduction to the Album Picture Manager - below:
We have just launched our first video tutorial for Helium Music Manager. This first screencast video will show the benefits of the Album Picture Manager which is a tool that greatly simplifies the task of downloading and attaching album picture to the albums of your music collection.
We plan to release more video tutorials as time goes. This gives us great opportunities to take you to the depths of what Helium Music Manager has to offer, which often goes unnoticed.
Make sure to either follow the Helium Music Manager YouTube channel or the Video tutorials section on our site.
We look forward to stunning you with feature guides, tips and tricks and in-depth tutorials of the very best of what Helium Music Manager has to offer.
Look at the first video tutorial - Introduction to the Album Picture Manager - below:
Album Picture Manager
Helium Remote for iPhone available for testing
We're proud to share with you that our first iPhone App has been tested and approved by Apple!
We are now offering our current users of Premium and Network versions to test the App before we officially release Helium Music Manager 7.1 - which is needed to use the Helium Remote.
If you are a current owner of Helium Music Manager 7 (Premium or Network), have an iPhone and want to try out the new Helium Remote application please log in to the Customer Center and download the latest release candidate (RC 3).
Read on how to set up the Helium Remote for iPhone.
The Helium Remote is available for free download at the iTunes App Store at the following location, but remember that you also need a pre-release of the upcoming version of Helium Music Manager 7.1 (available in the Customer Center for owners of Premium or Network versions) to make it work:
http://itunes.apple.com/se/app/helium-remote/id370891560?mt=8
2010-04-26Group tracks to be more productive
The next version of Helium Music Manager will come with the possibility to group your tracks in Track Details. Groups can be created for all available fields and can of course be combined with sorting.
By grouping tracks you can easily identify tracks that are from a specific album, CD, bpm range and much more. Grouping is very quick and allows you to instantly switch between different groupings.
Track Details grouping will be available in all Helium Music Manager versions, including the free version. If you want to try out this new feature it's already available for current customers in the release candidate available for download in the Customer Center.
New developer API to be released
We are currently working on a new application programming interface (API) which will enable third party developers to make fancy applications that interact with Helium Music Manager.
This API will be able to both get information about the currently playing track as well as control the internal player to play, stop, pause and skip tracks.
The API is running as a HTTP service, enabling access through a regular REST interface which returns XML data.
The Helium Remote for iPhone will be the first product we release that will use this interface and we hope to build more in the future.
We also want the community to take the opportunity to develop cool things that uses this API. We will be expanding the interface according to requests and needs. The API will of course be fully open and available in all versions of Helium Music Manager (Free, Premium and Network).
Developers interested in learning more or to get a preview release to try can contact us through our contact page.
We are looking forward to seeing people utilizing this great new opportunity!
Control Helium Music Manager from your iPhone
Soon you will have the possibility to control Helium Music Manager wirelessly from your couch just using your iPhone or iPod Touch.
We are currently developing an iPhone application that will be able to remote control Helium Music Manager.
It will work similar to Apples Remote for iTunes, with the basic functions such as Play, Stop, Pause, Next, Previous and it will display now playing information of the currently playing track and show the album picture.
The application will also have access to view the current Play Queue in Helium Music Manager and also view and enqueue your playlists stored in Helium Music Manager.
2009-12-14Win a license for Helium Music Manager 7
The Windows Gadget now works for both Windows Vista and Windows 7 with Helium Music Manager 7.
The Gadget can be downloaded from our extras section and it will work in all editions of Helium Music Manager including the free version.
We are also anouncing a competition for a redesign of this Gadget, where the winner will get a free license for Helium Music Manager 7 Network edition. The competition will be open until January 31, 2010.
If you want to contribute in this competition you can contact us using our contact form.
The Gadget looks like this at the moment and your contribution should contain a design of both the main window and a subpage window. The contribute could be delivered in any non-destructive image format (such as .psd or .png) but preferable in a Photoshop document.
The winner will be announced after the competion is closed in this blog.