What's new in Pulsar 2.3.4
May 15, 2012
- Pulsar now correctly follows the channel lineup provided by Sirius (eliminating incompatible channels).
- Track titles for non-playing stations should again work for Sirius Canada users.
- It's now possible to change channels from the background in Grid or Favorites view.
- Pulsar now includes the in-window Trial Mode badge.
New in Pulsar 2.3.3 (May 2, 2012)
- Frequent connection failures caused by SiriusXM's new beta web player have been worked around.
- Pulsar now features a Developer News window, used for communicating urgent messages.
- The debugging window now contains hidden preferences.
- Pulsar no longer fills the pause buffer with silence when switching channels.
New in Pulsar 2.3.2 (Oct 31, 2011)
- Pulsar has been fixed to deal with SiriusXM's late-October 2011 server changes (using https in addition to http for the player .swf).
- A hidden preference ('useRTMPTunneled') has been added to use RTMP tunneling.
- Several other minor improvements have been made, to make streaming more reliable.
New in Pulsar 2.3.1 (Jun 29, 2011)
- An issue which could lead to high CPU usage and eventual crashing has been fixed.
- Track titles now work correctly even when the computer's clock is inaccurate.
New in Pulsar 2.3 (Jun 22, 2011)
- Pulsar now has full compatibility with The Iconfactory's Take Five (version 1.1 and higher).
- Pulsar's Last.fm integration now requires tracks to be a minimum of 121 seconds to be scrobbled, in order to avoid scrobbling commercials.
- Pulsar now has AppleScript support for volume control as well as muting.
- Pulsar now also features a "player state" AppleScript property, to indicate if Pulsar is currently playing audio.
- An issue where SiriusXM connections did not properly timeout has been resolved.
- Several rare hanging issues have been fixed.
- Keychain errors seen in the Account Assistant are now better handled.
- Pulsar now has preliminary support for the forthcoming Mac OS X 10.7 (Lion).
- Pulsar now requires Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard) or higher.
New in Pulsar 2.2.2 (Mar 26, 2011)
- Pulsar again has support for SiriusXM, following their most recent server changes.
- Pulsar's debug logs have been simplified.
- An issue with Pulsar's Help manual has been corrected.
- Several other smaller bugs have been corrected, to improve functionality.
New in Pulsar 2.2.1 (Feb 25, 2011)
- Pulsar now refreshes track titles for non-playing stations every 30 seconds (instead of every 60 seconds).
- Pulsar now attempts to work with old Audio Hijack Pro sessions. Recreating these sessions from Pulsar is still recommended.
- An issue where playback could fail (with a SWF Hash error) due to strangely configured Home folders has been handled.
- Playback on some older 10.5 installs, which did not support AAC-HE, has been fixed.
- A bug where tuning a station could randomly fail has been corrected.
- A crash which could occur when changing stations has been fixed.
- A hang which could occur when changing stations has been fixed.
- An irrelevant "Libcrypt" warning which displayed in Console has been removed.
New in Pulsar 2.2 (Feb 16, 2011)
- Pulsar now has full support for the new SiriusXM in the US.
- Special thanks to Dave Binnion and John Melby for their assistance.
New in Pulsar 2.1.3 (Feb 7, 2011)
- Tentative support for SIRIUS in the US has been restored. We are currently working on a more robust solution.
New in Pulsar 2.1.2 (Nov 23, 2010)
- Pulsar now features improved integration with forthcoming versions of Airfoil.
- Pulsar's Growl artwork has been improved.
- Pulsar is now better at detecting expired XM trial accounts.
- A problem playing streams over T-Mobile tethering has been fixed.
- Pulsar now uses Dogstar as the preferred source of SIRIUS track titles, due to iPhone track titles and streams being out of sync with the other web streams.
New in Pulsar 2.1.1 (Jul 28, 2010)
- Updates to the Now Playing information for certain channels, such as XM 84, have been improved.
- A rare bug where dropped internet connections could cause Pulsar to unpause and begin playing audio has been fixed.
- Scrobbling to Last.fm now properly identifies itself as coming from Pulsar.
- Several under-the-hood fixes have been made as well.
- Pulsar again quits faster on Mac OS X 10.6, for all users.
- Pulsar now sends anonymous account data up to userSurvey.
New in Pulsar 2.1.0 (Jul 16, 2010)
- Accessibility - Pulsar now fully supports VoiceOver, for vision-impaired users.
- Dock menu - Right-click or Control-click on Pulsar's Dock icon to access handy playback controls.
- The Controls menu now offers a Jump to Live option, to restart live playback (jumping to the end of the pause buffer).
- Growl notifications are now coalesced, so only one is on-screen at a time.
- Pulsar now properly remembers mini-player or regular window state between launches.
- Now Playing information now updates faster in some situations.
- A minor issue when the pause buffer led to a full disk has been resolved.
- Pulsar quits faster on Mac OS X 10.6.
- A bug where track titles would not display correctly on PowerPC machines has been corrected.
New in Pulsar 2.0.0 (Jun 29, 2010)
- Pause live radio - Pulsar now enables you to pause up to three hours of radio, then pick back up where you left off or jump ahead with the arrow keys.
- Pulsar's interface has been updated with an improved and more fun look.
- Mini-mode has been improved to provide access to Favorite stations.
- Favorite channels are now sortable via drag and drop. Order them however you like!
- Last.fm scrobbling is now supported - just set your Last.fm account in Preferences.
- Pulsar can display currently playing songs in a temporary window, via Growl.
- The volume slider now behaves more usefully, with the left button muting audio and the right button moving to the previously set level, instead of always moving to 100%.
- Now supports basic AppleScript commands: Play/Pause, Previous Song, Next Song, as well as retrieving Now Playing information.
- Pulsar's controls are now accessible from the background via command-clicking.
- Scroll position is now maintained between views.
- The VU meters now function properly, with the last bar moving.
- The 'pauseJumpTime' hidden preference adjusts the jump time, which defaults to 10 seconds.
- The 'pauseBufferSize' hidden preference adjusts the buffer time in seconds, defaulting to 10800 seconds (3 hours).
- The erroneous Spelling & Grammar menu has been removed.
- Pulsar now prefers iPhone track titles over DogStar, when available.
- Now accepts 'CMPL-' license keys, for free Pulsar users.
- Pulsar no longer tries to display Favorites for disabled accounts.
- A bug where rapid tuning could cause erroneous data to display or erroneous music to play has been corrected.
- Many error messages have been improved.
New in Pulsar 1.5.6 (Jan 29, 2010)
- SIRIUS log-ins, broken by server changes made on the SIRIUS.com side, again work properly.
- Pulsar now fully supports XM Canada/XM Online Plus.
- A rare crashing bug with the Account Assistant has been fixed.
New in Pulsar 1.5.5 (Nov 30, 2009)
- Pulsar now properly honors the list of available XM channels.
- Pulsar now better deals with login failures and error reporting related to XM server outages.
- Pulsar now better reports errors with inactive SIRIUS accounts.
- Several issues with login failures to SIRIUS Canada due to incorrect CAPTCHA data, have been corrected.
- A rare "Error 0" bug caused by conflicting python libraries has been fixed.
New in Pulsar 1.5.4 (Nov 21, 2009)
- Support for XM Radio Online, previously broken by XM server changes, has been restored.
- Erroneous "Service is broken" messages are no longer shown.
New in Pulsar 1.5.3 (Nov 16, 2009)
- Support for SIRIUS Online, previously broken by SIRIUS server changes, has been restored.
- Several other small bugs have been fixed.
New in Pulsar 1.5.2 (Aug 25, 2009)
- Pulsar now pulls SIRIUS track titles from multiple sources for better reliability.
New in Pulsar 1.5.1 (Jun 3, 2009)
- A hang that occurred after a channel's stream cut out has been fixed.
- Channel logos are now displayed more rapidly at launch.
- Pulsar now better detects and handles Mac OS X Keychain errors
- Pulsar now works better with future Mac OS X versions.
New in Pulsar 1.5 (Apr 24, 2009)
- Pulsar is out of Preview! With dozens of improvements and bug fixes, Pulsar is ready for the world.
- Mini-mode! Pulsar now sports a smaller mini-mode interface. Just click the Zoom (+) button to toggle between the full-size and mini modes.
- Now supports recording with Audio Hijack Pro. Right-click a channel to create a new Session in Audio Hijack Pro, for instant or timed recording.
- Pulsar now stays logged in to SIRIUS across launches when possible, preventing issues where SIRIUS could lock out listeners.
- No more hunting for a Play button. To play a channel, just click it in the channel list.
- Many minor bug fixes and improvements.
- Pulsar's color scheme has been revised and improved.
- pulsar:// urls for playing back streams are now supported.
- SIRIUS accounts requiring an upgrade now properly report an error.
- A bug where SIRIUS track titles would not display in some time zones has been fixed.
- Setting the audio output device is now possible, in Preferences.
- The RTSP streaming engine has been re-written, based on live555.
- The ffmpeg audio playback engine has been updated to version 0.5.
New in Pulsar 1.1.0 (Jan 26, 2009)
- SIRIUS Canada accounts are now fully supported.
- XM channels now tune correctly after long idle periods.
- Pulsar now displays correct channel titles for all XM channels.
- Several additional tuning and LCD display bugs have been corrected.
- SIRIUS: Fixed bug where Low bitrate streams would sometimes fail to play.
- Interface: Better display of Tuning status when clicking Play.
- Networking: Now warns if port 554 appears to be not functional.
- Audio Playback: Now correctly handles the Default Output device changing.
- Misc: Level Meters can now be turned off to conserve CPU power.
- Misc: Fixed pinwheeling on first launch.
- Misc: Now properly remembers the view on re-launching.
New in Pulsar 1.0.0 (Jan 5, 2009)