These are the most frequently asked questions so please contact support if you can’t find the information you need on this page.
What happens to the original app?
It was made free until Sunday 31st December 2023 @ 6pm (Australian Eastern Time) and was then removed from the App Store. If the app remains present on your device it will continue to work. The data files will continue to be updated if a demand is still present for them. After Monday 30th September 2024 @ 9pm (Australian Eastern Time) no more data file updates will be made available although the app will continue to work with those it already has.
If you are one of the (very) few who have purchased the original app within the last twelve months please send an email to recentuser@x3.com.au and mention the email address you are using for your account in the new app. The first subscription you purchase in the new app will then be extended by an additional three months.
I bought the original version. Why isn’t this an upgrade?
This is a completely new app. It provides a large amount of functionality and reliability that cannot be added to the original version without an exponential increase in effort and complexity. Think of it as adding more stories and rooms to an existing house. You are restricted in some things you’d like to build and some rooms may join awkwardly because you can’t remove certain structural walls. At some point it makes far more sense to demolish and rebuild with better foundations, updated building practices, and a more cohesive design.
There is no way to transfer data between the versions since the data in each is specified in fundamentally different ways. Therefore it is simpler for all to treat it as an entirely different product and keep the old one around for a while.
Another subscription? Why can’t I pay a one-off price like the original version?
Cloud services cost money. And continue to do so on a recurring basis. The app now uses them to provide far more simplicity and functionality than the old version. I need to pay for them which means I either charge a single up-front cost or a subscription. If I go for the former I would need to work out how many expected users, how much data each of them would upload and download, and how many years each of them would use the app. Not to mention how the cost of cloud services would change over the years. There’s so many variables in that even actuaries would baulk at providing an estimated figure. I’m not an actuary and they are extremely expensive to hire so I decided to take the far simpler approach of a subscription.
The main thing to note is that an active subscription allows you to add new media to your account and transfer it between your devices. If your subscription is inactive then everything on your devices continues to play. So you only pay for a subscription if you wish to add new media to your account or download to a new device. Note that you get a free subscription until you have added 1GB of data to your account. That’s five to ten releases depending on your programmes.
As for the subscription cost that covers a mere part of the development of the app and associated components (around 5,000 hours of work so far), a help desk, the ongoing payment for cloud services, the provision of continually updated data, and new app features. My aim is for the annual cost be be around what a group fitness instructor is paid for teaching a single class. I think it’s a very fair price.
Can I transfer all the data and music across from the existing app?
No.
The reasons for not being able to transfer the music are both technical and brushing up against a legal one that I’m very keen to stay away from.
The music used by the current app exists in the iOS music library. This is managed and controlled by Apple. Once iTunes / Apple Music has added it to the iOS library the music is available to apps – but with some restrictions. The apps can access the full audio content data of the file as long as it is a file that you have added and it is not protected by DRM (digital rights management). Those protected by DRM include all files on streaming services and those sold on the iTunes Store before 2009. If files have DRM then iOS will allow apps to play them but they cannot access the full audio content data. Only allowing audio files to be played without access to the full audio content data massively increases the complexity involved when trying to implement features such as volume levelling and cross-fading. Even the incredibly clever people who write DJ apps struggle with this so I’d stand little chance.
But, I hear you ask, if you can copy the full audio content data from a lot of my songs at the moment can’t you just move them over to the new app?
This is partly a data management issue and the aforementioned legal one. For the data management part my issue is that I couldn’t be 100% sure that the file I copy across is correct. This is because the validation process used in the current app works on music running times and the order of music tracks that all belong to the same album. You will have seen that some of your albums occasionally receive a prompt asking which release it actually is because there may be multiple ones it could match against. I would have to trust that every user made the correct decision when assigning every album. I can’t assume that’s the case and I suspect it would mean more work and complaints further down the line as people discovered this, probably during class which is the worst time for it to happen.
I also would not be able to do the necessary pre-processing such as marking the areas of silence in tracks and determining the data needed for volume levelling until much later (that would also require a whole new lot of code to be written). By that time you may have already used the track before the pre-processing and had a poorer user experience than I find acceptable.
The legal part is that if I did extract the full audio content data and wrote it to the new app along with as much metadata I could find then it would mostly likely be a slightly different file – even by a few bytes – from that which you added. Which means the app would be creating a new version of a copyrighted and licensed track. The companies that own the copyrights and do licensing are very big and have lots of lawyers. So while it’s a bit of a grey area I don’t want to be the test case and so will only read and play what you have added. Having a single point of entry into the system guarantees that the app is working only on the exact copy of the files you added. That goes a long way towards ensuring myself and users are within acceptable fair use provisions of people using their own content.