Last weekend, I rolled out a new version of media.io that features the following changes:

500 MB Upload Limit

I’ve raised the upload limit to 500 MB from 250 MB.

Support for MP2

media.io now supports the MP2 format so you can convert MP2 to MP3 online.

Other Bug Fixes

• In very rare cases, an error in Groovy would prevent conversions. This has been fixed.
• Support for invalid range request headers. Some buggy clients send indices in range request headers in the wrong order. This is now supported.

Since the last update, I haven’t added any new functionality but instead concentrated on getting bugs out of media.io. I now have a system in place that helps me finding problems with browsers quickly and the outcome of this is that the following bugs were identified and fixed.

• Bugfix for missing Content-Length header during upload. Some clients do not tell the server how long the upload they’re sending is. This is now working fine.
• Bugfix for changes in Internet Explorer 9’s CSS opacity handling. In IE 9, Microsoft has removed the older filter CSS property to change the opacity of elements. The impact of not implementing this soon enough was that few IE 9 users were able to use the site (those using the compatibility view were not affected, I think).
• Bugfix for files with + in their names. Files containing + in their names could not be downloaded. Thanks to mrzerga for reporting this.
• Bugfix for file not found errors in Internet Explorer 8. Some bugs only affect users of certain browsers which can cause them to go unnoticed for long. Sadly, downloads of files with spaces in them (in other words, most files) never worked in Internet Explorer 8 due to a combination of IE’s HTML mangling and my hope that certain things would work the same across browsers. This bug affected a lot of people and made them unhappy, judging from the survey responses.
• Enhancement: No more ActiveXControls in IE 7 and greater. Internet Explorer has implemented a native XMLHttpRequest object from IE 7 on. This is now used in preference over the MSXML ActiveX control the XMLHttpRequest API originated from. This means that, even if your computer administrator has disabled ActiveX controls, you can still use media.io.
• Enhancement: Better conversion page for mobile phones. The conversion page for cellphones is now almost the same as the regular conversion page for desktop browsers.

There you have it. Enjoy using media.io to convert MP3 files!

Correct Download File Names

A bug that existed since… the beginning of media.io: When you downloaded a file that contained non-ISO-8859-1 characters (technically speaking), you would get broken file names. To be honest, I never noticed until someone from Russia told me. Crazy.

Faster Downloads

To make downloading faster, I implemented gzip compression for downloads. In April, this reduced the amount of downloaded data by 13 %. Less data to download means faster downloads for you (and less money if you are billed by bandwidth consumption).

MIDI

media.io now supports the popular MIDI format so you can for example convert MIDI to WAV.

media.io in Estonian

Thanks to Olav from Estonia, there is now an Estonian translation of media.io. Thanks, Olav!

Other performance improvements

I’ve made several small tweaks to increase site performance. The home page should now load in less than 2 seconds – worldwide.

I’ve published a new version of media.io today that has several new features.

New Features

• You can send anyone a link to download a file you’ve converted. Many people suggested I add this. The download link is valid for 30 minutes.
• After downloading your converted audio files, you can start over. This way, files you have already downloaded will not show up again. Again, I’ve been asked to do this.
• You can see which file extensions are supported, in addition to the maximum file size. This was something that might have annoyed one or two people so I implemented it.
• There are now buttons to link to media.io If you have a site and would like to promote media.io, I’ve prepared some banners for you. Enjoy.

GUI Changes

In addition to these new features, I have implemented one or two subtle changes to the GUI. It’s now all white, as well as having Verdana as the body font which I find more legible than Arial. As usual, you will find screenshots of media.io “before” and “after” below.

Bug Fix

One thing I’m very excited about is a seemingly tiny problem I found a while ago and that I solved the same day. Fixing this bug has decreased audio conversion error rates by absolute 2.76 %, relative 38.48 %. For five lines of code changes, this is awesome.

As always, I hope you enjoy converting MP3 to WAV online and all the other file formats at media.io.

Support for AIFF

AIFF (file extensions: .aiff and .aif) was high on the list of requested file formats. Now you can convert AIFF to MP3 online, as well as converting AIFF to other formats. Supporting .rm files (Real Media) might be next.

Downtimes

The last two weeks have been pretty bumpy – media.io was down several times. In response, I have increased my monitoring a lot which will help keep the site online.

Bug Fixes

A bug that affected people using Download Accelerators (caused by my buggy implementation of HTTP Range requests) has been fixed. Some people have reported incomplete downloads in the past and this should fix it.

Reliability

One thing I’m working on is collecting data why some files can’t be converted at media.io. I know of a few bugs in the tools I use but sometimes, these tools also cannot convert the files you’d like to convert, such as floating-point WAV files. Over time, I want to increase the conversion success rate until everybody’s happy.

From 13.03. to 23.03., visitors with cookies disabled were unable to download anything from media.io. This bug has now been fixed.

That is all, enjoy :-)