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!

It’s been a busy start into 2011 for me. Here are the things that are new at media.io:

Extended Version

media.io now has an Extended Version (formerly pro accounts) that lets you convert multiple files and also upload larger files (500 MB right now, up from 250 MB). For now, the price is only 1 €. Access to the Extended Version is valid for 24 h.

Bug Fixes

Since the last update, the following problems were corrected:

• Some browsers send full file paths. Paths are now removed.
• Question marks in file names were not removed. Question marks in file names that might have been caused by downloading files are now removed.
• Advertising performance improvements. Google’s AdSense product has traditionally been slow and getting slower almost by the minute. With two little tricks, I was able to reduce the bandwidth of AdSense by about 50 %, leading to faster loading pages.
• Many mobile browser bugfixes. Many modifications to the mobile audio conversion page and the home page ensure that even low-end mobile browsers can now use media.io.
• More debugging data for me. While this will not impact visitors, better logging helps me better understand what formats work well and which ones don’t. This has also been reflected in the privacy policy
• Underscores in file names were not removed. Occasionally, people try to convert audio files that end on “_,” such as “foo.mp3_” These underscores are now removed.

New Audio Formats

media.io now supports wave files which are simple WAV files with a different file name.

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 :-)

Time for exciting, new things at media.io! Since the last update, I haven’t done a lot I confess, but at least this:

• “Download Links” are no more. From my conversion rates, I noticed that people didn’t seem to understand what the download links were meant to do so this feature is gone.
• Fixed download encoding issues. @Warin notified me of a problem when downloading files with certain characters in the file name. This might have been a big problem that’s now resolved.
• Impromptu instead of Thickbox. The venerable ThickBox has been replaced by the newer Impromptu that’s at least as good, if not better.

Coming Soon

I’ve also changed one or two things here and there, as evidenced by the screenshots below. And there are more changes in the works (yes, including support for WebKit and mobile browsers). As always, if you have questions or need a feature when converting audio online, please let me know.

Bugs, bugs, bugs

Software bugs are annoying so I fixed some more.

• Repeatedly uploading files would not work in Internet Explorer. This was a caching issue.
• Don’t log file names during download. Nobody seemed to care about this bug but it was easy to fix for the next version of media.io.

Time for tests!

It’s no secret I love testing. I’m a bad designer and a bad copywriter, but I don’t have to be good because I can let my users tell me what they like. In the next days, I’ll start another multivariate test that should answer some of my questions regarding button and help text placement.

Survey

I would like to find out how you use media.io and I have created a short survey. If you have 30 seconds, please take the survey. Thank you!

New upload layout

I mentioned that people are occasionally uploading files but never converting them. In response to that, I’ve completely redesigned the file upload. You can see it in the screenshot below. Soon, when you convert audio at media.io, it’ll be painfully obvious how much data you’ve already uploaded.