Support for .3ga files

Support for .3ga files was requested several times and media.io now lets you convert .3ga to MP3 (and WAV, Ogg Vorbis and WMA).

Japanese Translation

media.io is now available in Japanese.

media.io on Facebook

I have started a little Facebook page about media.io. If you love media.io, please like media.io on Facebook.

Other new Features and Bug Fixes

Here is a list of what else is new since the last post:

• Usability improvements. While the jQuery Impromptu plugin is awesome for what it does, putting the amount of information in an overlay that media.io did had one or two usability problems.
• Support for Internet Explorer’s partial downloads. media.io now correctly supports Internet Explorer’s partially downloaded files – files that look like foo.mp3.d1234567.partial. Support for DownThemAll partial downloads will also be implemented.
• The “Start over” feature never actually worked. “Start over” has now been implemented in a different way that is guaranteed to work.

That’s it for this time. Let me know if you have any questions for comments. The UserVoice forum is a good place.

I rolled out a new version of media.io yesterday. Here is a list of things that have changed since the last post:

• Better performance. Recently, I’ve gained control over space time using only my thoughts. By bending time around TCP/IP packets, I’ve made media.io even faster.
• No more ShareThis. ShareThis wasn’t used much, but, like most widgets, had to be cleaned of privacy intrusions and I grew tired of maintaining code other than my own.
• Bug fix for overly long file extensions. media.io would remove file extensions longer than eight characters.
• More translations. I’ve filled out some gaps in the translations of media.io. Thanks to the translators.
• Support for Qualcomm QCELP. Supporting .qcp and .qcelp file was a user suggestion. Now you can convert QCP to MP3.

That’s it for this time. Enjoy media.io!

Yesterday, I’ve released the following changes at media.io:

New Audio Formats

media.io now supports four more audio formats. These weren’t the most requested but they were easy to add.

• Monkey’s Audio (.ape files)
• Shorten (.shn files)
• TwinVQ (.vqf files)
• TrueAudio (.tta files)

Bug fixes

• The list of formats was incorrectly shown to mobile devices. The jQuery plugin I use to display the list of audio formats wasn’t really working for mobile devices.
• Uploads are now ordered correctly. Previously, new uploads would be added to the file list at its end. Now, new uploads are added at the beginning. This should help on the download page.

What else is new?

• Italian translation. I’ve had media.io translated into Italian. I like having localized versions because they make things easier to many people.
• Improved Polish translation. I had a colleague go over the Polish translation and improve it.

More is coming. I am still working on the “email/share” feature. If you know where to look, it’s already there.

Another year has passed and media.io is now two years old. Here’s what happened since the last update:

A Dedicated Server for media.io

On 30th of August, I moved media.io to its own, super-powerful server. Here are some examples of how the move affected the service quality of media.io:

• media.io loads 200 ms faster worldwide. Page generation at the old VPS took a while whereas the new server generates the pages in less than 20 ms. This has a nice impact on page loading speeds, as well as reducing the bounce rate by around 1 %.
• More than 50 % less conversion errors. On the old VPS, media.io couldn’t convert many audio files because of the very old operating system that didn’t support newer audio formats such as AMR or WMV 9. On the new VPS which runs Ubuntu 11.04, I see over 50 % less conversion errors.
• Faster conversions. The increased CPU power also shows in the time spent waiting on the conversion page which is reduced by around 6 %.

New Audio Formats

media.io now supports the AMR (Adaptive Multi-Rate Audio Codec) and 3GP (essentially MPEG-4 or Quicktime wrapped around several low-bandwidth audio codecs) formats. AMR especially has been a long-standing issue with many people trying to convert AMR.

What’s new?

• Improved caching. Accidentally downloading the same file again should now cause it to be served from your browser’s cache if it is stored there.
• Regression for DNS migrations. In case of a DNS migration, visitors contacting the new server would cause errors which I would get as emails.
• Swedish translation. Jakob von Essen has donated a translation of media.io in Swedish. Many thanks!

Future Options

Even though I find it hard to guarantee anything, what are some of the things you’d like to see at media.io? I know multiple files are very popular, as is sending the download page to someone. I played with the idea of developing Chrome and Firefox extensions. Would this be of interest to you? Please speak up in the comments. Thanks.

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.