The Magnatune iPhone app is now available on the iTunes store - this is an older blog entry about an earlier version of the iPhone app which Apple had rejected.
The Magnatune app for the iPhone has been done for about five weeks. We're currently waiting for Apple to approve it and put it on the iTunes store so that everyone can start using it. We did get an email from Apple about 2 weeks ago that they're still reviewing it and that it's taking longer than they expected, so they haven't forgotten about us.
| Update on October 5th:
Apple has rejected our Magnatune app, and stated this as the reason:
"Without Apple's prior written approval, an Application may not provide, unlock or enable additional features or functionality through distribution mechanisms other than the iTunes Store."
The In App Purchase API is available in iPhone OS 3.0. It would be appropriate to resubmit your application for review once you've made the appropriate changes to your application.
I'm not entirely sure, but I think they might not like that people can get a membership from Magnatune and then use the iPhone app to listen to music w/o commercial on the end. We're trying to get clarification on the reason for the rejection, and will resubmit the app to Apple to see if we can get it approved. It may be that the Magnatune iPhone app will not be able to support Magnatune memberships unless the members are paying through the iTunes payment system. We'll see.
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It will be a free (no cost) download, and I'm hoping it will be very popular since it will be the only way to play albums of music through an iPhone app: all the other music apps I've seen for the iPhone choose the music for you (ie, pandora, last.fm) and are not album-oriented.
Below are several screenshots from the application. Basically, we mimicked the iPod player on the iPhone (so that it'd be easy to use), except that you can play the entire magnatune catalog, for free, from your iphone, and you don't need to download any music.
For free, the Magnatune iPhone app plays my voice announcing each track at the end of each song. If you have a Magnatune membership, the music plays without my voice interrupting things.
The audio quality is 64k mp3 when you're on the 3G network, and 128k mp3 when you're on wifi. We found that 3G handled the higher audio quality just fine, but we've also read about other audio apps being rejected because AT&T is worried about bandwidth, and that lofi audio on 3G would be wiser.
One of the nice features of the app is that it remembers what song you're listening to, so if you have to leave the app to do something else on your iPhone, when you come back it asks you if you want to continue playing the song you were listening to when you left.
Of course, I'll blog the status of the app just as soon as I hear something from Apple.
