NeutralAxis

I’ve been using the open source Crossfire music streaming web app on my iPhone for awhile now, but a recent update has made it much more reliable. Crossfire requires the Firefly media server be installed and operating on the computer where your music is stored. It then provides a web based interface that you can browse to with the iPhone or iPod Touch to play your music. Basically, it makes it as if your device has unlimited song storage capacity.  No jailbreak process is required.

One of the biggest drawbacks to web browsing on the iPhone is its lack of support for flash based applications, so any web app that requires flash won’t work, and most music streaming web apps use flash. Simplify Media, available throuth the iTunes app store, is a good solution to that problem, but one with which I was ultimately dissatisfied due to some specific circumstances with my needs.  Also, the version of Simplify that I tried was a little buggy in that it never managed to scan and catalog my entire collection. The main reason I chose not to stick with Simplify was because it required me to install their music server software on my computer.  I was already running the iTunes compatible Firefly music server to stream both mp3 and FLAC formats to Roku Soundbridge networked music players and to the web. Simplify Media didn’t work with the Soundbridge and I didn’t want to run two music servers.

Crossfire, on the other hand, was created specifically as an iPhone client to the Firefly music server.  It let the iPhone browse to a web page and play mp3 format music without requiring flash capability, and without buying anything from iTunes or jailbreaking your phone. The first version I used was 0.5.0 and it had the annoying problem of often loading to a blank page. It sometimes took multiple refreshes to get the interface to appear. That problem seems to have been solved in version 0.6.0.  Installation is simply a matter of downloading a zip file and dropping its contents into your web server’s root folder.  In addition to that you’ll need to have a php enabled webserver running and Firefly already installed.

The UI has 4 buttons at the top for Browse, Search, Configure, and About. There are 4 iPhone skins available in the standard download.  Pictured is the default for which I’ve changed the logo from the Apple logo to my own custom image of the Firefly logo.

The Configure button is where you choose the skin you want and provide the IP address, port number, username and password of your Firefly server.

The Browse button calls up a menu letting you choose to browse by album, artist, or library (playlist). The list that appears starts at the beginning of the alphabet and shows 10 items per screen with forward and backward arrow buttons at the bottom of each page. Browsing that way is very slow, and as you can see in the picture, there are 9 items listed without needing to scroll.  So in order to tap the forward/backward arrows, you have to scroll on every page.  The alternative is to use the Search button and search for the first letter of what you’re wanting.  That will quickly bring up a list of everything beginning with that letter.

The Search function seems to have two modes of operation.  First, giving a single letter will list everything that starts with that letter.  Second, you can search for any whole word or words, but it must be how the listing starts.  By which I mean that searching for “Dylan” will not bring up “Bob Dylan”. You’d have to search for “Bob” or “Bob Dylan”. “Bob D” won’t work.  Once you find what you want to play, it will buffer for a few seconds and then begin to play via the Quicktime player

The program is a little rough around the edges, but it gets the job done.  It worked well on a recent drive to Kansas City where in 3G areas, buffering took about 4 seconds between each song.  In areas outside 3G coverage, but where I still had data service, it slowed to nearly 20 seconds.  Over wifi at a hotspot it only took about 1 second between songs.  For a situation where you run your own webserver, are using Firefly music server, and of course have an iPhone, then Crossfire makes a lot of sense to install.  For others, Simplify Media is the simpler and more polished solution.  For me, this will suffice until Apple comes out with an 80GB iPhone.