Tune Announcer

We've revamped Tune Announcer, the Android app that uses the native Text-to-Speech capabilities of Android to speak the tracks you are listening too. It can also pop up a small toast or notification to show you the album art and track details.

Why a New Version?

We could release this under the guise of the old version so all existing Tune Announcer users would receive the new version. However, the way in which this new version works is fundamentally different to the old version discarding the emasculated scrobbling for a notification based listener.

This requires a rewrite of the app from the ground up. We can reuse the service based logic of the old app to speak and toast, but the UI needs significant work to add new functionality and remove the scrobble related code.

Furthermore, we're changing how we monetise the app. The old way of users paying a one-off fee and expecting 13 years of support for all the different versions of Android that have been released in that period is unsustainable. We will now use a subscription based service to unlock the 'pro' features of the application. A small fee, around $3 every year, will enable these features and enable us to receive ongoing support as we continue to develop the application.

The original 'pro' version is still on the Google Play Store but we cannot update it without removing the broadcast receiving function and at some point in the not too distant future, Google will remove it from the Play Store as it will be mandatory to update all apps to target later versions of the Android SDK.

You can download Tune Announcer V2 here.

We have a video of the setup process for Tune Announcer that also has some music and speech examples.

History

Tune Announcer was the first application SoftWyer wrote for Android, back in September 2010. Since then Google have slowly clamped down on the features that made Tune Announcer work, specifically receiving implicit broadcasts. Tune Announcer receives music broadcasts from any player that supported the idea of "scrobbling", made popular by the music site Last.fm. This broadcast scrobble contained all the information we needed to be able to speak the track details and without it Tune Announcer just will not work.