What it means for you?

1. The service is considered stable and suitable for the use in production environment
2. Core features set is complete but we have some new exciting plans in the roadmap (more on this later in this post)
3. If you use a Basic service plan (up to 10 users), you can continue using it
4. If you use a beta version of a premium service plan, you need to switch to a paid version before your beta expires to assure the uninterrupted use of the service.

Switching to a paid service plan

1. Check out Loudtalks Cloud pricing and available service plans
2. Log-in to your Loudtalks Cloud admin console, go to Account page and switch to the selected service plan
3. If you decided to use a free service plan you may need to remove the users and radio gateways to fit into the service plan limits first
4. If you are switching to a premium service plan, proceed to Account > Payment to complete the payment and activate your service plan.
5. Beta service plans are set to expire on March 15, 2010. Please switch to appropriate paid (or free) service plan before that date.

What’s next?

Here are a few things we want to focus on in the near future:

1. Extend and improve the SDK to allow developers better leverage our platform
2. Support more mobile platforms. iPhone, Blackberry and Android are in the short list.

The latter goal is quite ambitious but we strongly feel it’s very important. If you agree and want to help us making it happen earlier, go ahead and sign up for a premium Loudtalks Cloud service plan!

One more thing

If you have tested Loudtalks Cloud and planning to continue to use it, send us your feedback or suggestions on how we can improve the service, and we’ll credit your network account with $100, which you could use to pay for the premium service.

Loudtalks server API reference
Loudtalks push-to-talk SDK

Windows

- Added animated status while connecting a call (only applicable if you use Clear to send)

- Improved sound capture

- Updated Romanian and Swedish translations

Windows Mobile

- Added animated status while connecting a call

- Fixed audio recording problems on some devices (particularly Samsung SGH-i627, Samsung SCH-i770, Intermec CN50)

- Correctly handle screen orientation changes

- Updated Romanian and Swedish translations

The update will be delivered through automatic updates today or you can download it manually now:

Download Loudtalks Lite for Windows

Download Loudtalks Lite for Windows Mobile

Loudtalks Lite 0.9.0.63 is here. Most of the changes are around mobile version again.

Release notes:

Windows

- Added connection quality indicator rating your current connectivity in 1..5 bars scale. If you have 5 bars, your connection is excellent and you will enjoy the best Loudtalks experience. 1 or 2 bars means you have some serious connectivity trouble and may experience dropped voice or longer than 1 sec delay. It might be your ISP, our server or your BitTorrent client working to its limits. Finally if Loudtalks client is currently re-connecting an alert icon is shown instead of the indicator there.

- When you submit a report about the problem a copy of it is saved to ‘My Documents’ folder

Windows Mobile

- Fixed sound capture on some HTC-made devices (particularly Hermes)

- Added connection quality indicator

- When you submit a report about the problem a copy of it is saved to ‘My Documents’ folder

- Added option to bring the app to the foreground, when transmitting a message (useful when using a global hotkey)

- Added option to bring the app to the foreground, when receiving a message

- Added more audio-related information to diagnostic log

The update will be delivered through automatic updates today or you can download it manually now:

Download Loudtalks Lite for Windows

Download Loudtalks Lite for Windows Mobile

This update includes some serious changes to the sound capture code so if it stopped working on your device, please let us know!

1. Go to http://drop.io/ax85pip and download startrek.wav and startrek2.wav sounds to your PC or mobile phone
2. If you downloading to the phone, make sure to put them into ‘My Documents’ folder so that the app can find them
3. If you are using desktop version of Loudtalks go to step 4), mobile — step 5)
4. Open Options (via Tools > Options… menu) and activate Control tab, go to step 6
5. Open Options (via Menu > Options… menu) and activate Control tab
6. Set “New conversation alert” checkbox, then click “Change…” button, browse for startrek2.wav file and click Open
7. Next to “Clear to send alert” checkbox, then click “Change…” button, browse for startrek.wav file and click Open
8. Use “Test” button to verify that the sounds are loaded, click “OK” to close Options dialog and enjoy!

Dynamic channels

Now when configuring a channel in the admin console, you can choose from using group channel and dynamic channel.

Dynamic channels have a different icon and work differently too.

1. Unlike group channels, when you add it to the user, only that channel (and not its users) is added to user’s contacts
2. You can connect and disconnect the channel from the client software in real time by double-click (tap) on the channel name. That way you can easily skip the conversations, which are not relevant at the moment
3. Since dynamic channels don’t “pollute” your contact list, they could potentially scale well beyond 100 users per channel so you can use it for broadcast to really large groups of users which was impossible before.

Along with the introduction of dynamic channels concept the group channels operations was also seriously redesigned. Both group and dynamic channels now include the following features:

1. For messages received from a channel, the channel name along with sender name appear in the notification window (only user name appeared previously)
2. Channels now have their own history display
3. When the new message is received from a channel after a period of inactivity (”new conversation” event), the channel is selected in the contacts instead of a user
4. Call setup time for one-to-many calls is faster than before and consistently under 1 second
5. There is a grace time of 10 seconds for every message sent to the channel. During that time the person speaking couldn’t be interrupted. That solves the issue when many people start speaking simultaneously but still allows to interrupt someone, who took over the channel for too long.

Clients remote configuration

If you are running a large network, you may face the problem of manual configuration of every device, which could be troublesome. With remote configuration feature the network admin can setup certain client options for all users right from the web console.

Right now we enabled the configuration of automatic updates, auto-away and voice quality.

Voice quality configuration wasn’t available before and now you can select one of standard profiles or go real hardcore and modify raw codec options. This might be especially useful if you are using Loudtalks over the satellite internet (where traffic is extremely expensive).

If you haven’t tried Loudtalks Cloud yet, go ahead and try it now. It’s free!

Release notes:

Windows

- Added back “Noise suppression” option — in the most cases you’ll want this on, however if you are using a noise cancelling microphone or USB Speakerphone like Polycom C100 turning it off may improve sound quality

Windows Mobile

- Unattended mode support. Now if you have Loudtalks running and press Power button the device doesn’t go to sleep but goes into unattended mode, with minimal power requirements yet allowing you to stay online and receive incoming transmissions.

- Fixed “Microphone error” bug, which showed on some devices after sending the first message

The update will be delivered through automatic updates today or you can download it manually now:

Download Loudtalks Lite for Windows

Download Loudtalks Lite for Windows Mobile

Here is a little test.

1. Take a 5 years old laptop with 1.7 GHz CPU

2. Launch 21 (yes, that’s twenty one) copies of Loudtalks Mesh client on it

3. Launch  Loudtalks Mesh server on the same laptop (!) under VMWare

4. Test one to many messaging from the first client to 20 others

Here is how that looks:

The cpu load fluctuates in the 50..85% range and everything works nicely.

The same codebase is used on mobile devices, which allows Loudtalks enabling push-to-talk on the old Windows Mobile communicators with 200 MHz cpu and consume less power on the modern ones.

1. [fix] Support for VGA+ devices
2. [new] Improved soft buttons use — moved menu to the right button, reserving the left one for context-dependent actions (”PTT” on contacts screen, “Play” — on history)
3. [fix] History was hard to use on devices without touch screen

This is also the first mobile release to be distributed using automatic updates feature. Please report if automatic update didn’t work as expected.

Download Loudtalks for Windows Mobile

Release notes

Windows

1. [new] Automatic updates configuration. You can select one of three modes — Download automatically (default), Notify only and Disable
2. [new] Recording and playback level adjustment. Use this option if Loudtalks volume is too low or too loud. This control should be used with caution because if you set volume too high, it’ll cause sound “clipping” and bad artifacts.

Windows Mobile

1. [new] Automatic updates support
2. [new] Recording and playback level adjustment.
3. [fix] Distorted graphics and icons in 320×320 and 320×240 modes
4. [new] Automatic scrolling when the UI form doesn’t fit into device screen

Loudtalks for Windows
Loudtalks for Windows Mobile

Known issues

1. The current Windows Mobile build doesn’t display correctly on VGA and higher-resolution screens. The issue will be addressed in the next release. In the interim users with hi-res screens may use Loudtalks 0.9.0.54 (download .cab)
2. AT&T Tilt users are not able to assign device’s PTT button as a hotkey in Loudtalks. If you have this device and want to help fixing this issue please contact us at support@loudtalks.com
3. Some users report that Loudtalks can’t capture sound on their HTC-made Windows Mobile phone (HTC Touch and other models). We weren’t able to reproduce or isolate this issue yet. If you experience it, please contact us.
4. When running Loudtalks under Linux on WINE, you must disable notification sounds, otherwise it crashes on the incoming message.