We've been hunkered down in our bunker recently working REALLY hard on the update after the first update failed peer review. The end is in sight and we hope to have in review before march. It'll be worth the wait - we promise.

During this time, we were asked by the XNA team at Microsoft for an interview - and we obliged. The article has gone live now here: http://creators.xna.com/en-US/spotlight/world/madninjaskillz 

We suffered at the hands of a security flaw in our CMS and some super unspeedy tech support from our hosts meaning we have been down for a few days. As you can see, the site is back, and by tomorrow all the features will be re-enabled.

As for update news - its big.

Update 1 has been pretty much scrapped - it failed peer review on a few things consistantly that required an almost total rewrite of the input and menu code.

Long live update 1.5! a MAJOR overhaul has taken place with even MORE new features, a better menu system, better performance, support for 8 new languages etc etc. more info will be released soon, and we are hoping to release the game around the 20th.

If you're interested in some friendly competition and music sharing, check out the ezmuze idol competition going down on Facebook:

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=135407516797

There are around 40 people there already and the second contest is in motion right now, it's madness!

We got a rather favourable review on the rather awesome 'XNA Roundup'...Including the admission that according to them, ezmuze+ is 'hands down the best non-game available on the community section'

To post your comments on the video, click here

All the bugs and features have now been closed for update 1! Additional testing will happen - we are fairly confident though that everything is happy and we can release for peer review mid next week.

We think you will be pleasently suprised about some of the new features!

New up and coming games website, www.game-pad.net asked us for a developers interview and of course we were happy to oblige - Read the full interview  here.

Hopefully, before the end of the first week of June we will release the first update for ezmuze+ to the review process - followed shortly by the first update for ezmuze breaks edition.

Want to know whats changing? Heres the current list:

Bug fixes:

• Song author info not resetting on clear song
• Songs with only 1 letter in the name not showing up in file list
• Automation ramping too early (means volumes above 33% are all the same)
• Changing storage in automation mode
• Changing row will reset automation points

Tweaks:

• Credits removed from Quitting
• Holding B now deletes automation as well as selected area
• Removed xbox logo from send song (copyright issues)
• Scroll speed in song list increased
• Vis is now at 640x480 to decrease memory used (should mean it doesnt cancel out anymore)
• Overwriting asks for confirm now

New Features:

• Ability to change the colour of the automation lines
• Ability to remove the background grid
• Song list shows song author name and can be sorted various ways
• Song looping option
• Easily select an entire row

We are likely to add more to that list, but thought you should see a taster of where we are going. As for the most often asked feature - mp3 exporting - lets have a little discussion:

Quite simply, its not possible. In theory i could render out mp3 files, but the xbox security would only allow me to write them in a location thats unique to ezmuze+ - nothing else could get at it - so it would only be playable by ezmuze.

However, we are investigating several options on ingenius ways around this limitation. We have an idea of one way to do it, but it will be for gold subscribers only - and you will need to download the mp3s from this website - and this method has a lot of reasons why it shouldnt work - but we are going to try our hardest to make this work - because its what you want.

That being said - dont expect it in this update, theres a lot of R&D involved in this - the only other games that manage things along these lines are EA games and HALO - and thats because they use their own servers attached to the xbox live network - something we WANT to do but arent ALLOWED to do - its above our paygrade.

Be patient with us, we will do our best.

To handle some new features for the site, we have just moved to a rather shiny dedicated server. You should find the site a lot faster now and itll let us roll out a bunch of funky ezmuze+ related goodies!

download the mp3 here

http://www.gamerbytes.com/2009/05/xbl_community_watch_ezmuse_mus.php

Not the biggest article, but they obviously deemed it good enough to comment on - and in the same article as biology battle! im honoured!