It has been a very long time since an update of Rhydhun has been released. I have been very busy in my final examinations and then the graduation for the BSc that I am glad to be over with.
I promised everyone a Mac OS X and Linux version and I have not forgotten. After my unsuccessful initial attempts to have a stable port of Rhydhun in both Mac OS X and Linux platforms, I decided to do ground up rewrite of the audio backend which was causing most of the porting issues.
Now, the upcoming version of Rhydhun will have an,

• Improved faster, optimized audio backend
• Improved Multi-speaker support (upto 7.1 speaker support)
• Better Equalizer
• Normalizer
• SFX Reverb
• Spectrum Analyzer
• Smoother, faster and better streaming
• Unicode support
• Lots of UI Fixes
• Memory Optimization
• Performance Optimizations
• Lots of bug fixes

And with this release I will be introducing both a Mac OS X and Linux version of Rhydhun. Expect the release in the coming weeks! I will keep you all updated.

After a little bit of delay, an update to Rhydhun has been released. Among small bug fixes, it fixes 2 major issues:

* Fixed 12 min song stopping issue
* Added authenticated proxy support

Rhydhun will prompt to update automatically at the next login, but Users behind authenticated proxies will not be able to auto-update Rhydhun. So, please download the update from http://download.rhydhun.com/deploy/in/current/rhydhun-setup.exe instead.

I am now working on getting a Mac and Linux version released, along with improvements to the playlist.

All users signed up to the Rhydhun beta program has been invited! Please check your email and also your junk mail folder, some email providers are putting it there. You can also get your account activated by visiting http://beta.rhydhun.com/activate/

We have invited a further 2000 users into the beta program!

After some delays getting the Beta site up and running, we have invited 500 users into the Beta Program in a first come first serve basis. We will be inviting the next wave of Beta users very shortly, just need to see if we have the resources to support all the users.

After 2 and half years since I began writing the first piece of code, Rhydhun has finally come to the stability to take it to the beta stage. 2 and half years might seem like a very long development time, but its probably only about 6 month that I really put into it, considering I have to go to University and I worked on it during my “holidays” (notice the quotes) and free time and the development team consisted of just me to do everything from web page design to database design & implementation. But, its has been a long 2 and half years, where most of the components in Rhydhun has be rewritten from scratch multiple times. Rhydhun features one of the most complicated skins I have encountered, but I am happy to see its not a performance hog. The excellent audio decoding has been optimized. Many of things I have done is to make things run faster and better.

Rhydhun started out when I tried to think of ways to make MusicIndiaOnline better after its 3rd rewrite about 4 years ago, I had a large list of features that I had planned to have in MusicIndiaOnline.com as you might have noticed the many “Under Construction” and “To be implemented” signs in MusicIndiaOnline, but never got down to it. When I started to juggle around ideas, I also felt the quality of MusicIndiaOnline.com’s music should be improved, I felt the organization of songs was little too complex, it was become a huge hassle to make MusicIndiaOnline work on all the OS platforms and I really didn’t feel adding more features would put MusicIndiaOnline on the bleeding edge. So, I decided to completely go away from having music being streamed to a browser and to write a full fledged application from scratch. Currently Rhydhun is for Windows, with Linux and Mac OS X version to follow in the next 2 or 3 months.

Rhydhun was set to launch last year around this time as many of you might have seen a notice of something cool coming on MusicIndiaOnline.com’s main page last year, but due to many issues in the middle such as a major data loss, which removed a couple of months of free time to fix it took a little longer. But this version is complete as far as my first milestone for Rhydhun was originally planned. Now, I am off to design and implement the other cool features planned for the 1.0 release that will make Rhydhun much better to use.

As of now Rhydhun is being beta tested, it is available for a selection of users, which we will increase as time goes on. I urge you to join our beta program, which you can signup for at: http://rhydhun.musicindiaonline.com/. Please signup for the beta program and we will contact you as soon as we can!

I hope you will enjoy using Rhydhun!