Fixing Synergy

Now, I know we only spent $5 on Synergy, but since Amazon cut off their album cover service, Synergy has become essentially worthless. I've heard that there's been all sorts of fixes in the works, but there's no official word or timetable, and that's been going on for over a month now...

Shouldn't there be a simple way in one of the Synergy files to change the Amazon Developer Token to one of our own? Haven't found it yet...

The wincent.dev synergy docs no longer refers to amazon's blocking; are they still blocking synergy access?

It still does not work and the Synergy page still makes no mention of this. Deceptive advertising makes me want to puke. I paid for the product and enjoyed it up until the point it stopped working and Wincent ran for cover. Shame on your Wincent for not making it clear on the Synergy page that the product no longer works! It doesn't matter if you plan to fix it in the future, purchasers have the right to know.

I think the sensitivity is around the fact that all of wincent.dev was updated after the Amazon cutoff - updated to include even teases of new products - yet the new synergy web info still makes no mention of the Amazon situation. When I discovered this new info, I assumed the Amazon situation had been fixed, but apparently it hasn't.

What is the status of the online Album art - will Amazon turn you back on, or is there some other provider?

What if, instead of just the image, synergy grabbed the whole page related to the album in question, then the larger album image - looking more like a page dl than an image poach?

Ok, I think I've found out the developer's token and associate id used in Synergy by watching the network traffic in Interarchy.

I think this is the developer's token: D31GYSP62C9C55

And this is the associate ID: synerformacos-20

So in theory you should be able to use a hex editor to find these strings and replace them with something similar. Only problem is they have to be the same number of characters long (I think!).

I then tried watching Clutter's net traffic and it looks like the dev token from Clutter is:

D10XEP2ZV5TOZ4

And the associate ID is:

webservices-20

So, not sure if this will work, because the associate ID from Synergy is 16 characters long, and the one from Clutter is 14... Perhaps will do some experimenting with a hex editor (first of all I have to find the strings in the Synergy executable!) and see if I can get Synergy to work again by sticking in Clutter's keys... perhaps will have to pad out the associate id with two spaces or something... or register my own key!

Anybody else who knows about this stuff, please help!

That's really cheeky, but it works (Wincent - feel free to delete these posts if they're could cause you trouble).

I can see why they disabled access though - if Synergy doesn't get a result the first time, it keeps running the search request every 5 seconds (even if you turn off the floater), which can't be good for their server.

I'd just like to say that Synergy is still incredibly useful even without the automatic downloading of cover art. I use it every day and I will continue to. It has provided me with more bang for my buck than any shareware application ever has.

Keep up the good work.

Josh

I can't understand why anyone would think Synergy was 'worthless' without the album cover downloads... I was happily using it before the album cover feature was added, and I even bought it before then (if my memory is right). The hotkeys and the floater alone, even without the album cover art, make for a phenomenal utility.

Just like to say, thanks, wincent, for programming such a great utility (although, just like everyone else, I would appreciate a compatibility update, as soon as it's available).

OMFG, LOL. Whoever posted the first few posts in this thread obviously has like no idea what the real point of Synergy is. I mean, downloading from Amazon is nice, but its absence hardly renders Synergy "unusable", especially since Synergy will still show covers you already have in its Album Cover folder, and it will still show covers from iTunes.

Whoever posted those insulting comments is extremely ungrateful for all of the hard work you've put into Synergy.

Anyway, I've emailed you multiple times commending you on your great work on Synergy, but I just wanted to thank you again for putting so much time and effort into Synergy. All of us (well, most of us anyway) really appreciate it. Synergy is simply one of the best OS X utilities, and me and many others just cannot live without it anymore. Seriously, iTunes for Windows is seriously hindered just because of the absence of Synergy.

I've been trying out the 1.0a2 beta, and it's been amazing. No problems on mine at all, it's fixed all the Panther bugs for me.

Thanks again!

Adam

I have to say hotkeys are what did it for me. I was using another app... "hotkey" I think to run apple scripts that controlled itunes. But it was slow and had no floater and in the short and the long synergy (album covers or not) was much better suited to what I wanted.

(Take into note that while "hotkey" was a lot more powerful - it was also much more expensive and all I wanted was a way to control iTunes.)

I hope the developer's trip in spain (didn't sound like he lived there permanently..) went well and I look forward to seeing the next version of synergy with album art retrieval and what ever else he plan on throwing in. Good to some updates.

-Francis

Is Synegy a spinoff?

Controlling iTunes is all it's about.

The floater is sweet. I have acquired a lot of music that sounds good to me but I never learned the artists and song names so the floater is educational!

The album covers were nice to impress friends (yawn). It was better that they were not in iTunes since that makes the files bigger which means less songs on the iPod.

From this Forum FAQ:

Quote:

The first post of a given thread establishes the subject by which all subsequent replies will be known. Once there's been a reply, the thread subject cannot be subsequently changed.

Huh?

Wincent,

With all due respect for your hard work on a wonderful piece of software (and at a steal of a price, as well), I have to ask when you're going to fix the album art function?

More specifically, I emailed you months ago about the possibility of adding the ability to do manual additions of art, and I believe you replied that it was in the works. While I agree that Synergy is far from "worthless" without the album art function, it nevertheless is (was) one of the coolest aspects of the program and one I miss a LOT.

Why can't the album art be added at the user's descretion? Is it really hard to implement? There ought to be some way to get around the Amazon issue, and put the control of the feature where it belongs: in the hands of the user!

I hope you can give all of us some sort of response on this. I've been waiting very patiently, but your last post was mid-December and here it is almost February 1st. I just went back and found the response I got from you via email about this, on September 3rd of last year. You wrote:

That kind of functionality is going to be in a point update eg. 1.0.1 or 1.1 or similar.

Are we at ALL close to that point???

Sincerely, John

Agreed with the above poster. I really appreciate all that Synergy does and can't complain about the bargain price. But I've been wondering if you have an estimate for an update which will fix the cover issue & maybe even let the user add covers manually.

Oh yeah, and what about Synergy Advance? I've really been interested in what it's all about/when it's coming out since you announced it.

That's interesting to hear about the other things you're working on. I understand about not wanting to commit to a release date - it seems 95% of developers miss their estimated release dates and end up with loads of users shouting at them because of that.

I had just started to wonder since there hadn't been any news for a while. Good to know things are progressing.

Thanks for the update Wincent, keep up the great work!

How, exactly, does one go about hacking the developer's token? I used to be a nightmare on ResEdit in my youth, but I am not so familiar with the new architectures used in X.

Of course, this is for personal research purposes only.