We’re busy working on Awaken 4.1 which is a major update and often times I bounce ideas off of people I know on my buddy list who use Awaken. The feedback is very valuable and I wanted to extend the reach by offering a way for those interested to get involved. So if you’re interested in being sent progress updates, links to screenshots or video of features in development and opportunities to voice your opinion and other feedback during development send an email to info@embraceware.com with Team Awaken in the subject. If you would like to be removed from the list at anytime - just let us know via the same email address.

Again, this is just for the hardcore users who would like to be a little closer to how things get developed.

You can still passively watch development via our Twitter account: http://twitter.com/jerrybrace and we’ll be posting major updates in progress here on the blog.

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I’d also let you know that development on Awaken 4.1 is going very well. It’s a much bigger update than originally planned and we are aiming to get a public beta out soon. 4.1 will be a free update, as are all updates to Awaken (both minor and major versions).

• Do you use Awaken? Click here to let people know.
• Twitter - I post what I’m working on with Awaken in real-time.
• Become a fan of Awaken on Facebook! - A great way to get Awaken updates in your news feed.

We’ve been busy with Awaken 4.1 - it’s a fairly big update. We’re including a lot of the feature suggestions that have been sent in and fixing any bugs reported. In addition to that Awaken will be localized in French and German.

Tonight we have a sneak peek at a new feature…

Up until now Awaken has had to rely on iTunes to play your playlists. For the most part this is okay and it’s great if you’re using wireless speakers via AirTunes. But sometimes iTunes just doesn’t want to play nice. So coming in Awaken 4.1 we’ll be giving you a choice to have Awaken play your iTunes music or have iTunes play it as its been doing.

Advantages of Awaken playing your iTunes content:
- Rock solid reliability can be achieved when not depending on communication to iTunes
- Better performance
- Video playback within Awaken

Advantages of using iTunes to play music:
- AirTunes support…

Awaken will be the default choice - but you can easily change it in the preferences. We’ll also be working on improving iTunes playback for those who want to use AirTunes. We decided that providing the choice makes things work for everyone.

Check out the video to see the new preference and Awaken playing your music and videos…

• Do you use Awaken? Click here to let people know.
• Twitter - I post what I’m working on with Awaken in real-time.
• Become a fan of Awaken on Facebook! - A great way to get Awaken updates in your news feed.

First I’d like to say THANKS to all who have been sending comments and features for Awaken 4. Our email server has been running hot and keeping our caffeine-based beverages at perfect temperature.

I wanted to let you know that we’re working on Awaken 4.1 now. It’s a little early to go into details on the features that will get locked in - more on that later. I did want to mention that we’ll be adding localization for French so that’s all très bien. All of our point releases will be associated with a new language localization being added.

If anyone has feature ideas for Awaken please send an email to us at support@embraceware.com. We’d love to hear them and pick the features that are in the most demand and benefit a wide range of people. We have a long list already but we could never have enough If you’ve written already - we have yours. We keep everything well organized here.

We’ll have lots more on Awaken 4.1 here very soon.