LingQ app for iPad

I like the LingQ app but it sometimes doesn’t work well. Today, I tried to listen to “Who is she?” and noticed that it automatically played back to the beginning while I was halfway even though I wasn’t doing anything with it. As a result, I can’t finish the whole dialogue. I’m not sure if this would happen to every dialogue within the lesson, but would you please investigate the issue?

Sorry to hear you’re having trouble with this! Would you include a link to the specific lesson that is causing trouble for you? Also, would you try going into the settings for the app (Info > Settings) and clear the MP3 cache to see if that helps?

Ok, here are a couple of bugs that having been bugging me for a while, but I have never gotten round to reporting them.

Firstly, I find that quite often, when I am listening to audio on the app, I get this message

This error appears when I am listening to individual lessons, and when I am listening to playlists. The reason it is a problem is that when this message appears, I can no longer pause and start the audio using the remote on my headphones. It also means that when I remove the headphones, the audio continues to play.

Secondly, when I first open the app, I usually go to the playlists and because I am just wanting to listen to a list of lessons that I have previously saved. However, quite often, when I open the playlist, it looks like this

The lessons have already downloaded, but it says ‘waiting’ beside each lesson and the pictures are not available. I cannot play the audio when this happens. The only way to play the playlist is to first open the course from which I have saved the lessons (I always save entire courses as playlists), let the list of lessons load, and then go back to the playlist. And of course, I can only do this if I am online.

Thanks for the detailed reports! I will look into these in more detail tomorrow and let you know if we need any other information!

I reported this second bug back in April. Eventually I gave up on playlists.

I’ve noticed this can happen if you start to play a lesson before it has had a chance to completely download.

Alex, thank you for your prompt response. I tried to listen to some dialogues in the lesson this morning and noticed the problem had been completely fixed.

Colin, I was just about to take a closer look into this but the Dropbox links no longer seem to be working. Would you try uploading them to Dropbox again or just send them to me in an email?

Looks like the Dropbox links are working now - not sure what the issue was the other day.

I’ve done a bit of testing with headphones using both my iPad and iPhone, and I guess I’m not really sure how to get this “No Lessons” popup to appear. I am testing now with the current version on the app store to try to reproduce this, but so far no luck. I notice from the screenshot you are connected via 3G - have you noticed this same popup appearing when connected via wifi?

On the second issue, we’ve seen this in the past and fixed an issue related to this, but it seems it is still an issue. I’ll ask our iPhone developer to take a closer look into the code here and see why the “Waiting” message along with the grey box would be appearing instead of the lessons themselves.

Hi Alex. Sorry, I missed your message on Friday and just saw it now. No idea what could have been up with Dropbox on Friday.

You are right, this error has happened when I connected via 3G. The problem is, I mostly only ever listen to stuff on the app while walking between my apartment and my office, so even if the error does only happen when I am on 3G, that would not necessarily mean it has anything to do with being connected via 3G.

However, this is a good point, and I had not thought about it. Now that I do, I must say, the only times this ‘no lessons’ problem comes up, as I remember, is when I am waiting in line at the supermarket and want to quickly pause the audio so I can pay (I never wear headphones when interacting with somebody), or when I want to cross a busy road, and so maybe it is something to do with 3G.

But I also have the problem that I can’t reproduce this problem when I want to. I have tried a few times, but I don’t know what sets it off. It just happens, and it happens a lot.

Presumably somewhere in the code for the app, there is some code that is responsible for the message ‘This course has no lessons’ being put on the screen. This is what could lead to the cause of the error.

OK, this may be helpful. I’ll see if we can use this additional information to figure this out. I was thinking that too on the code, so I’ll pass this along as well. I believe it’s supposed to only show when opening a course in which all the lessons have been deleted (the course container still exists but has no lessons). It may be something here where a course is trying to load but not loading successfully on 3G. Anyway, we’ll see what we can uncover!