Light Theme
I spent some time making sure the light themes worked correctly and there was surprisingly a lot of work needed to get them looking good.
By default, the theme library GMMP uses lets the text to all of the views that are not the toolbar to be black. The toolbar is smart enough to check the background color and choose the appropriate text color to display on top of that. Since a large amount of GMMPs UI uses the primary color as the background, I had to create a lot of custom views to do something similar to the toolbar.
A dark background will give you light text and light button colors and vice versa for a light background. Note: I still need to work on the button colors behind album artist. Light colors on top of art is obviously preferred
Paging
In my opinion one of GMMP's strongest points has always been the ability to handle very large library, so I started testing 3.0 with a large library. I put a 200 gb sdcard filled with music into my Moto e4 and began testing. I quickly found out that what I had written started to struggle when throwing 20,000 songs at it. The lists rendered fine and you can navigate through your music at a speed you would expect.. however the memory usage seemed to be very high causing random pauses when selecting items. Fortunately google has something exactly for this in their Paging Library to handle this. What this does is load data around where your list is current positioned. In the case of having a list with 20000 songs, at any given time only a few hundred will be loaded into memory to be displayed in the list.
I am still in the process of working out all the kinks with the paging library, but my initial implementation seems to work pretty well. The lists will show up almost immediately (vs taking a few seconds to load) and I no longer experience the random pauses when making selections. Now some things do not play too well with this library like the fast scrolling, but I will either get things working with the fast scrolll library, write my own implementation of fast scroll, or come up with an alternative to navigate large lists fast (perhaps something like android auto does with the letter selection).
I am still in the process of working out all the kinks with the paging library, but my initial implementation seems to work pretty well. The lists will show up almost immediately (vs taking a few seconds to load) and I no longer experience the random pauses when making selections. Now some things do not play too well with this library like the fast scrolling, but I will either get things working with the fast scrolll library, write my own implementation of fast scroll, or come up with an alternative to navigate large lists fast (perhaps something like android auto does with the letter selection).
Song Highlighting
One of the most frequently requested features I received was the ability to show the current playing track in all the list views instead of just now playing / folder view / queue view. Every view that shows track lists besides the bookmark view should now highlight the playing song if its in the visible list. The video below shows that in action.
I also made a few other additions like syncing with the android media library and loading the entire list into the queue when selecting a song (this now includes the full track list view as well)
I am still targeting a late May release for the first alpha. The player is in pretty good shape now but has not yet gone through any sort of significant testing, so there is the potential for a delay if I run into some bad issues.