GoneMAD Music Player

Most of the work I've done since the last post has been behind the scenes so there is not too much to show.  I rewrote the audioengine management piece (what handles the interaction with gonemads audioengine, android media player, and chromecast), rewrote the crossfade code, and cuesheet handling. Cuesheets are something that the majority of gmmp's user base probably does not use https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cue_sheet_(computing), but they are a nice feature.  For those who do not know, a cue sheet allows you to listen to a single large audio file as if it was split up into tracks for each song.  GMMP has always had decent support for CUE files (they would appear as individual tracks in the library views), however in the folder browser they would just appear as a .cue file and the single mp3 / audio file.  In 3.0, the folder browser will actually extract and list the individual tracks in a CUE instead of the single file. Below is what the actual folder ...

Next up on the new UI list is the file/folder browser.  I also rewrote the file/playlist handling on the backend to be much more streamlined.  A lot used to go on when playing folders and i've greatly simplified that.  As always, the file browser will show anything on the file system and does not care if its in the database or not.  This is great for navigating, but caused a lot of issues when a user went to play a file or folder.  I am sure some were familiar with the issue where songs would "disappear" from the queue after reloading GMMP.  This was because the user played a file that was not scanned into the database.  GMMP would play the file fine in the queue, but when the queue was persisted to the database those files were lost.  In 2.x GMMP would try its best to get everything scanned in by running silent scans of folders as you navigate into them.  While being pretty inefficient, it worked for the most part.  The big issue happen...

Both sales should be live on google play and amazon https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=gonemad.gmmp.unlocker https://www.amazon.com/GoneMAD-Software-LLC-Player-Unlocker/dp/B008MR1PDE/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1511290559&sr=8-1&keywords=gonemad

I recently picked up one of the new Google Pixelbooks and I will say it a pretty awesome development device.  It runs Chrome OS, Android, and Linux all at the same time and has pretty good specs (i5 cpu, 8 gb ram, 128 gb ssd) for running Android Studio.  I am able to code and deploy GMMP right on the same device which makes development really convenient when not at home.   Android apps also run in their own window which can be resized which makes UI testing on different size screens super easy. Ignore the artifacts around the window containing GMMP.  It is a side effect of taking a screenshot i guess (it appears fine on the device) In order to support the free form resizing of the app window, I updated the target SDK level to 27 (android 8.1).  GMMP 2.x was still on 21 (android 5.0).  The target SDK update should see some performance improvement in newer devices (although i do not know by how much).  I also added support for the android perm...

In the last few weeks I've been mostly doing backend work so there arent too many UI changes to show off.  The music service refactor / rewrite has caused me to rewrite a few of the other backend systems (and there will probably be a bunch more that need it to).  Since I was already making so many changes to the data access layer, I decided now would be the best time to basically clean up the whole data model and make the necessary changes to support some of the highest requested features like supporting multiple artists and multiple genres.  These changes led me to rewrite the scanner entirely (I had to do it anyway due to the data access layer changes).  Now the scanner will recognize artists and genres that are delimited by a specific character (";" by default) and set them up in the database accordingly.  Since fields with the ";" in it are a bit ugly.. i do plan on adding some functionality to replace that with "and" or "&" or really...

The last update I showed off the new queue ui which did involve a complete rewrite of the underlying queue backend code.  Due to that and switching to the new data model (Room-based), I ended up taking the plunge and rewriting the MusicService.  It seemed like a waste to try to hack it up to use all the new stuff I added when I eventually planned on rewriting it anyway.  Due to that I dont have too much to show UI wise, but I did make some queue improvements and redid how shuffle works. One of the largest complaints I've gotten over the years was the inability to skip back/forward while shuffled and get a consistent track order.  Once you skipped back, the next track would be chosen at random.  My response was always that I understood the frustration but without rewriting shuffle / music service entirely there was not much i could do.  Since I am rewriting the music service and queue, this seemed like the perfect opportunity to fix this issue. In the vi...

Its been awhile since I've posted a new update but I spent a few weeks working on 2.2.4/2.2.5 and now I am back working on 3.0.  This next update focuses on the queue.  Its not finished but it is working enough that I can show it off. The queue involved a bunch more work than the previous views since I had to rewrite the actual backing queue data structure.  Previously the Queue class would retain its own copy of the tracks and it was in charge of persisting all changes into the database.  This time around I made it much simpler by just keeping everything straight in the database, so the queue and db no longer have to stay in sync. The queue features drag and drop like the previous version of gmmp, however it is done a bit differently (at least for now pending feedback).  Instead of having the "handle" on the left on each list item that you press to start dragging, dragging is now started via a long press.  The reasoning behind the behavior.. honestly.....