Taking Control of Your Music Playback Experience
When I first started working on Auracle, I wanted a music player that could play music the way I wanted it to be played. I wanted to be able to choose whatever song came up next, or even make an album or playlist play next. I would often forget the name of a song, but I knew the words, so I wanted to be able to search by the lyrics. I also wanted it to be beautifully designed, but alas… I was only a programmer. My visual design skills included a basic understanding of Microsoft Paint, and that was about it. I could make something work, but making it a joy to look at and use was a different matter. I was determined, so I decided to start with what I knew best: the code that went into making an app.
Fast forward a couple of months and now I have a very basic prototype which could play music, shuffle, skip songs, and add songs to a queue. It’s a cool spring day in April of 2014 and I’m browsing /r/Android, when a post by /u/jessecoleman caught my eye. It was a submission to Taylor Ling’s (a Google Developer Expert and Material Design Award Winner) Android Design contest. In his submission, Cole had designed a beautiful music player by the name of Eve. It featured work that clearly showed how much he cared about controlling the music playback experience with a queue. The contest wasn’t over yet, but I had to reach out to him.
I sent Cole the app I had so far, and after getting it working on his phone, he agreed to work with me on making his mockups, now our dream, a reality. A few weeks later Cole was announced a winner of the design contest and now, we finally have a working beta to share with you!
Introducing Auracle: A queue based music player
Auracle is a local music player designed around what’s coming up next. In the main songs view, you can see a “+” icon next to every song. Clicking this icon adds a song to the queue, and long pressing brings up more options.
Clicking the yellow shuffle button starts playback and reveals the miniplayer.
Because the miniplayer is a representation of the queue, it scrolls vertically, just like the queue.
Now Playing
The Now Playing screen is also a representation of the queue, so it scrolls vertically. Due to its design, the Now Playing screen allows you to take a peek at the upcoming song without actually playing it. If you choose to skip to the next song, the UI will smoothly transition its colors to the most prominent colors of the next song’s album art.
The Queue
In the queue (accessible anywhere you see an icon with “Q”) you can directly control what’s coming up next. You can drag songs to rearrange the playback order, and you can swipe to dismiss a song that you don’t want to play at all.
You can also add collections to the queue, whether that collection is an artist’s songs, the songs from an album, the songs from a playlist, or even a genre.
Search
When it comes to searching for music I always want to find what I’m looking for as quickly as possible. I can be extremely lazy with my search and still find what I’m trying to play. Typing in “sum ch” brings up one of my favorite songs, Summer Friends by Chance the Rapper, because it has a partial match on the song title, and a partial match on the artist.
Auracle also supports partial matching on the album, so you can type any combination of a partial title, artist, or album to find a song. And if I don’t know the title of the song, I can hit the overflow menu to search by lyrics. Swiping to the right allows me to search for albums and artists. These searches also support partial matches.
If you’re interested in trying out Auracle for yourself, join the Google+ community here first, so you can join the beta test. As Auracle is still in beta, I’d love to hear your feedback on what works, what doesn’t, and what can be improved. Take control of your music playback experience and download Auracle today!
Auracle’s Features:
- Google Now integration
- Android Wear Support
- Headphone/Wireless speaker control
- View song lyrics
- Download missing album art from Last.fm
- Search by lyrics
- Tag editing
- Playlist creation
- Importing/Exporting of playlists
- Song play count, skip count tracking
- Home screen widgets
- Music pause on headphone unplug
If you’d like more updates on Auracle, follow me on Twitter @AOrobator
