Devlog #1, building the most awesome music player (in Flutter).
First off.
It has been a long time since I last posted here on medium. Interestingly my follower count kept growing — so thanks for that! :)
When I started posting on Medium back in February. I didn’t really know what I was doing (I still don’t).
My first post “Flutter: How I built a simple app in under an hour from scratch. And how you can do it too.” got featured on AndroidProDev and got pretty big.
I wrote it because I saw a YouTube video about Flutter and tried it out. I was so amazed, that I thought “Why not write a post about that?”. So I did.
But the app I was working on didn’t have that much potential and eventually, I lost motivation.
People always say “The idea is worth nothing, it’s all about execution”, while I certainly don’t disagree. I think there is more to it. If the idea you have isn’t exciting (for yourself) then you [probably] won’t be able to execute it well.
Enough rambling
As you might have guessed from the title, I’ve been working on a music player.
Why a music player?
The Design
I love well-designed stuff.
Sometimes I just go to sites like dribbble.com or uplabs.com and admire the beauty people create.
I wanted to challenge myself and music players seemed like a great opportunity to do so.
The market
If you search for “music player” on the app store, you will be flooded with apps. Seriously you wouldn’t be able to count them.
So why on earth should there exist another one?
A lot of them have a huge amount of downloads. I’m pretty sure I won’t reach those counts, but it’s nice to know that the market exists :D
Most of them are “good”. But I haven’t seen too many amazing ones yet.
Don’t get me wrong. They all do their job. And I’m also pretty sure there are a few outstanding ones, but most do their job and that’s it.
In my eyes apps are more than just a tool to accomplish a task. Music is art. So are apps.
What I’ve done until now
Design
The design took me a long time and still is one of those parts where I’m not exactly sure what I am doing. But every iteration it looks a little bit nicer, so that’s good!
Keep in mind, nothing is final yet.
Here are some cool snippets of the app:
What already works
- List all songs/ all albums/ all artist/ all genres / all folder
- Homepage displays recently played albums
- Editing metadata + cover art fetcher
- Artist Page downloads artist images
- Searching for individual songs
- Background service/ Notification with controls/ Lock screen image
Whats still left to do
- Designing and implementing the Home-Page
- Rewriting the Queue Logic to run in the background service
- A lot of small UI tweaks
- Fixing bugs
- A lot of cool features
The future of this series
As a disclaimer, this app is not going to be open source (at least for now). I will, however, post snippets which might be useful for other people and explain them.
Also, I will release packages which have their origin in this project. For example, https://github.com/Norbert515/pimp_my_button was made for this app.
I hope you can understand!
If you want to get the latest new about the development, be sure to follow me on Twitter! https://twitter.com/norbertkozsir?lang=en
