MusicNow

[Aniket Mhatre]

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Nokia Lumia 925 India

 

[mzetko]

Hello friends .

So what is going on now?

The last days of September I was furiously finishing my yearly project for school, because I had problems contacting my work's leader and gave up on it till the last three weeks, when I got a reply from him and had to work fully on it - to be specific - this project was my other app FileEx, concretely the cloud service integration. The app is now looking very good and when I finish Dropbox integration, I will publish the long awaited update.
Also in work things got finally a little better, we have just one more week of work on the project I mentioned the last time and then we will ship it and it will, as I say, finally get calmer .

So now I am fully dedicated to MusicNow again, I work on it daily (I have set out to have at least an hour every day for it, even on work and school days and much more time on weekends ) and it starts to shape up again .
The official Music app is getting better and better, which is a great thing, and also means MusicNow will need some additional features to make it interesting .

As I have said, I will do my best to make it great and will definitely keep you informed, now much more efficiently and often .

I will let you know by the end of this week about progress and about questions I would like to discuss.

Thank you very much for being here!

Martin Zikmund

 

[K_Arora5]

So it's not dead.

 

[mzetko]

So it's not dead.

Hello, K_Arora5,

no, it is definitely not dead... I can't apologize enough that it takes so much time, but it is just a very unfortunate time, because of all the work and school invading my time. I don't want to disappoint you!

 

[mzetko]

Hello friends,

I spent the end of the week improving the app's background audio service, to make sure it starts fast and is reliable. There is a lot of thing going on asynchronously, so I want to make sure there will be no multithreading race conditions, etc.

I have also improved the speed of song collection discovery, although reading files from SD Card the first time is still quite slow... But it is just the first run of the app and when changes happen, this process is running in the background, so it shouldn't be that bad.

Now one first question for you, so that I can work on the app design and layout:
I know all of you (and me included) love swiping on the 'Now playing' screen. Which layout do you prefer - having Now playing in the main app panorama or as a separate view? Or would you like to have a choice from both (meaning you can have now playing in main panorama, but can switch to full view mode, that will be just for the current playback)?
Also, which swiping direction do you prefer - left/right or up/down?

Thank you all!

Martin Zikmund

 

[amitnahar]

Hello friends,

I spent the end of the week improving the app's background audio service, to make sure it starts fast and is reliable. There is a lot of thing going on asynchronously, so I want to make sure there will be no multithreading race conditions, etc.

I have also improved the speed of song collection discovery, although reading files from SD Card the first time is still quite slow... But it is just the first run of the app and when changes happen, this process is running in the background, so it shouldn't be that bad.

Now one first question for you, so that I can work on the app design and layout:
I know all of you (and me included) love swiping on the 'Now playing' screen. Which layout do you prefer - having Now playing in the main app panorama or as a separate view? Or would you like to have a choice from both (meaning you can have now playing in main panorama, but can switch to full view mode, that will be just for the current playback)?
Also, which swiping direction do you prefer - left/right or up/down?

Thank you all!

Martin Zikmund

I prefer now playing as a separate view and I don't like up down swiping.

 

[rizzo183]

"Now playing" should be a separate view with a one-click-access to it on all other tabs/panels/views inside the app. Basically we should be able to hop back to "now playing" from anywhere in the app, anytime we want.

Swiping left/right is more ergonomic.

 

[keerthi vasan]

Now one first question for you, so that I can work on the app design and layout:
I know all of you (and me included) love swiping on the 'Now playing' screen. Which layout do you prefer - having Now playing in the main app panorama or as a separate view? Or would you like to have a choice from both (meaning you can have now playing in main panorama, but can switch to full view mode, that will be just for the current playback)?
Also, which swiping direction do you prefer - left/right or up/down?

Thank you all!

Martin Zikmund

Giving a choice is always better though I like to have it as a separate view

 

[Mohamed Ashid]

Hello friends,

I spent the end of the week improving the app's background audio service, to make sure it starts fast and is reliable. There is a lot of thing going on asynchronously, so I want to make sure there will be no multithreading race conditions, etc.

I have also improved the speed of song collection discovery, although reading files from SD Card the first time is still quite slow... But it is just the first run of the app and when changes happen, this process is running in the background, so it shouldn't be that bad.

Now one first question for you, so that I can work on the app design and layout:
I know all of you (and me included) love swiping on the 'Now playing' screen. Which layout do you prefer - having Now playing in the main app panorama or as a separate view? Or would you like to have a choice from both (meaning you can have now playing in main panorama, but can switch to full view mode, that will be just for the current playback)?
Also, which swiping direction do you prefer - left/right or up/down?

Thank you all!

Martin Zikmund

An option to choose both!

 

[blue1k]

Is it too late to join the beta?

 

[mzetko]

Is it too late to join the beta?

No, the beta will be public, so you will be able to join without any problems .

 

[mzetko]

Thank you for your opinion on the "Now playing" view. I also assumed that leaving this as a choice is the best solution. Swiping left/right seems more intuitive, but that can work only in the separate view, because in panorama the gesture is captured by the panorama's scroller. I will try to find a way to block it somehow, but in case it doesn't work, I will add left/right swiping to the separate view only.

Accessing the "Now playing" view for all pages via an app bar button will definitely be important requirement.

Thank you again for your ideas, I will return tomorrow with progress and a new poll/question !

Martin Zikmund

 

[wasim sallam]

Lyrics from the MP3 file will be so cool.
also live tile will be so great in home screen.
I hope you keep it simple with no much complex.

thanks a lot for the app.
I can't wait to try the app when it come out

 

[K_Arora5]

Can you somehow calibrate your app to work with an app like mpa tool so that we can attach artist images to our songs so that they show up on the lock screen while playing music.

 

[mzetko]

Hello friends,

I am a day late, sorry about that, but now I am here .

wasim sallam and K_Arora5: I am happy that you brought these two topics up, because that is something I would really like to discuss.
First - the lyrics feature. That is something I really want to include in MusicNow, but I would like to ask you if you know about a good, reliable source for lyrics, optimally a open database that could be used to retrieve them. I have found a few options, but would love to hear from you, in case you have some tips too, so that we can select the best one (or a choice of more ).

Secondly - editing song metadata and images is very important, but especially with thumbnails is a little more complicated than I though. However, I have found a nice little library, that should be helpful and should enable this. I will report back to you, how it works, when I test it out .

So that is all for now I will get back on Sunday or Monday, as I will be travelling for the next two days. However, taking the app development with me .

Thank you all!

Martin Zikmund

 

[Asskickulater]

yes!

my request is to make sure it looks pretty! (love artist backgrounds) maybe add a few fancy animations, and make sure to give it that polished look.

I'll be following this thread closely for future developments

 

[mzetko]

yes!

my request is to make sure it looks pretty! (love artist backgrounds) maybe add a few fancy animations, and make sure to give it that polished look.

I'll be following this thread closely for future developments

I will do my best to make the app nice looking, with the ability to customize the looks and so on .

 

[mzetko]

Hello firends,

checking back with you with progress, I am now mainly working on design and personalization options. I decided, that the app will not respond to system accent color changes and dark/light theme, but will instead offer full in-app customization, so that you will be able to choose from a bigger color palette, different background colors, settings for background image, customizing also its transparency and more.

I will let you know with more later this week here on Windows Central (still getting used to this new name, keeping typing wpcentral in the browser ).

Have a nice day!

Martin Zikmund

 

[keerthi vasan]

One quick question. I'm not sure whether you have mentioned this in the thread before.
Will the app read files only within the music folder like modern music or will it read files from all folders in the storage?

 

[mzetko]

One quick question. I'm not sure whether you have mentioned this in the thread before.
Will the app read files only within the music folder like modern music or will it read files from all folders in the storage?

Hello, keerthi vasan,

currently I am accessing music files in the Music libraries only (meaning Music on SD card and Music in Internal Storage). This has the advantage of having faster access to the library files via the built in library methods. The access times were sadly even faster in Windows Phone 8, but still it is better than direct storage access, because you can just get the list of all files in the tree at once.

In future versions I will try to add a way to allow to add more locations to take music from, if some optimization will help.