Looking for help: Building a Awesome Open Source Music Player
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[quote author="texrat" date="1377414836"]At some point I may jump in and help, because I'm interested as well. Can't just yet though. But I would like to toss in 2 cents: one thing that would distinguish a music player for me is to connect the player with the concert-going experience. There are web services that track concerts; what I would love to see is a mashup that periodically checks my collections against upcoming shows by artists I love and alert me. Shows could be added to my calendar with a click and I would be reminded occasionally as the show date approached. Ticket purchase reminders could be added to. Anyway, I think this would really benefit music lovers in general.[/quote]
Greetings! Thanks for taking an interest in the project. Your suggestion sounds like a good idea for a plugin (even an official one that could come installed with it), but goes in the opposite direction of Trackbox's vision. Trackbox aims to be very minimalistic in features that aren't for playing your local music tracks. This means that it has great features for playing your tracks, but avoids including social features, artwork/metadata retrieval, etc. The reason for this is that those features are what plague existing media players and distract them from a good interface, great music playing features, and a simple yet powerful overall application. While the basic application avoids social/other features, they would be great to include in plugins. They could come downloaded with Trackbox (possibly a different download option that includes everything), but would need to be enabled in the Plugins section of the Options menu.
It would be great if you could help with the project, even if you were to mostly work on that plugin. At the moment, we're fighting to get borderless windows to resize correctly, so development on the actual features of the application hasn't really started yet. Feel free to join in whenever you can!
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Hi guys!
I was really looking for a project like you described! I even created a Qt account just to say that I want to help. Only problem is, I'm a complete n00b in Qt. I just recently finished my first application using BlackBerry's Cascade framework which is built on top of Qt 4.8. But I really want to learn Qt in depth.
What should I do next to get more involved on the project?
Cheers. -
Awesome! We would love the help! For more details, we are building our app with qt 5 and qt desktop c++. It looks like you were programming with qml, which we aren't using but will be a good foundation for using qt desktop c++, especially if you used c++ plugins with your qml.
The qt documentation has many good examples, if you are looking to learn about desktop c++, like http://qt-project.org/doc/qt-5.0/qtdoc/gettingstartedqt.html . Simple desktop qt stuff is a lot simpler than most people think, and pretty soon you'll forget you're using c++ .
If you need any help with anything you can always email me j@zatigo.com or post a message on this thread.
Our code is at https://github.com/TrackboxFoundation/Trackbox if you would like to look at it (currently not a lot, just a resizable and movable boarderless window).
Our list of features we are working on is at https://github.com/TrackboxFoundation/Trackbox/wiki/Planned-Features if you would like to contribute. You can edit the code by making a fork of it at github and sending us a pull request.
Currently me and my partner are communicating via chat, but that isn't a good way of communicating for more than two people, and will probably create a google group and website sometime soonish. We'll let you guys know when we do create them.
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Owncloud is very cool, but it isn't really a music player, is it? It is a open sourced competitor to dropbox and drive. I was not able to install and try amarok, as their site was down, but I will try it out and take a look at it. We are shooting for a more simplistic metro style, than amarok, but are working with similar goals.
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Owncloud is a cloud solution , and it has a music player. Its one of those "living in the browser" its all the rage these days. The UI looks remarkably like your mockup :)
I'm wondering which site you used that was down, please try this site as it typically works http://amarok.kde.org/
Notice that amarok is in all the linux distros, should you use it, to be installed from your package manager directly. -
http://amarok.kde.org/ was down temporarily, but is back up now so I will be trying out amarok. The owncloud player somewhat similar, but Trackbox will very much be a desktop app for now. Both me and my partner want a nice, offline way to play music. There already is a whole lot of online media player apps that do the job decently. It's possible that we could go online, but definitely not for a while.
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Update on development: We are shifting design frameworks.
Even with just the few snippets of code we have written, trackbox's nonstandard design has caused normally small discrepancies like button highlighting into big issues. We have found severally bugs with QT effecting windows and boarderless frames, but as they don't appear like they are going to be resolved soon would have caused huge issues with the presentation of our application.
We are going to go with a application designed around chromium embedded.
This gives us many advantages in the short and long run including:
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Allowing us to cover for platform discrepancies in a easy manner. Our interface will be written in html and css, but with a powerful c++ wrapper to handle low level events.
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Since we are going with a nonstandard borderless window, we can get closer to native on every platform. We are planning on using WinAPI on windows and probably QT (or possibly GTK) on linux. This allows us to take advantage of all the features that each platform has to offer. This should allow us to have snapping, desktop notifications, and proper animations without distorting our design.
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HTML, CSS, and JS are much easier to work with than c++, making development and bug fixing easier for people who aren't expiernced with the crazyness that can come with c++.
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Plugin support should be much easier to implement with JS, as it doesn't have to be compiled and can have the full power to edit every high level part of out application without trouble.
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Easy updating. As the c++ wrapper shouldn't need to be updated all the time, small updates that contain only html, css, and js can be easy to update with a built in updater, streamlining the process.
We haven't updated all of our code in the git repo yet, but it should be updated soon. We are still looking for QT developer help for the Linux wrapper. We also despratly need help in Mac OS X wrapper (most likely using qt), because none for the current developers use commuters running Mac OS X.
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Hi,
What bugs did you find ? Where they reported ?
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I found this bug: https://bugreports.qt-project.org/browse/QTBUG-33302 . Experienced this bug: https://bugreports.qt-project.org/browse/QTBUG-33541, but was not the discoverer. I also discovered that ubuntu overrides all pushbuttons with context to be highlighted orange, which completely ruins the design appearence, though that isn't qt's fault.
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Update: Trackbox repo updated to the CEF/Winapi/QT version.
