Playa

Playa is the OS X audio player for those who enjoy thinking in playlist of beautiful albums, rather than shuffling over messed collections.

Features

• Plays mp3, m4a, flac, ogg files;
• open playlists in multiple tabs;
• displays track waveform;
• displays album cover art from Discogs;
• scrobbles to your Last.fm account;
• allows remote control over HTTP.

Philosophy

I put it straight: in ~ 10 years of OS X usage, I never found a music player that completely satisfied my needs, mostly because of playlist organisation. Most players, if not all, handle playlists as a list of tracks, rather than as a list of albums, the latter being at least for me the atom (no technology pun intended) of the listening experience.

So now that I found a solid match between a low level audio player, and an application environment easy to work with (namely Electron), I stopped whining and started working on my idea of audio player, soon a concrete audio player.

Install

Either download the latest build from here, or build manually:

$ npm install
$ gulp release

You'll find built app in the /release folder.

Development

Run

$ npm i
$ npm rebuild // see * below
$ npm start

* (in case you install new native modules and you run into the dreadful module version mismatch issue)

Test

$ npm run test

Tests are written in tape and should live along the code itself:

pathTo
  └── component
        ├── __stubs__
        |       └── index.js
        ├── index.js
        ├── component.js
        └── component.spec.js

Where index.jsis just:

import Component from './component';

export default Component;

The template for specs is:

import test from 'tape';
import Component from './';

test('whatToTest', (assert) => {
  ...
  assert.equal(
    something, toSomethingElse,
    'expected result',
  );
  ...
  assert.end();
});

If the need to mock underlyings deps arises, use proxyquire and place stubs into __stubs__/index.js:

export const Component = proxyquire('../Component', {
  __esModule: true,
  'lib_to_mock': {
    method_to_mock: () => ...,
  },
});

Import in the spec file accordingly then:

import { Component } from './__stubs__';
...

Keep in mind that proxyquire proxies the deps only, not the component itself, and it is meant to simulate network / fs layers. An abuse of its features is a smell of tight coupling, and implies a lot of work. Work less, and save tight coupling for the weekend.

---

Note: in order to use Discogs webservice you need to obtain a Consumer Key/Secret pair from them and create settings/discogs.json using following template:

{
  "DISCOGS_KEY"     : <yourDiscogsKey>,
  "DISCOGS_SECRET"  : <yourDiscogsSecret>
}

Same for Last.fm scrobbling, please save it to settings/lastfm.json:

{
  "LASTFM_KEY"     : <yourLastFmKey>,
  "LASTFM_SECRET"  : <yourLastFmSecret>
}

Roadmap

Plans for the close future are:

• Implementation of MetaDoctor, an interface driven process that help you solve track metadata problems when importing media to playlists.

Plans for the not-so-close future:

• search feature over a library, whose changes are monitored;
• inclusion of arbitrary media URLs in playlists (Youtube, Soundcloud, Bandcamp...).

Known issues

• no drag and drop of multiple albums/folders.

License

The MIT License (MIT)

Copyright (c) 2015-2017 Diego Caponera

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.