mp: a hybrid music player

Click here to try it online!

This is a music player built on web technologies. It can be used as a standalone cross-platform application (using nw.js or Electron) or as a web page.

The trick here is that the code base is shared: the very same application code that runs the web page is used in a standalone app.

Features, planned and implemented

• Sound playback
  • Supported formats: all that your {browser,Electron,nw.js} supports
  • Routing to WebAudio graph
• Playlist
  • Basic control
  • Recursive import
  • Repeat
  • Drag/drop reordering
  • Shuffle
• Playback control & info
  • Waveform
  • Metadata parsing
    • ID3v1
    • ID3v2
    • Vorbis comments
    • m4a/mp4
  • Seeking
  • Album art
  • Global hotkeys
• Miscellaneous
  • Realtime visuals
    • Spectrum analyser
    • Big Psyco from Visual Player for DOS
  • Single instance runtime playlist control
  • Single instance runtime playback control

Running

1. Clone this project
2. Run it:

• adjust and run dist/electron/mp.sh [path-to-song-or-playlist]
• adjust and run dist/nw/mp.sh [path-to-song-or-playlist]
• launch dist/web/index.html

The web version is also hosted at GitHub pages.

Command line API

[-p] play1.mp3 play2.mp3 ... -q enqueue1.mp3 enqueue2.mp3 ... -c command1 command2

Where command is play, pause, prev or next.

Web version can be controlled by postMessage with the following data object:

{
  command: "control",
  argv: ["array", "of", "command", "line", "arguments"]
}

Compiling

1. Clone this project
2. npm install
3. make

Achievements unlocked

• Playback via HTMLAudioElement through Web Audio sound graph
• Waveform visuals via decodeAudioData
• Realtime visuals using AnalyserNode
• Metadata parsing thanks to XHR2, ArrayBuffer, DataView and TextDecoder APIs
• Written in ES2015, bundled using Rollup and good ol' Make
• CSS compiled with LESS