Huge Congratulations To The Entire Team On The Redesign

[thegranddesign]

I've been using Finamp for quite a while now and while it was the best music app for Jellyfin, there were multiple VERY rough edges. This is in no way a criticism of @jmshrv. Building an app that starts out of love and then ends up being relied on by the community while at the same time getting paid 1/1,000th (or often nothing) compared to a salaried job can understandably make a passion project become the last thing you want to do.

However, I am extremely happy to have new life being breathed into this project. I just tried the beta and I am BLOWN AWAY at how good it is. The entire collaborator group deserves huge kudos for how much work this was.

On top of the unbelievable new design, the top two things that I am amazed by:

1. The new downloads system

I haven't tried using the "sync" feature for my playlists yet, but considering the fact that this is even a thing is unbelievable. I used to have to delete my downloaded playlists and then resync the entire thing.

Also the auto-transcoding!? Wonderful! I'd love some additional options there but the default is good enough for now and allows me to sync a significantly larger number of tracks.

Speaking of number of tracks, this download system seems to be able to handle a LOT of downloaded tracks. It's been a dream so far.

2. DOES SHUFFLE ACTUALLY WORK!? 😂

On the old version, when playing a list of tracks offline it seemed as though shuffle would play the same songs over and over even between sessions. Within a session sometimes i would get 10 songs in and then the first song would be played again. It was pretty useless to have large playlists because I'd only ever hear 2% of the songs over and over.

Since trying the beta, it SEEMS like shuffle is actually shuffling all of my songs in a playlist while offline. And I haven't tried it yet, but it looks like I can resume a shuffled playlist at a later date. That'll be a dream.

And since Finamp is keeping track of plays now, hopefully we can have a feature later where we can weight less frequently played songs over more frequently played songs to keep things fresh.

I'm hearing songs in some of my playlists that I only ever listen to while away from home for the first time in YEARS ❤

I could go on and on about smaller things I love about this new version, but I'll stop here. And there are obviously a bunch of rough edges but surprisingly, I'm not finding any showstoppers (yet) from using this daily.

THANK YOU ALL SO MUCH FOR THE WORK ON THIS!

@jmshrv PLEASE SETUP A SUPPORT LINK ON GITHUB SO WE CAN GIVE YOU AND THE OTHER PROJECT LEADS FOR THIS REDESIGN SOME WELL-DESERVED PAY.

#220

[jmshrv]

Thank you so much! Finamp has become so much more than what I could have imagined when I started messing about with mobile development 4 years ago, and the redesign has been insane to witness (especially given the quality of some of the code I wrote back then...)

I haven't spoken about it too much publicly (or privately, honestly) but I've actually ended up taking a back seat on the project due to university (and probably a bit of burnout). If you want to throw money at someone, @Chaphasilor is the de facto lead of the project now, alongside many other people :)

[jmshrv]

It'd probably be a good idea to set up a FUNDING.yml or whatever for the current lead people 🙃

[thegranddesign]

@jmshrv burnout is real and totally understandable ❤ Once you get your sponsorship set up I'll send you over a thank you.

[Chaphasilor]

Hey @thegranddesign! It was absolutely lovely waking up today and seeing your sponsorship, absolutely made my week!

I'm really glad that you enjoy the beta so much and that we managed to address the main pain points already.
Initially I was just interested in making the app a bit prettier, since I prefered an open source app over alternatives, but really didn't like the design. After whipping up a fee designs it became obvious that users liked the design, but there weren't many devs around that would implement it. Much of that early development is recorded in #220, as you're probably aware.

I then got to work on implementing the design myself, starting with the player screen and queue. It just so happened that the current queue system wasn't reliable enough for my design goals, so I rewrote it (mostly successfully).

I was very positively surprised when @Komodo5197 started opening multiple large PRs, starting with the queue restore functionality, and then following up with the downloads system rewrite. You have them to thank for the awesome new capabilities of the beta. I basically just provided testing and made some wishes about what I would like to see, and @Komodo5197 implemented it right-away. That was really incredible, and I wouldn't have been capable of doing this myself.

Aside from the player screen the redesign progress has been slow, as you might have noticed. I've been fighting bugs (many of which I don't fully understand), responding to issues, and trying to keep things organized, but it takes a lot of time which I don't always have.
But I'm planning to be more productive in March, when I'll hopefully have more time to spare.

All in all I'm really happy that Finamp is continuing to get better (even if slowly), and that users like you appreciate the changes we're making.
Be sure to post your feedback either in the redesign discussion (#603), or on Discord (https://discord.gg/xh9SZ73jWk), or by creating issues on the repo here. Feedback is always appreciated, and I'll try to keep it in mind when creating new designs or adding new features :)

[thegranddesign]

@Chaphasilor I'm glad to hear that and thank you for the lengthy update :) I hope you all have a good test suite on the app. I don't know Flutter but I can't seem to see one. A bit of advice: test suites take more time than it would take to implement a feature by itself, but as an app grows, especially one as complex as Finamp, it becomes invaluable. If you don't have one, what you end up doing is fighting new bugs (and old bugs that you've already fixed once) instead of implementing new features.

In other words, for a small up front pain, you end up saving exponentially more time later on.

[Chaphasilor]

@thegranddesign we actually have someone working on that right now. But sadly most of the bugs are related to playback and OS integration, which is very hard to test for.