maculateConception / aural-player

Player (back end) redesign

All back end player sub-components have been significantly redesigned and rewritten, improving reliability and testability, and reducing the possibility of crashes.

Bug fixes

• Incorrect computation of track duration in some cases ... now it is precisely computed just before playback.
• Auto-hide of controls in player view was inconsistent.
• Tool tips for previous/next track buttons now always show the correct track name.
• Formatting of track seek times in the player view ... sometimes, negative numbers were displayed.
• Width of text field in player view (was not fully extended).
• When a delayed/transcoding track was moved within the playlist, the row for the playing track would not update when playback started.
• The playlist would notify that the playing track was removed at times when it was not.
• Race condition: When a favorite/bookmark/history track was played very near the end of a currently playing track, the player would skip the user-selected track.
• Per-track sound settings were not saved when a track was stopped.

Bug fixes (for Sierra and High Sierra systems).

• Vertical alignment of playing track info text in the player window.
• Slider and player controls would hide behind the album art in some cases (i.e. z-order problem).
• Chapter end times and durations would be incorrectly computed by AVFoundation APIs (i.e. Apple bug).
• Button clicks would result in white flashes.

Other improvements

• Lazy loading of chapters list window (should reduce some memory usage on app startup).
• Transcoder view (in player window) simplified and made consistent with other track info views.

Source code improvements

• Complete refactoring of player views and associated controllers.
  • Simplified, easier to maintain, more reliable.
• Upgrade of source code to Swift v5.2 (Xcode v11.5).
• Complete source code restructuring.
  • Re-organized project meta files, resources, and documentation.
  • Every source group now has an associated filesystem folder.
• Cleanup of old screenshots and demos from the repository.

Introduction of unit tests

• Unit tests have been added for critical player components.
• How dependencies are created / injected has been modified in many classes, in order to facilitate mocking and unit testing.

Aural Player now allows extensive customization of its UI colors and comes with a few built-in color schemes you can choose from. You can customize the color of pretty much every component on the application's 4 main windows, and can save your hand-tailored color schemes for future use.

Demo

See a video demo here

Editor panel

The new color scheme editor panel can be accessed either by going to View > Color Scheme > Customize under the main menu bar or from the settings popup menu at the top right corner of the main (player) window, by clicking Color Scheme > Customize.

• Instant preview - The panel modifies the app-wide color scheme as you change the colors of different elements, so you can instantly see how your chosen colors look in the UI.

• 38 different UI elements whose colors can be customized. Some elements, such as sliders, allow further customization in the form of gradients.

• Undo/redo functionality - You can roll back/forward individual changes (or all at once) to different versions of your customized scheme (history is reset when the panel is closed).

• Color clipboard - You can copy a color you used for one UI element, and paste it onto another color picker for a different UI element, reducing tedious work.

• Apply/save preset schemes - From the panel, you can load a preset color scheme as a starting point, modify a few colors, then save the new version as your own custom scheme, so you can create several variations of color schemes. You don't need to start from scratch everytime.

NOTE - Only the current app-wide color scheme will be altered by this panel. Any preset you have applied will remain unchanged (presets only serve as a starting point).

Built-in color schemes

There are 6 built-in color schemes, one of which is the default scheme, "Black attack", that is applied when the app is started up for the first time before altering the color scheme.

They can be accessed from the submenu under View > Color Scheme or from the settings popup menu at the top right corner of the main (player) window, under the Color Scheme submenu. They can also be applied from within the editor panel.

Color schemes manager

The color schemes manager allows users to preview, rename, apply, and/or delete user-defined color schemes. This is useful if:

• You want to give your schemes more meaningful or cooler names.
• You've forgotten what one of your custom schemes looks like, and want to preview it.
• You have duplicates or simply want to reduce clutter and delete old schemes no longer preferred or in use.

Access the color schemes manager by going to View > Manage color schemes.

NOTE - You cannot alter built-in color schemes ... only your own.

Bug fixes

• Fixed a bug in the expanded art player view - During delayed playback, album art wasn't being loaded sometimes.

UI aesthetics

UI aesthetics have been enhanced in this release.

• Brand new better looking fonts (packaged with app bundle).
• Album art frame now displays a shadow, giving it a 3D appearance.
• Some new/smaller icons.
• Sleeker looking selected tab markers.
• Thinner sleeker sliders in player window.

Aural Player can now read and display chapter markings from tracks^*, and offers convenient chapter playback functions. This is especially useful for audiobooks or podcasts.

^* _{Testing has been done on M4B (AAC), MP3, WMA, Opus, and Ogg Vorbis files with chapter markings, although other file formats with properly encoded chapter markings should also be readable.}

UI features

• Tabular display of chapters in a new "Chapters list" window (chapter title, start time, and duration). This window will automatically pop up when a track that has chapter markings begins playing (automatic popup can be disabled in Playlist preferences).
• Type selection and search for chapter by title
• Marker showing currently playing chapter
• Current chapter title displayed in player window

Playback functions:

The following functions are available within the Chapters list window and also through new menu items under the Playback menu.

• Play selected chapter
• Replay current chapter
• Previous / next chapter
• Loop current chapter

New allowed file extensions

Previously, files with these extensions could not be added to the playlist.

• M4B
• M4R

Ability to show/hide playing track metadata fields

The player window, which shows currently playing track metadata, now allows the user to individually show/hide each of the 3 metadata fields (when they are available to be displayed):

• Artist
• Album
• Current chapter title (new field)

Bug fixes

• Playlist text size - The Playlist text size setting was not being remembered properly and was using the player text size setting instead.

• Player crash in rare cases - When a segment loop was defined with its end time coinciding with the end of the track, and then the loop was removed, track completion would not be detected and the player would freeze because of a playback segment being scheduled with a zero frame count.

• Metadata text cutoff - The Metadata tab in the detailed track info popover was only capable of displaying a small number of lines of text for each field, so large text values like comments would be cut off.

• Track reordering - In certain playlist views, track reordering would result in the track list not being updated properly.

Enhancements

Slight aesthetic refinements to player UI: seek bar, volume and pan sliders, playback control icons, detailed track info popover, etc.

"Show new track" preference moved

The "Show new track in playlist (when track begins playing)" user preference has been moved from the Playback tab to the Playlist tab of the Preferences dialog. Note that this change is not backwards compatible, so users of previous Aural Player versions will have to reset this setting as preferred after downloading v1.7.0.

Shrunk the source code download ZIP archives

The source code archives available with each release no longer contain the massive Documentation folder and ffmpeg binaries which took more than 100MB of space. The archives are now only about 11 MB in size.

Free audiobooks

To obtain free public domain audiobooks to test these new Aural Player features, visit LibriVox

Toggling between playlist view tabs

Users can now conveniently toggle between playlist view tabs (i.e. Tracks / Artists / Albums / Genres) with
2 new menu items under the Playlist menu, and through their associated keyboard shortcuts:

Previous playlist view - Shift + Cmd + [
Next playlist view - Shift + Cmd + ]

Note that these keyboard shortcuts are consistent with the standard macOS shortcuts for tab switching in various apps: Finder, Firefox, Chrome, etc.

Standard way to toggle between dialog tabs

Also, there are now standard consistent keyboard shortcuts to toggle between tabs in various dialogs such as Preferences, the Detailed Track Info popover, the Effects Presets editor, etc.

Previous tab - Shift + Cmd + [
Next tab - Shift + Cmd + ]

These keyboard shortcuts are consistent with those used to switch playlist views.

Selecting an audio output device

The ability to select an audio output device comes new in this latest release. Previously, Aural Player would always send its audio to the system's current output device.

For instance, you can now choose to send Aural's audio output to your Bluetooth speakers while macOS can send its output to any other device like headphones or a Macbook Pro's built-in speakers

You will find this new feature in the Sound menu. There is a new menu item labeled "Output Device". Hovering over this item will reveal a menu listing all available audio output devices, with the current one selected. Click on any of these items to change your output device as preferred.

Setting a preferred audio output device (on app startup)

Also, the Preferences dialog now offers a new setting, under the Sound tab, to allow users to configure which output device should be used at app startup, under the heading Output device on app startup There are 3 options available:

1 - Use system device - The current macOS output device will be used.

2 - Remember device from last app launch - Whatever output device was used when the app previously exited will be remembered and used, if it is still available. If it is no longer available, Aural Player will default to the system output device.

3 - Use preferred device - You can choose from a list of all available devices. This setting can be used if, for instance, you always want Aural Player to send its output to a particular device like your headphones or external speakers. As long as that same device is available when Aural Player starts up again, it will be selected for use. If not, Aural Player will default to the system output device.

Per request, this release adds the option to set a user-preferred playlist view that the app should default to when starting up (i.e. Tracks / Artists / Albums / Genres).

This user preference can be accessed by going to Aural > Preferences > Playlist tab, under the "Playlist view on app startup" heading.

There are 2 ways to set this preference:
1 - Remember the playlist view from the last app launch (i.e. when the app exited)
2 - Always start with a specific view (Tracks / Artists / Albums / Genres)

This release adds the ability for users to scale application text based on preference or as needed because of display resolution.

• 3 preset text size settings: Normal, Larger, and Largest
• Text size can be adjusted either globally or per individual app window (player, playlist, and effects)

This minor release adds the ability to configure the behavior of the ◄◄ and ▶ ▶ media keys through the preferences panel under the "Controls" tab.

• 3 modes of behavior for skip forward/backward media keys:
  • Press to change tracks, press and hold to seek
  • Track changes only
  • Seeking only
• 3 key repeat speeds to choose from: Slow, Medium, and Fast

This release adds support for Mac media keys.

In order to enable this support on macOS, please follow the simple steps listed here.

NOTE - In some scenarios, other media apps such as VLC may interfere with the proper functioning of media keys with Aural Player. But, if Aural Player is the only media application open, and in most common scenarios when other media apps are open, media keys should work fine.