Release of the 1.5.2:

What's in it?

• The backend has been reworked, we now store informations on already scanned folder and songs, to only re scan update folders or songs.
  • It works like that, if a song has been updated or added in the folder "artist A", then the folder's metadata will change, triggering a rescan, then only the songs that have their metadata updated would trigger a song scan).
• Added a way to hide the mini player.
  • You can now hide the mini player by doing
    • on macOS Cmd+Shift+H
    • on windows Ctrl+Shift+H
• Do you need to do something ?
  • No the app will auto update the database to add the changes.

With these changes we are at 30% of the v2.

Download here

I'm implementing this idea: Potential new feature?

If you don't want to read all of this simply read the last part.

The feature idea is: "I would appreciate it if we could have the option to use a keyboard shortcut to trigger the mini player instead."

And the problem that it would fix is "I’ve found that it can get annoying for the mini player to keep popping up when you hover on the screen edge of the screen.", Which I'm sure a lot of you are also tired of having like this.

The problem is that a shortcut has only two state, pressed, an well, not pressed.

So I can only have 2 state for this feature, currently pressing Cmd+Shift+H (windows will be Ctrl), lock the mini player in a hidden mode, fixing the, "Stop showing yourself I want to click on an element on the right side of the screen".

But it's not exactly the feature logic, since to implement this, I would either need to get read of the hover entirely OR add another way (or another shortcut) to enable the toggle to manual mode.

So my question is simple would you to do / what would you prefer ?

• Keep it like that because the original problem is solved.
• Add another shortcut to toggle between manual and hover mode (so two shortcuts, which is a lot of steps, but hey maybe you like typing).
• Or get rid of the hover feature and make it manual only. But the thing is, that it's also an accessibility feature. What if for some reason you can't use a keyboard, or want to actually lock the mini player in hidden mode only 10% of the time ?

I've nearly finished the back-end refacto, the app will take a little bit longer to initialize on first launch, but then will be three times faster than before.

We are now storing the metadata in the db, this way, if the app found an already scanned music (the path is the same) and that it has not been updated, it will skip the metadata reading and directly take the one already loaded in memory from the database.

We also now fingerprint each image cover via a hash, previously we used a combination of mime type+image size in bytes. It works, and is faster than a hash but have a chance (very low but still) to be overwritten by a cover that have the exact same size.

It was originally going to be in the v2, but we are going to ship it in the 1.5.2 (with the shortcut feature to enable disable the mini player hover).

"Sell your house of cards while it still looks like a palace", everything to lower the cost of production and increase the revenue.

You can download it in the releases by clicking on the resonance_mac_universal.zip

The build works on both apple Silicon and Intel mac.

Hello again, since the 1.5 is stable enough, I am going to work on the making of the v2.

The v2 will be a total remake of the app, bettering the architecture of the code, and optimizing some parts.

Keep in mind we will still:

• Keep the 1.5 free
• Keep the 1.5 alive
• Update bugs that might occurs
• Update dependencies

But note that the new features will only come in the v2.

As we’ve been teasing it, in some posts and in the recent video, here is a look at it’s design.

We opted for a more detailed Skeuomorphism (that you can see the renders made by u/dwcq).

It will be fully in css, which means that first, it will be even more light weight but also that, it will be customizable directly on run time.

And thus here is the first new feature for the player:

1/4 • A skin system: The core idea is to be able to, directly in the app customize the appearance of your player, save it, and be able to share it easily with others. For this, two new views will be added, one to select / remove / copy / import a skin, and another one to create or edit a skin.

The skins will simply be a huge text containing the different css properties, so in a few clicks you will be able to share/import them anywhere and since the interface will guide you through it, it will be easy to customize and understand it. But do not worry, as we will make some tutorials on how to create basics themes from scratch.

To keep it simple and progress step by step making sure that everything works and make sense we are going to only whitelist some pre chosen element.

Here is the list of the elements that you will be able to customize, check the third image (also first level is the element, second are the fields):

• Color for the selected / interactive elements in the screen:
  • background color
• Cover of the player:
  • background color
  • background image
  • opacity
• Normal buttons:
  • size (a min and max will be forced)
  • border radius
  • background color
  • icon color
  • opacity
• Normal buttons on hover:
  • size (a min and max will be forced)
  • border radius
  • background color
  • icon color
  • opacity
• Change mode button:
  • size (a min and max will be forced)
  • border radius
  • background color
  • icon color
  • opacity
• Change mode button on hover:
  • size (a min and max will be forced)
  • border radius
  • background color
  • icon color
  • opacity
• Piano buttons (next/previous etc…)
  • background color
  • background image
  • icon color
  • led color off
  • led color on
• Piano buttons (next/previous etc…)
  • background color
  • background image
  • icon color
• Side switch:
  • thumb background color
  • thumb background image
  • thumb border radius
  • thumb size (a min and max will be forced)
  • thumb opacity
  • track background color
  • track border radius
  • track opacity
• Equalizer:
  • thumb background color
  • thumb background image
  • thumb border radius
  • thumb size (a min and max will be forced)
  • thumb opacity

2/4 • As mentioned in the skin section a new button will appear in the mini player replacing the mini player visualizer bars. It will be a simple switch to well…, switch the position of the mini player from left to right, we know that sometimes the mini player get annoying, blocking the view or a button, so this will fix the issue.

3/4 • A real random / shuffle queue, currently the shuffle is only function that give the player a random music that is not the current one, it does the job, but what if you wanted to go back in the track ? Well actually you will just be served a new random song and not the track that was before.

4/4 • Gapless playback, self explanatory.

All of this will be a lot of work, my guess is at least a month and a half full time, but it will be a clean new start for the app, and add a feature that would for one give more souls to our player and secondly give you guys a little more of Resonance to play with.

For this reason we have decided to make the v2 non free on Patreon (not a subscription) we did not settle a price yet but It will be around 10$ and, we will offer 5 coupon to download the app for free in our sub at the release (more to be announced).

I’ve updated the roadmap to cover the kind of new direction for the project you might want to give it a look here.

In the meantime if you want to support us for our work, you can subscribe to our Patreon.

First of, the good new I've fix a hidden bug preventing the next song on the latest song of the queue and the previous song of the first song of the queue when the shuffle was on; and remade the audio pipeline to be more simple.

Secondly for the not so good news:

Most of the linux distro (if not all) had various problems, I thought that if it worked on my debian vm then it would work on every debian based and fedora. It did not.

The problem is that our app rely heavily on a technology called webkitgtk, and, I didn't know that each linux distro chose to incorporate the version that they want (not always the latest).

Not a big deal normally right ? Except that webkitgtk audio pipeline is buggy and need the latest version to works.

So I spends hours (more than hours actually) to found a linux distribution that had a webkitgtk almost working and changed the code to remove what it didn't like.

The app should work on fedora out of the box but if you still have problem or are on a different distro check our linux installation part, the "best" method is to run a container that is running a fixed version of fedora that works the best and pass the app to the host.

It's not the best user experience but it's working.

For this reason until we refacto entirely the audio pipeline to not be dependent to webkitgtk, the linux version will be unstable (it works but as longs as you don't spam actions).

I've just released the v1.5, it's made with tauri + react (by one dev and one designer), in short we wanted to distance ourself from music streaming services, tired of the "this music is no longer available" or the "this music is not disponible in your country" or the simple fact that you have to pay continuously to keep being able to listen.

So we build our own player that we use daily, inspired by the old widget designs and winamp / sonic / windows media player.

If you want to see more, here is our github page to download the app (MacOS, Windows10/11, Linux (debian/fedora))

And if you are really curious you can come say hi on our subreddit r/ResonanceApp :)

Hello everyone, we've just released the 1.5 version of our small music player.

What's the motivation behind this? We are tired of the streaming paradigm, always renting, never owning, and we're tired of the lack of innovative design or unusual designs to say the least.

Everything is either too cold, black and white, two-toned squared designs (it works, but this is all there is now!) or the classic vibe-coded UI with neon colors.

So we chose to do exactly what every sane person would do: take months to build our own music player :).

We want to bring back the cool effects of the early 2000s, the "we did it because we could" mentality. Our goal is not to be a better Apple Music, Spotify, Deezer, or even a foobar2000, but to be a simplified local music player that simply works, offers a new design in the form of a widget, and doesn't phone home, doesn't ping the internet, doesn't lock you out with a subscription, account, or email.

You take the app and you can keep it forever, inciting the "own your medias point of view" (starting by owning the software that plays your medias).

I said that it was a "just work" type of app, but it has more than simply play/pause features:

Core Music Player Features

• Load music from an entire folder or specific directory
• Enable on-click and drag-and-drop loading capabilities
• Display metadata automatically (artist name, album name, artwork, track ID, bitrate, etc.)
• Display full metadata on a dedicated screen
• Include an equalizer with customizable presets
• Adjust left / right balance.
• Offer a mini player mode (hidden or locked)
• Display a small bar visualizer

Playback Controls

• Play and pause music playback
• Manage volume levels
• Seek through tracks using a timeline
• Enable shuffle and repeat settings
• Handle media session control via keyboard/media keys or AirPods

File Support

• Support various audio file formats: MP3, AAC, M4A, ALAC, AIFF, FLAC, WAV, OGG, Opus

User Interface

• Utilize a skeuomorphism UI design
• Detect the user's theme and adjust the screen theme accordingly
• Allow manual selection of a custom screen theme

Additional Features

• Enable filtering by artist name, album name, or song title
• Handle drag functionality for the app itself
• Include click sound effects (that you can disable)

If you want to see more here is our github page to download the app (MacOS, Windows10/11, Linux (debian/fedora))

And if you want to be updated on it here is our subreddit r/ResonanceApp :)

I'm still working on the .appImage for linux, but all the bugs have been fixed:

• MacOS works,
• Windows works,
• Linux works (.deb/.rpm)

Saturday the 1.5.0 will finally drop as well as a new video, and the showcase of the v2.0, stay tuned !

Link for the pre-release

Hi everyone we have pushed to Github the pre release of the 1.5.0, it now has:

• A rework of the hover / leave detection, meaning you don't have to click on the mini player anymore to make it reveal itself (if you've not set the mini player on locked of course).
• Fixed media session bugs for the shuffle and previous music.
• Fixed mini player shuffle not working correctly.
• Fixed metadata's face having a field's value set as "0" when no folder were loaded.

And more importantly, i have the app working on linux (debian).

But for now i can only test it on a vm so i need your help to make sure everything is indeed really working. On the release page I have added a .deb (debian) and a .rpm (fedora / red hat) as well as an AppImage (which still have some problems).

That said, If you're on windows or macOS your help will still be valuable to make sure no regressions was done or even simply you feedback on the new rework of the hover/leave maybe it needs to be smoother (lowering the delay of the animation?).

PS: For the windows users listening to their musics on a mounted device (harddrive / thumbdrive) you should not be able to play the music on next launch, it is normal (it's cliché to say that, I know) but by default the app is restricted to some directories, i still need to implement a reliable way to allow the app on drives that mounted drive (which i have in mind). So sorry in advance for the inconvenience 🙏.