As first app release, I will be building a music player. It was a late winter night, and an idea popped in my head, “There are no good music apps out there for sorting/playing your own songs you own that work on every device”.
So I thought, how about we build something that works on the web, phones, laptops, tablets, windows, MacOS and even your TV, then we also make it so we can store the songs online and have any device you pickup, your phone, tablet, TV etc and just have it sync those songs or just play them right over the internet. Kinda important don’t you think for your car, home, gym or whatever you play music at. Also offline syncing would be important in case your not in internet range.
So where did Crystal Tunes name come from? You will laugh at this, my character name of final fantasy 14 is Crystal Sight, so I joined a party one night and mentioned I was building a music player and someone said Crystal Tunes, so I guess it just kinda stuck, and it does sound futuristic in my opinion considering quantum computing lately has discovered breakthroughs using crystals.
How far have I gotten as of May 21st? Halfway is my honest answer. For many months I have retrained myself to learn new programming languages, python, flutter, occasional java and and javascript. I will be using flutter as client end for this and python as server end. Flutter is much more difficult to work with than python, so it has been taking some time working with 2 languages all the time.
So far I have tested it working on windows, android phones, linux, web, and TV. The TV was probably most difficult as I have to work within constraints of using a TV remote, which changes a lot of what I can and cannot use. Rest assured however, when I am finished it will support every device out there. So if you typically use a windows computer, android tablet/phones, and your TV, it will work there, and I will deal with Macs and Iphones when I can get my hands on them to test they work there to.
All in all not a bad idea for a first app attempt, when I am finished I will release it as version 1.0 for every device you can download, and I will also upload to google play store for android and TVs.
So stay tuned…..version 1.0 coming this year 🙂 Feel free to email me if you have any feature requests or design ideas. I will base this on my own creativity then I will run some design aspects against youngest generation in the end to cover all basis.
So what advanced features can we build in in 2020? Working on every device on internet is definitely the toughest one, I have to build in different C libraries for different platforms, and that has been a real challenge. Passwords? Let’s do away with them, aren’t we tired enough of having a million passwords everywhere and these password managers storing all our passwords on the cloud! 2020 is about oath2 security and signal security. So to build it cross platform we will use oath2, so let’s ditch passwords completely and use quick click email links or google logins to authenticate the world, much more convenient, especially for logging in on your TV.
So my idea on security will be no passwords ever again, and a token revocation list, and also be emailed about any new devices added to your account, I don’t think it gets much better than this for convenience of never having to use a password again. Only issue we might face here is if we want other people to access our personal accounts, without them having access to your email account, they won’t be able to, so perhaps we can add subaccount down the road if people need this, I don’t ever think it is a good idea to give anyone access to your main account, but only things you want them to access.
Playlists:
This is a hot topic with everyone, everyone wants a drag and drop interface, here is the problem with that, won’t work on TV with a remote control. We need a better concept or we enable a drag and drop interface for phones/desktops to configure playlists for your TV might be a better plan. What we also need is ability to see next songs playing, especially for a TV. So we are going to do something different here than any other music player, we are going to update the playlist with what is playing next for every song, this will be important, it’s more work and more code but will look better on TV.
Uploads:
This is probably the most difficult one because everyone has to pay for storage space in this world, it doesn’t just come free. I really want to make it so its free to everyone, but if we get to the point where we start running out of disk space because to many people use the app, then we will have to offer a premium membership to buy more disk space for people. My thoughts are we just buy as many drives as we can in a raid 5 setup and keep going, my servers are hosted at USA datacenters with dual internet link redundancy, so this enables us to write our own custom code for server end to do whatever advanced features we want for our app, instead of relying on things like firebase etc with limited functionality from google like most developers use. In fact we will bypass google completely and write everything custom so we can build as many advanced features for app as we want! We will set a callback for them with google login, but that is as much as we will do with them, we will also have a custom login in case people don’t want to login with google.
Streaming only online option:
This is like what the web will have to do. There is no way to access all your songs from a browser otherwise they could look at all the files on your hard drive from any website and that would be a massive security breach.
I am going to build it so you can stream all your files from internet at all times if needed, and for web well there is no choice there. What we should all ultimately be doing is syncing songs to whatever device we pickup, phone, tablet, desktop or your TV. But then again maybe people have massive song libraries of like 20 thousand songs or more which is not uncommon these days and don’t want to sync them to every device for disk space reasons, which makes sense.
So in order to stream online only all the time, would require a dedicated process like a web server process or an asynchronous API. My thoughts on this are that async is good, but for something like streaming files it makes no sense because process will be busy entire time just streaming the file depending how fast your internet connection is. We will try both and see how it goes, I can code in the async backend for streaming files, but we should probably start with a simple web process handling the file instead to free up the API itself for handling requests at beginning, but we will build both in and see which performs better on a larger scale.
If to many people abuse this feature however, we may need to upgrade the hardware, and offer a premium membership for this because everyone on internet pays for bandwidth, and we might not want to flood the datacenters bandwidth where we don’t need to, otherwise we’d get a hefty bill in the mail from them! And that’s fine, if your goal is to upload a hundred thousand songs and never sync them to any device, just play them online all the time, then just help with bandwidth costs by having a premium membership and it should all work out and your golden as well. I will try to accommodate everyone’s needs.
Future of Crystal Tunes:
I hope Google buys it one day for everyone, till then, we will keep working to try and make it better and better till they do 🙂 I cannot tell the future, but maybe if we integrate YouTube and everything else into it, maybe they will buy it then.
In retrospect:
I guess one of nicest things about building something like this, is giving the world something everyone in it can use everyday, I hope you will enjoy it!
Dan.
UPDATE:
While I had worked hard on the app with flutter and a rest api with python, I have had not had a chance to get back to it, during winter months I hope.