Music, if well chosen can lift the spirits of it listeners, enlighten them and go as far as spicing up their lives. To some folks, it is an addiction, a positive one if there is anything like a positive addiction. Whether it is in the East, West or in Africa, music as united people of diverse race, colour, and culture. I am tempted to call it the soul of the world, it is like medicine for sick heart and novocaine in difficult times. 7 out of 10 nights, I sleep with cool songs. Somehow, it is like sleeping pills.
Source: Pixabay -CCO-
Music is the language of the world.
Do we have anyone here who doesn't like music? I will be interested in such a person whether on Steemit or elsewhere.
Choosing a good music player is as important as choosing good songs to listen to. Since the last four years, I have developed the habit of not using the inbuilt music player that comes with Android phones. I have my reason, they appear too naked and crude.
Going online to find better music players is worth it.
I have used Shuttle and Vinyl music player in the past, but discovering vanilla has been a hit, it is simple to use, yet magnificent. Vanilla Music is a complete package that caters for the needs of every music lover.
Vanilla, What about It?
It is an open-source mobile music player that let me play music through Albums, Tracks, Genre, and Artists. Also, it allows the creation of a playlist for a unique user experience. Vanilla Music has powerful search functionality, themes and settings for full customization. Through settings, I can tweak audio playback screen, set notification, change the cover art, toggle accelerometer shake, play around miscellaneous features and have a glance at media library. Really, I initially felt overwhelmed with these features, so much for a music player, but they are what made it stand out in the league. Let me walk you through the features that I find so interesting. I will leave you to explore Vanilla mobile app and discover more.
Features
All music players play songs, maybe all formats or a few ones. Therefore, for anyone to be outstanding, it gotta have features that make life simple for users. Let's see what's in vanilla.
When I opened the app, without having to press anything, I see Artist, Albums, Tracks, and Playlist at the very top of my screen. I may decide to select from Tracks, Albums or Artists, but I always prefer to play from my playlist for obvious reasons. I will have to swipe left to have access to Genre and Files. At the middle of the screen, I see a list of songs, 11 at the time. At the bottom, there are search and more icons.
Search
Since I prefer to listen to songs on my playlist because I have created a list for different purposes like sports, reading, driving, and bedtime. I barely have reason to use these features. It is useful if you have to find a song by typing the song name, album or artist name. I have more leverage using vanilla search features because other similar apps will only allow me to search using the artist name only.
More
It is an icon represented by three vertical dots at the lower right corner of the app home screen. Under it, I have access to Now playing, Settings, Show queue. Jump to time and Sort by.
Sort by
This allows me to rank my songs, interestingly, the sort option is different depending on where I am playing songs from. For instance, if I'm playing songs from Album, I can sort by title, year, date added, duration and artist. But if I am listening from the playlist which is my favourite, I can only sort by title, date added and duration. The sorting option varies.
Jump to time
Perhaps, the sound/audio is 1 hour long and I feel like listening from 23rd-minute playtime. All I need to do is to click on the Jump to time, input 23 minutes 00 seconds. It will start playing from that time. Nice tool, huh? Yes, if you ask me. I barely place songs on the queue so I don't use Show queue functionality, but it displays all songs on the queue if you have added them to it.
Settings, Hub of Vanilla Goodies
If you want to fully customize any app or software, go to settings. There was a time where I rate software based on how loaded it setting is, with tools that do not exist elsewhere.
Audio
Music is nothing without sound, let me know if you can listen to songs without it. Can you? I doubt it. So if sound matters, here is where I adjust different parameters to please my ears, especially through the equalizer, pop does it for me always. But there are times that I had to adjust the frequency and decibel level of pop to create a unique music experience. Wow! This is getting interesting, enabling track Replaygain allows me to listen to songs at a level higher than the default highest level of my device. Anyways, users will sacrifice audio quality for increased output. There is a way you can adjust volume when there is notification, I kept this at 21%. It means how low or high I want the song to sound when messages come in. Other tools in audio are Headsets/Bluetooth controls, Headset control beep, External output only, Pause when unplugged, and Play when plugged. It is good to tick pause when unplugged to avoid an embarrassing moment in an official or religious gathering.
- Accelerometer Shake: I enabled it, this feature allows me to change track to next or previous by shaking my phone. Click on shake action and choose between next track, previous track, next album, the previous album, and others. I prefer next track every time that I shake my phone.
NB: click on shake force threshold to determine the magnitude of shake, from experience, I recommend between 15 to 20 threshold. Anything below 15 will change your track while you are jogging or working too fast, and I'm sure you don't want this.
Theme
It is the skin of my darling Vanilla music app, the standard theme looks unattractive to me, so I chose orange (dark). There are 11 themes to select from, enjoy as many themes as you wish.
Cover Art
There are different ways to have art displayed together with tracks; I can allow it to download from folder, hidden folder ( no one wants that😁), Android internal memory or file tags. I allowed art to load from file tags only.
Summary
Vanilla music is a mobile application that was designed with users in mind, it is difficult to agree to the fact that it was released about 1 month ago. It has recorded reasonable success in terms of the number of downloads in app stores. It enjoys contributions from 17 contributors in different countries, no wonder it features are awesome. So far, it does not crash neither does it hang. I have only discovered a bug in the last three weeks of usage. It is easy to overlook such bug, but for the development of this project, I will draw developers attention to it.
The Vanilla music output is cool and its shake feature is iconic!
Recommendations to Developers
To enhance the appearance, you may include an animated display in the home screen while the song is playing.
Allow users to view recently played songs.
Make it possible to know how many times a song has been played, this can be effected through automatic playlist creation.
Version
This app is new and developers contribute to its development regularly
Links
Source Codes
https://github.com/vanilla-music/vanilla
Download Link
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=ch.blinkenlights.android.vanilla
My Github Profile
https://github.com/autofreak
Series: Nil