Polarity - A music player for Polaris

Introduction

Polarity is an application with a terminal-style user interface that controls the playback of music stored on a Polaris server.

Motivations

There have been many applications to play music but my favourite has always been Winamp. The number of plugins were numerous and the playlist enqueueing features of a few of them were novel. Namely, one-click queueing of tracks created a great experience for the user and I had a lot of fun with while listening to my favourite tracks.

I wanted to create a device that allows you to control your playlist in a way that was intuitive and was useful.

Principle

The software is divided into two parts - one that is the controller which can be operated by GPIO buttons or joysticks and another that downloads music over a network and plays it locally. Each application will be launched separately and communicate with each other using remote procedure calls over a TCP connection.

Each part will have access to the Polaris server so that they can get track info and music data. This means that the device that contains the controller will require a network connection and so will the device containing the player.

Progress

Currently, it is on version 0.1.0 which allows the user to view the track info of their entire collection and select a track to play on the player.

Check out the video!