Future of Auxio about auxio

[OxygenCobalt]

Hm. I wrote that line in the FAQ when the app had some really bad UI issues that I was still working out. I think it could be okay to get onto the mainline repo, but I'm not sure where I'd start [especially so since its already on IzzyOnDroid and has to be reconciled somehow]. I do have a .yml I created that could be proposed on the repo though.

[OxygenCobalt]

Nice. I did notice what izzy pointed out about my translations. To clarify:

• German was almost completely made by me. I took high school german for 3 years and was able to cobble together just okay
  sentences from what I knew and a dictionary. I expected it to be broken but I didn't want an incomplete translation [and it was a fun challenge in general]
• The rest of the languages I just derived from other projects with some minor tweaks. They aren't as complete.

I would love for more people to contribute translations though, would fix the broken ones I made myself and the incomplete translations that are missing values I could not find analogues to in other projects. Time will tell now that Auxio is accessible to a wider group of people.

[OxygenCobalt]

The hypothetical system would also read from the filesystem directly, and since ExoPlayer has its own parsers instead of relying on the busted MediaMetadataRetreiver API, it would be able to recognize the album artist tag. However, the amount of changes I would have to make to get Auxio working with this new system would easily take months as I have to iron out bugs and make the experience as fluid as possible.

I think the short term right now is getting widgets, custom accents, and playlists done, and then trying to move on to this new system if possible.

Another option might be getting google to add a new ALBUM_ARTIST field to the albums database in the next android version. This way, I could keep relying on MediaStore and load things quickly while respecting well-tagged media libraries. Might be easier said than done though.

Update: In retrospect, I might not actually add custom accents. The logistics behind getting the entirety of Auxio to play along with a special accent seem a bit daunting, and Android 12 seems to be introducing a similar feature. I may add more pre-defined accents however if theres enough demand.

[offa]

@OxygenCobalt the FAQ mention F-Droid, is there any ETA or blocker? Would be nice to have it in the main repo!

[offa]

Best starting point is opening a request for packaging I guess.

https://gitlab.com/fdroid/rfp/-/issues/1777

Let's see, what's next :-)

[offa]

RFP has been merged and it should appear on F-Droid soon 👍.

Additionally, I have opened a PR to add permission documentation as suggested in the comments.

[alanorth]

There is no way to salvage this system that isn't just begging google to improve MediaStore so I am considering implementing a system similar to Vanilla Music where I use the Exoplayer Metadata Retrieval system to read metadata instead and simply store the results in a database. This seems to work okay with Vanilla to an extent, but would require most of the app to be completely refactored.

@OxygenCobalt would switching to the Exoplayer Metadata Retrieval system allow support for reading album artist tags? Currently Auxio chooses the artist tag from the first track of the album and decides that is the artist for the whole album:

In reality the album artist for all the tracks in that album is "Migos", and the artist tag of each track has "Migos feat. some other artist".

It kills me how so many Android audio applications don't support this. It makes using a well-tagged media library (beets and MusicBrainz) a very annoying experience. By my count, these applications support album artist tags (likely by doing their filesystem own scanning):

• Odyssey
• Vanilla
• VLC

Thanks!

[OxygenCobalt]

Issue has outlived its usefulness. I've split it up into #34, #36, and #38.