Mono - Android Music App with Subsonic Support

[milleph]

Mono now has significantly improved Subsonic support - we've added what should have been there from the beginning. Search by artist, track, album, load playlists etc. Let us know what you think and what else you'd like to see.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.mono

Mono accesses numerous data and media sources to bring you a single point of exploring and playing music both locally and on Chromecast and Chromecast Audio. Sources of music are YouTube, SoundCloud, Fanburst, Subsonic and local files. Sources of information are these plus Last.fm, Musicbrainz, Songkick, Spotify, Hype machine, Billboard and others. Playlists are easy to create and can include tracks from mixed sources - a YouTube song followed by a SoundCloud track, followed by a Subsonic track etc. A playlist can be loaded from Subsonic and then each track set to be sourced for example from YouTube and the specific YouTube video chosen for each track. Playlists can also be saved in the cloud and shared. Many playlists are also available from Spotify - just create a free account if you don't already have one. Give it a try.

[subarthur]

Does anyone use this app? I would like to know some review of it before download.

[Kliikko]

Looks promising but a bit of work still - hope you get custom Last.fm logins (so personal last.fm history is incorporated) and Tidal support asap! Any estimated date for updates ?

Mono now has significantly improved Subsonic support - we've added what should have been there from the beginning. Search by artist, track, album, load playlists etc. Let us know what you think and what else you'd like to see.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.mono

Mono accesses numerous data and media sources to bring you a single point of exploring and playing music both locally and on Chromecast and Chromecast Audio. Sources of music are YouTube, SoundCloud, Fanburst, Subsonic and local files. Sources of information are these plus Last.fm, Musicbrainz, Songkick, Spotify, Hype machine, Billboard and others. Playlists are easy to create and can include tracks from mixed sources - a YouTube song followed by a SoundCloud track, followed by a Subsonic track etc. A playlist can be loaded from Subsonic and then each track set to be sourced for example from YouTube and the specific YouTube video chosen for each track. Playlists can also be saved in the cloud and shared. Many playlists are also available from Spotify - just create a free account if you don't already have one. Give it a try.

[FlyingPersian]

Seems to be missing offline-saving. Without that feature I personally would never use an app. I'm currently using dsub and I'm quite happy with it, although I only sync my playlists and play my music with it, so I don't use any fancy features. Looks nice tho!

[Kliikko]

Offline caching definitely a must

I like the idea of this app but I think there's a long way to go and I think maybe a desktop/webserver kind of approach might be better suited.

These days listening to music I get one song of Subsonic, one song off Youtube, next maybe Soundcloud .... so it would be GREAT if you could integrate these into one search and one interface, with Subsonic as the solid backbone of course. But a very complex job I think. Since very few songs are not on Youtube I would prioritise ability to create play queue seamlessly mixing sources eg SS and YT.

[milleph]

Forgot to check 'Notify' so missed these :/ thanks for the feedback:

Custom Last.fm logins
- sounds straightforward. Please detail the features you'd like to see

Offline caching definitely a must
- please point us to an app that does this well - straightforward but happy to be directed

Tidal support
- assuming you just want to login to your account and have Tidal available as a source?

We've also had a request to support multiple Subsonic servers - some questions....
- should this be arbitrarily extensible or is a fixed maximum of servers (say 3) enough?
- assuming search/lookup should extend across all servers?

We just released a new version that solved some of the SSL issues we were having with Subsonic/Madsonic and sorted out Notifications for local and Chromecast playback (they were a mess).

Self-signed certificates should now be working well. We've had a request to support third party certificates. It may already be working with the latest update given the changes but maybe one of you with this setup could test? Just haven't had time to install a certificate on a server and test yet...

[Kliikko]

Hey thanks for listening See my comments below

Forgot to check 'Notify' so missed these :/ thanks for the feedback:

Custom Last.fm logins
- sounds straightforward. Please detail the features you'd like to see

To be honest I rarely login directly to Last.FM so I'm probably not the best to suggest what to use Last.FM for. But I see it almost universally incorporated in music software I use so I imagine it's solid and has many uses. Regardless I imagine there are very many interesting uses that can be thought up from a register of all your music listening and all the patterns in frequency etc.

I'm thinking based on your personal last.FM records you could browse your music through on-demand generated playlists (like in e.g. Serviio, 'last added', 'recently added' etc. categories) like:

- most listened songs/artists/album/years

- biographies/discographies/musicians on releases (particularly musicians, especially for genres like reggae and jazz it would be awesome to get Internet Movie Database-style complex searches like this musicians and this musician have appeared together on these recordings, or this musician was on these recordings in this year)

- perhaps things like artists that you have listened to a lot but which have albums you have listened to very little, e.g. one just released

Offline caching definitely a must
- please point us to an app that does this well - straightforward but happy to be directe

From a programmer's point of view I have no idea, but for me as a user the apps that do this well do it like this:

preselects an external SD card (if available) folder so that even if that setting is never manually set, it is already set to what I guess any competent user would set it to
-(ideally not preselect a folder buried like 10 folders deep in some random automatically created Android data folder which I never visit, I think this maybe was a requirement on earlier Android vers because you see it a lot)

-has a touch-browsable folder tree for selecting the folder
(avoiding insanity like expecting the mobile phone user to manually type in or laboriusly copy/paste a deep folder path - if I'm not mistaken an otherwise excellent Subsonic-related app does/did that

-performs a check when user has selected folder that everything is all good (no problem creating folders etc), and provides a visible "green light" confirmation of success

Tidal support
- assuming you just want to login to your account and have Tidal available as a source?

YES! That would be fantastic, if I could have a music player where I could browse my private local music files alongside the Tidal library. Like they all appeared as part of one directory tree, with for example a different colour denoting local and Tidal sources.

And Youtube then as a fall-back last-priority source if you searched for a track that you don't have elsewhere in your library sources.

That might not even be possible from Tidal though, to basically get and browse a list of everything that is there, I don't know.

Perhaps more realistic/possible and equally fantastic would be to just be able to click&select/drag&drop tracks to create a list of songs you want to listen to - e.g select a folder from SD card, add that, search for another few tracks on Tidal and add that, and to be able to easily do this (for example right-hand tree with various sources like in SD Explorer I think it is, local/SFTP/whatever all presented and managed identically, you don't need to click through several menus to go from say local to network sources)

ES File Explorer can also browse several sources like this but ES File Expl doesn't handle the on-the-fly playlist very well or with stability. With a combination of cloud/local/work-whatever accounts it is SO USEFUL (and there is no reason not to) that you can browse essentially identical but technically different sources such as C:\ and e.g. and SFTP from your NAS to e.g. drag and drop into Winamp when you're listening to music.

We've also had a request to support multiple Subsonic servers - some questions....
- should this be arbitrarily extensible or is a fixed maximum of servers (say 3) enough?
- assuming search/lookup should extend across all servers?

I don't understand why it should be necessary to run more than one server as long as one server can use any and several remote/local sources ? Not to diss someone else's suggestion but I'm guessing Youtube/Tidal etc would be useful for more users

[milleph]

Great feedback - appreciate it. We are going to work on caching Subsonic files next and we hear you on the folder interface.

biographies/discographies/musicians on release

There's plenty of this already in Mono. If you click on any track in a playlist and then select the Artist submenu you'll see. We've thought of listing the musicians on a particular track as you suggest and it's now back on the todo list

Perhaps more realistic/possible and equally fantastic would be to just be able to click&select/drag&drop tracks to create a list of songs you want to listen to - e.g select a folder from SD card, add that, search for another few tracks on Tidal and add that, and to be able to easily do this (for example right-hand tree with various sources like in SD Explorer I think it is, local/SFTP/whatever all presented and managed identically, you don't need to click through several menus to go from say local to network sources)

Although Tidal is not yet supported, Mono has the ability to play mixed source playlists

- On the home screen, top right menu, Music Config
- You can drag/drop to prioritize and enable/disable sources
- For any track that is not 'pinned' to a specific source lookup will occur in the priority set in Music Config
- You can pin/unpin a track on the track menu
- Notice that playlists/albums loaded from Subsonic are 'pinned' to Subsonic (Subsonic play icon on track play button). You can unpin or pin to a different source if you wish
- To build a playlist from tracks from other playlists, send each chosen track to the clipboard from the track menu.
- To see the clipboard, select the playlist menu at the top - Clipboard
- To save a playlist (including the clipboard) use the playlist menu at the top - Save
- To reorder tracks within a playlist just touch and hold the left side of the image and drag track up or down
- For Soundcloud and YouTube you are not stuck with the first match. Each source has a player where you can step through versions. If playing locally (not Chromecasting) then the YouTube player always pops up. The SoundCloud player can be accessed from the Track menu. The last version chosen is remembered and saved (if the playlist is saved)

don't understand why it should be necessary to run more than one server

I think the request was from someone who also had access to a friend's Subsonic server and wanted to have access to both from the App. We can do this, but just want some input from the community first

[FlyingPersian]

Forgot to check 'Notify' so missed these :/ thanks for the feedback:

Offline caching definitely a must
- please point us to an app that does this well - straightforward but happy to be directed

Dsub does this quite well. Taking a playlist as an example, you simply go into the playlist, hit the three dots and press "permanent cache". It then downloads the songs to an either pre-set or self-chosen location. The green pins indicate that it has been cached permanently, blue pins would mean that it is only cached temporarily, although I don't know for how long since I never use that. Here the link to their github:

https://github.com/daneren2005/Subsonic

Edit: Something else that would be nice is background playing for YouTube videos. Now sure how much this depends on the YouTube app, but I'd like to play a video and still mess around in the app, outside the app, and turn off my display.

Also some customization on the left bar would be nice. Adding/Removing stuff

And finally, browsing the Subsonic DB. I installed the app for now to test it. Once it has progressed more I'll leave a review on the play store

Edit2: Found a little bug. When playing something from my subsonic list, switching over to chromecast isn't working. It does connect with the chromecast, but doesn't switch playing on the chromecast and instead continues playing on the phone. Pausing isn't working either, so I have to force close the app. Connecting to the CC first, then playing a song works fine.

[milleph]

FlyingPersian, thanks for the feedback. I'll take a close look at Dsub.

Aware of the switch over to Chromecast issue and we'll fix that. Not sure you need to exit the app though. Just go to a different track

[janks]

Wow, it sound really good. I am going to check it right now - I will leave my review soon

[milleph]

We're really close to releasing full download/caching functionality.... will post when ready

[milleph]

After wrestling with the Android file system and the Media Store I've finally managed to release Mono v2.81 which is now available on the Play Store. This version has the download/cache capability and individual tracks or whole playlists can be downloaded. The tracks are added to the media store so can be accessed as device files by Mono or other apps. There's also a download manager to delete downloaded files. To cancel downloads expand the download notification and select one of the cancel options.

I tried to let the user choose the download location but that proved impossible with removable sd cards - the files are saved under the Android/media/com.mono directory. Appreciate any feedback you can provide.