SubFire 5 early preview

[acroyear]

https://subfiresuite.com/demo5/#/home

Supports:

• Loading from play queue
• Remembering last playing
• Inherits login from a prior SubFire 2 or SubFire 3 instance on the same client machine
• PWA installation on desktop (chromium browsers) or android - I have not tested IOS yet, but I know Safari has bugs with the UI library I am using, so I may never support it.
• MediaSession API
• Loading from playlists (including shuffle)
• Loading from SubFire "Radio" stations
• Random songs (in specific folder or whole system)
• Save Play Queue
• Receiving remote routing from a SubFire 2 or 3 player. (my current workaround for not having 'browsing' up yet)

Currently the only authentication is to have been on the same host as a SubFire 2 or 3 instance is on, or the 7-digit authentication relay (use https://subfiresuite.com/link/#/ if you don't have a SubFire 2 or 3 instance to link from).

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Still to do for 100% parity

• Albums (incl id3 and the various queries
• Music Directory browsing (filesystem)
• Artist-Album browsing (ID3 tags)
• Bookmarks
• Login by entering credentials directly
• chromecast
• See what firetablet's cast to fire tv does
• A number of minor changes for the TV beta

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Technical History:

After enough technical and annoying issues with library upgrades and the failure to get a monorepo working in what was to be SubFire 4...I gave up. SubFire 4 won't exist. The constant arguing of incompatibilities between react18, storybook, mui, and the needs of the monorepo approach I was taking, just got too frustrating. Also, now that I am regularly coding (p)react for work, i kinda tired of dealing with that form of components and jsx at home.

So totally new approach. The new implementation is a core library (able to work in node.js server-side as well as in browsers), a 'browser' library that supports the key things around queue management, playing through the audio tag, and eventually chromecast support and then the app itself (I haven't yet split components from the app, as the build tool I have for the app doesn't support rollup/webpack). The UI design is beercss for Material You (Material 3) look and feel, and an interesting new-ish web-components w/ jsx framework called mishijs. Wave.js for the visisualizations.

I've done some early tests with the Fire TV and it looks like things will be ok, though I'll be making a few layout changes for TV display over time. The visualizers are a little sluggish on older Fire Tablets. BTW there's bugs in the visualizers and the remote receiver stuff that I'm still working on.

[acroyear]

See what firetablet's cast to fire tv does

Meh, useless. It just opens the page from the silk browser on the tablet onto the silk browser on the fire tv, at a huge and unmanageable zoom level. No credentials are shared, no 'casting' provided.

[acroyear]

ok, album-artist browsing is working reasonably well. need to go test it against a navidrome server soon.

[acroyear]

lots of new stuff - visualizers (click the album art in the player - may need to pause and play the music to get it to work), improved album-artist browsing, established indexes/music-directory browsing (still a few things to work out there), and staging a bit of future work for alternate player modes.

[acroyear]

A LOT of work has gone in during the downtimes of this forum.

Full folder/directory browsing, Albums view, Search, Remote control reciever, light mode as well as dark (w/ system setting support but that doesn't seem to work on Android where it keeps being told 'dark' mode - I think that's a webview bug), and multiple player modes so you can choose some layouts for portrait vs landscape mode. And lots of little layout improvements here and there.

The landscape mode offers 2 settings - TV and Dash - Dash is for "auto" styles on mobile phones where the height is pretty limited on a 2.21:1 widescreen setup. TV is for more 16:9 aspect ratio.

The portrait mode offers Standard and Map. Map is a special case for my driving and biking, where there's a space on the screen to slide in the "picture in picture" of Google Maps.

Two features you can see but aren't working - "Party mode" (requires a server I haven't released yet), and Bookmarks. Authenticate another client is also not working. It can receive an auth approval from Subfire 2 and 3 but it can't approve one.

[acroyear]

not that anybody seems to be paying attention to the forums since they came back (other than spammers) but here we are.

Fixes:

• Bookmarks now fully working, load and save.
• Can now use this to authenticate another client.
• A little polish here and there, like no gaps between segment buttons on the Artist->Albums page

New Features:

• Build number on the Nav Drawer
• Attempts to detecte network disconnects (sometimes false alarms, still trying to debug that)
• WakeLock - it will attempt to keep the screensaver and lock from kicking in (note: no way to turn this off yet so kill the player if you find it is keeping the screen on when it is paused. still debugging and then i'll add a way to enable/disable in settings as well as an absolute cutoff time where it'll lock anyways (like, say, 1 hour)

My next (besides debugging the above new features) is to try to get full arrow-key navigation working and other needed things for the TV version.

[acroyear]

Latest updates:

• Bookmarks weren't saving with the play queue rule correctly and so showing up as "not a subfire bookmark"
• Convenience (for myself) if a bookmark is from DSub, I mark it as such.
• PWA now will prompt that there's an update available and allow you to click one button to refresh without having to go through OS or Browser config screens to clear the cache.
• Some fixes on wake-lock and the paused state. (still need to set a general time limit or way to turn that off so secure machines like work laptops will still lock the screen).