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Cover art improvements

Recently version 2.17 of libmpdclient was released which adds support for binary responses, like for the ‘albumart’ command that was added to mpd a while ago. Using this new library version Rigelian can now read local cover art without requiring a http server on the player.

There are still two major limitations with this approach:

  • It only works with mpd version 0.20.10 and up. Many players are still on older versions.
  • It requires that the artwork file is named cover.jpg or cover.png.

Support for this will be in the next Rigelian version, along with some other improvements in the artwork department.

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Rigelian on Mac

With macOS Catalina Apple has released catalyst, which makes it possible to port an iPad app to a Mac app with limited effort. A few months ago I had a first look at this, but ran into too many problems. Yesterday I tried again with the latest versions of all frameworks, and was able to get a version running on my Macbook in less than 4 hours.

The main issue I ran into is how to make existing subscriptions work on Mac as well.

Rigelian running fullscreen on my Macbook

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Start using SF Symbols

In iOS 13 Apple introduced a set of around 1.500 symbols (icon images) which are easy to use in an app. This makes live, at least on iOS 13, easier so I started migrating to these symbols where possible. To keep it backwards compatible, I’m extending UIImage for every image that I migrate:

 extension UIImage {
     static var play: UIImage {
         if #available(iOS 13.0, *) {
             return UIImage(systemName: "play.fill")!
         } else {
             return UIImage(named: "Play-Small")!
         }
     }
 }

Rigelian users on iOS 13 will notice new, better looking, images appearing over time.

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v1.7 almost ready

All changes needed for v1.7 are ready. What is remaining is final testing, and then it will be released. The today widget is now also supporting dark mode, and a problem where it sometimes wouldn’t load is also fixed.

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XCode 11 & iOS 13

The migration to XCode 11 in combination with iOS 13 leads to various layout problems, the current priority is to get those fixed. Once all screens look good again, the next step is to automatically follow the system-wide dark mode setting.

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Kodi playlists

The implementation of browsing of playlists and adding them to the playqueue is done. Unfortunately the kodi api for this is limited and behaves weird in certain scenarios, as a result playlist editing (adding, (re)moving songs and saving a playlist) through Rigelian will not be possible.

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Kodi playqueue

Implementation of play queue functions for Kodi is finished. The following parts are in place now:

  • Player discovery
  • Player control (play, pause, skip, back, volume, seek)
  • Artist browsing
  • Album browsing
  • Genre browsing
  • Folder browsing
  • Search
  • Cover Art