Harmonoid

Things I Want To Say

A section on this page, explaining project's known issues/limitations is important.

• Harmonoid's beautiful, fluid & engaging user-interface is made possible with Flutter.

• I use Harmonoid daily for listening to music & I'm also looking forward to the improvements that I can make.

• There is a common codebase for all the platforms that Harmonoid supports. This means & does not mean:

  • Same core logic is used across all the platforms e.g. sorting, ordering, refreshing, indexing of music & management of other settings.
  • Common UI is used across all desktop platforms (only Windows & GNU/Linux presently).
  • Common UI is used across all mobile platforms (only Android presently).
  • The UI between desktop & mobile is not shared (for the most part). This is mainly because adaptiveness is important. Certain key things like touch friendliness, keyboard-mouse preference, context menus, default screen orientation etc. make a big difference.
  • The functionalities which have something to do with the hardware or the host operating system vary across platforms e.g. audio playback, metadata reading, system notifications, MPRIS, System Media Transport Controls etc.

• Harmonoid adapts greatly with platform & it's a project where I have written a lot of code, around ~70K lines. Flutter is just used for the UI. Internally, I have written decent amount of C/C++ for Windows, GNU/Linux & Java/Kotlin for Android as well, this is because audio playback, notifications, tag parsing, MPRIS, System Media Transport Controls, window styling etc. are highly dependent on the core operating system. To leverage the actual functionality, I have some quality packages:

  • media_kit : A complete video & audio library for Flutter & Dart.
  • media_library : A powerful media library indexer. Indexes & updates media from multiple selected directories into artists, albums, tracks & genres based on metadata tags. Complete with sorting, deletion, ordering & playlists support.
  • mpris_service : A Dart library to integrate Media Player Remote Interfacing Specification (MPRIS). Gives Harmonoid native OS media controls on GNU/Linux.
  • smtc-win32 : System Media Transport Controls for Dart & Flutter. Gives Harmonoid native OS media controls on Windows.

• A lot of time has went into making this project possible due to early-adoption of Flutter & nearly everything has been written from ground-up (from low-level C/C++ modules to UI & business-logic in Flutter/Dart). I made most of the modules which are used in Harmonoid to leverage any kind of native platform specific functionality.

• Presently, GNU/Linux version seems to consume far more memory than Windows version, which grows rapidly when the app is indexing music folders (same doesn't happen on Windows). And, I have spent over a week trying to find any instance of memory leak. I want to make sure both app versions work equally well. Flutter has recently received a lot of quality pull-requests related to performance on macOS & Windows from employees of non-Google companies, because most all well-funded companies which are using Flutter in their products are only targetting macOS & Windows. I'm in no way against it. Adoption of Flutter by large-scale projects & companies which can contribute back to it's improvement is a good thing. Eventually, Harmonoid should be able to catch-up on GNU/Linux. With that being said, it is still not that bad.

• Harmonoid is meant to be modern & these animations or pixel-by-pixel painted elements will definitely have some expense on your CPU & GPU. It's not going to consume as less memory as imgui, WxWidgets or vanilla Qt, but definitely NOT even close to what electron.js consumes (which most cross-platform apps tend to use). With that being said, performance is going to be improved overtime. Flutter is really new to desktop & a lot of performance improvements/patches are being made with time.

• In general, my experience with open-source hasn't been very good.

  • I mainly maintain packages/libraries which other projects or people use. I have written a lot of code in those libraries/packages on my GitHub profile, provided free support & bug-fixes aswell to thousands of people. Many of the libraries/packages which I made, are now downloaded for thousands/millions of times. It is correct that open-source should be seen as a way to "give back" & I also learnt a lot about programming while doing this.
  • But, I cannot afford this anymore now. Nothing has been rewarding. I could've spent this literal years of time working on some client projects & saved a lot of money.
  • This is the only "end-user" application that I work on. I have spent literal days working on it, perfecting it to how I want it & matching my requirements (still doing it). But, it just breaks my heart to see some people just taking my code & pushing it to their repositories after deleting the commit-history. Presenting this as their work. Some people are also distributing my software without any permission, I have no control over the updates etc. on their pages (really builds a false reputation about the project). Others just steal my hard-work & use it in their own projects & I can't bear it now.
  • Now that, the application has been RE-WRITTEN completely with my actual vision of design & usage (not some random dudes posting their requests or complaining about design). People have different taste, I like Material Design a lot. Harmonoid uses some crucial native modules a.k.a. "plugins" which I made. These are private to me & the supporters of the project. I have no fear in sharing the source code of these native modules with the supporters, because I'm not doing anything sketchy inside the codebase at all. Let the people who appreciate the hard-work have it.
  • As a result, Harmonoid is now distributed under a EULA. By this, I have a better ownership over the work that I've done & I can be sure about the project updates/patches.
  • Again, this is my current decision for this project. I may change my mind in the future.
  • Regardless, users are free to use Harmonoid the way they like & will never be affected.