Alright, so I’ve been meaning to share this for a while. It’s about this little project I got myself into, something I ended up calling ‘susan player’. No big story behind the name, it just kind of popped into my head and stuck, you know?
It all kicked off because, honestly, I was getting a bit tired of the music players I was using. Some of them were just packed with so much stuff, features I never even looked at. Then others were too basic, or they’d miss that one tiny thing that would just annoy me. I really just wanted something that would play my music, plain and simple, and let me get to my tunes without a bunch of clicks.
Figuring Out What I Actually Wanted
So, one weekend, I just thought, “Heck, why not try and build my own?” Sounded easy enough at the time, right? My main aim was to keep it super straightforward. I didn’t need it to look fancy or connect to a dozen online services. Just play audio files, and do it well.
I jotted down the absolute must-haves:
- The obvious controls: Play, pause, and stop. Can’t do without those.
- Skipping tracks: Next and previous song buttons were a must.
- Seeing what’s playing: A little display for the track name, maybe a simple progress bar.
- Volume: Got to be able to turn it up or down.
- Getting music into it: This was a big one for me. I really wanted to just point it at a folder full of music and have it play.
That was pretty much my starting list. I didn’t want to get sidetracked by complicated interfaces or anything too clever at the beginning.
Getting My Hands Dirty – The Actual Building Part
So, I opened up my usual coding tools. The first big hurdle was just making sound come out. I played around with a few different audio libraries. Some looked okay, others had instructions that were just confusing. After a bit of messing about, I found one that seemed to do what I needed for basic stuff like MP3s. That was a good start.
Next up was wiring up those playback buttons. Play was fairly easy. Pause, well, that took a bit more effort to get it to pause and resume without any weird glitches. Then, to skip tracks, I realized I needed some kind of playlist, even if it was just a simple list of songs from whatever folder I’d opened.
I spent a fair bit of time on the “open folder” feature. That was really important to me. So, I worked on getting a basic file browser working and then figuring out how to scan that folder for music files. Had to add a bit of logic to ignore stuff that wasn’t audio.
The look of it? I kept it dead simple. Just some buttons and a spot for the track title. I’m no artist, and I was aiming for something that worked, not something that would win design awards. Making sure everything updated correctly – like the song title changing, or the play button turning into a pause button – that took some careful thought.
The Ups and Downs – Little Problems and Wins
It wasn’t all smooth sailing, of course. Plenty of times I’d hit a snag and scratch my head for ages trying to fix it. Like, there was this one bug where the player would just randomly stop after a few songs. Drove me crazy for a bit until I figured out what was going on with how it was handling files.
And then, song information – artist, album, that sort of thing. That was a whole other world. Reading all those tags from the music files. I decided to just get the basic song title working first and maybe worry about the other stuff later. Stick to the plan, keep it simple.
One of the best moments was when I finally got it to play through a whole folder of songs, one after the other, without crashing. That felt pretty good. You know, those small wins keep you going.
So, What’s ‘susan player’ Like Now?
After quite a few evenings and weekends spent coding and testing, ‘susan player’ is actually something I use pretty much every day. It’s definitely not going to replace those big commercial players for most people. It doesn’t have all the bells and whistles. No fancy equalizers, no online streaming, none of that.
But, you know what? It does exactly what I wanted it to do. It plays my music files from my folders, it’s light, and it doesn’t get in my face. I can just pick a folder, hit play, and it just works. The interface is basic, yeah, but it’s my basic interface.
It was a fun little side project, and I learned a fair bit along the way. Just taking an idea and slowly building it up into something real. Even if it’s just a simple little music player that only I really use, there’s something cool about that. Just thought I’d share how it went. Sometimes, building your own tools is the way to go.
