Overview
Explore how to create a full-featured MP3 player desktop app using Ionic, Angular, and Electron. Learn to utilize the Web Audio API for audio playback control, implement track shuffling, looping, reverse playback, and design an interactive user interface with draggable playhead and volume controls to enhance user experience.
We'll cover the following...
What will we develop in this case study?
In our final case study, we’ll create an Electron desktop application, an MP3 player, which incorporates the following features and functionality:
- Implements various aspects of the Web Audio API
- Loading and playing MP3 tracks
- Allow the user to shuffle the order in which tracks are displayed and played
- Tracks can be played on a repeatable loop
- Draggable playhead allows the user to “jump” to any position in a track currently being played
- Volume output and stereo balance sliders
- Previous and next track loading
- Allow tracks to be played in reverse
- Mute and un-mute the playback volume
As with prior case studies, we’ll use various Ionic/Angular features and draw from the Free Music Archive to access open-source MP3 tracks that we can freely use within the application.
The application
By the end of this case study, we should end up with a fully functional application that looks like the following:
Application screens
When selecting a track from the <ion-list> component, we want to signal to the user that the track is loading so that there are no awkward visual delays or uncertainties about what is taking place while the Web Audio API is parsing the selected track:
During playback, we want to display the current track position time in the form of a timer as well as a progress bar with a draggable playback head:
We also want to provide a variety of controls for the user to manage playback of music within the application:
- Volume and stereo balance slider
- Mute volume checkbox toggle
- Previous and Next track buttons
- Playlist shuffle checkbox toggle
- Loop all checkbox toggle
- Reverse playback toggle
We’ll also allow the playback head to be draggable so the user can move to any position in the currently playing track the playback time and progress bar will adjust to the new time calculated by the position of the released playback head.
This is a fairly standard UI and expected behavior for audio playback and should be familiar to most users if they have used iTunes or a similar program, although we’ll be delivering this using Ionic, Angular, and Electron!