Sonivm audio player release version 1.0 (UPD: 1.6)

I know, I know – Java desktop software is dead and buried, and has been for a while. But just can’t stop doing it.

Behold – Sonivm audio player version 1.0

UPD: latest version is 1.6 already – get latest release here

I really needed a better audio player software for my desktop Mac (well, laptop MacBook Pro – but still). The iTunes simply doesn’t provide the features that I need – FLAC support, CUE sheets support, pain-free LastFM support etc. The now opensourced alternative Cog ( cog.losno.co, former cogx.org ) has been the player of choice for me for quite a while (years and years for sure, perhaps even a decade), but still lacked some extra features that I wanted to have (notably proper music library functionality). And LastFM support wasn’t painless again.

A little detour in the LastFM issue – iTunes and Cog both require auxiliary software to be able to submit stuff to LastFM. For Cog it can be a custom software (something I’ve actually built) or an official client. For iTunes it only has to be the official one. The official client does some regular re-scans of WiFi networks which slows down WiFi periodically, and is generally annoying. The custom software approach works, but still requires me to start 2 programs when I just want to listen to music (and if you forget to run the LastFM one – nothing gets scrobbled). So I wanted everything to be built-in into the player itself.

I know nobody cares about LastFM anymore, though I don’t know why. Must be that Spotify took over with its shared playlists and better automatic suggestions based on previous listens. But Spotify is supposedly bad since it pays rather little money to the musicians (depending on whom you ask though), may be a bit weak on audio quality side (again, depending on whom you ask, but still), and is primarily intended for online streaming (it has offline cache, but still). Also I am an oldschool guy and I like to own a collection of musical albums that I care about – not just pay subscription fee to stream stuff that I won’t have any access to once I stop paying the fee.

I own a collection of CDs that I’ve made copies of onto my laptop storage drive in FLAC single-file with CUE sheet, and I want to be able to play that.

Most of the people probably don’t care for any of this, I know. But I do!

Also I definitely should’ve have added features to Cog, yes – but my time is limited and I just don’t have enough to learn Objective-C and/or Swift now. So I did it all in Java.

Lo and behold!

Sonivm v1.0

Sonivm v1.6

Sonivm is based on two main open-source Java libraries – FFSampledSP (which also bundles ffmpeg with it) and JAudioTagger – as well as few others (like Apache commons-io etc).

The features that it already has:

• Support of file formats handled by FFAudioService (bundled with native ffmpeg for macOS and Windows)
• Tag reading support
• CUE files support
• Gapeless playback for single file tracks from CUE sheet (no gapless for separate files yet)
• LastFM scrobbling support
• Drag&drop files into play-queue, drag&drop tracks within play-queue
• Smart repeat
• Smart shuffle (with a smarter party shuffle coming later)
• Search in play queue

The features that I still have to add (and hope I’ll be able to do so):

• Music library management
• Gapeless playback for individual files
• Advanced “party-shuffle” modes, like year-range based shuffle, rating based shuffle etc. The rating based one would require functionality to rate tracks of course
• (If I can pull if off) Support of WinAmp 2 skins AKA “classic skins”
• Guess the music game (where a random track from music library is played, and one has to guess from a number of options which artist/album/track it is)
• Other minor improvements (like saving/restoring UI location/size between restarts)

So there it is. Download it, try it, post issues on Github if you encounter any.

Hopefully you’ll like it.