Beam: A Native App For Linux, macOS, and Windows (testing please!)

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Thanks for the mention @boopboop, that sounds like a great idea.

@psi , I really appreciate all of your work here, and the desktop app is super sweet! Just let me know when you’re ready to get something out, and I’d be happy to help.

I actually tested the 3.0 version of the app on my Windows computer the other day, and one of the main issues I found was that I don’t think my app updated my total remaining credits in real-time. It would only update them if I reloaded the app. Is this something you’ve heard of before, or is this worth looking more into? It kinda made me worry that I’d accidentally use too many credits at once, so I stopped using the app for the time being, so let me know if you need more info to figure out why this may be the case and ideas for solutions.

Thanks again for all of your hard work!

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Thanks for the report! Created a ticket for this

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Extremely smooth install on Xubuntu 22.04.

Downloaded beam_0.4.0_amd64.deb. When opening the file, I was invited to open it using Xubuntu’s Software Center.

Beam app with icon appeared in my apps menu:

Opened right up!

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Just had a quick look at it on Linux Mint. Amazing work! Thanks for doing this.

Writing some impressions and comments down as I try things out:

  • After installing using GDebi, the menu shortcut appeared under the “Autre” (Other) category instead of “Son et Vidéo” (Sound and Video…?) as I would’ve expected. I’m setup with French, Canada as system language.
  • Password isn’t hidden when logging in.
  • Dark mode looks a bit funky. Some work will need to be done to give it a more polished look.
  • The Favorite button on the bottom player bar and in the Favorites panel of the Library seem “unlinked” - you can invert the status of one or the other by clicking one, then the other. It will show as favorited in one spot, and not in the other.
  • The Looping/Shuffle buttons on the bottom bar, to the right, slightly overlap each other.
  • New playlist created from the left side of the Library section seem to only appear when you activate another element of the interface (quit the Library then come back, or click on another playlist, Collection, Favorites, etc.).
  • From the bottom bar, I expected clicking on the current track’s artist would take me to the artist page, clicking on the album title would take me to the album’s page, and clicking on the artwork would’ve shown a zoomed view of the artwork.
  • Placement of the elements on the bottom bar should be spaced out more evenly - for example, I expected the seekbar to sit right in the middle of the screen.
  • I have the Soundbox desklet on my desktop to control media players. It grabs Clementine with no problem, it gets the Resonate web player running from Firefox correctly as well, but it doens’t get the Beam media info correctly. The app shows as “Chromium”, the currently playing track as “Beam”, with no artist or album information, no artwork, and only the Play, Pause and Stop functions seem to work.
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Tested on both macos 12.3.1 and Elementary OS. No issues at all.

Just a first tip: Under library view on Artists tab, you could sort artists by ID in descending order.

API URL: https://stream.resonate.coop/api/v2/artists/?limit=50&orderBy=id&order=desc&page=1

This way, you can see newly added artists on Resonate. The next step would be to use the search api so we can also sort by activity timestamp.

I really like the library view, we should update the one on stream.resonate.coop so it looks the same.

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Thanks for testing all!

I created tickets for all of the above on GitHub and will start tackling them as part of the next release! Might not get to all of them very quickly (doubled the ticket count in the past three days :sweat_smile: ), but now they’re documented :slight_smile: and won’t be forgotten.

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This one’s on me. I got it halfway implemented before we realized we want to go about it a different way so that it will eventually work for web and inside the stream-app as well down the road.

@psi, maybe we should revert beam!65 so users testing with systems that prefer dark mode aren’t presented with a half-finished dark mode? I think it may be more important to tackle functionality/features first anyway.

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I prefer half-dark than no-dark personally

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Can’t revert on packaged releases :stuck_out_tongue: We can slowly tweak and improve it.

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currently playing

Would anyone else enjoy having @boopboop’s Currently Playing page either added to the main page, or easily available via a link from the front page?

Nearly anytime I open up the player I love to stop by Currently Playing and see what’s going on. It’s four clicks away on Beam – actually took me a minute to figure out where it was since I’m used to it being hyperlinked from the main page.

dark mode

I’m using Graybird-dark, a default GTK theme for Xubuntu. When opening up Beam, it opened in Dark Mode as well – must have looked to my system settings, so that’s working.

Just some feedback: on Xubuntu with Graybird-dark, Dark Mode isn’t usable. Rows alternate between shaded and non-shaded with some text becoming invisible, including that on the player control bar:

Personally, no need to rush on fixes, although I love dark mode. Well done on Beam, @psi – to you and everyone else contributing!

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what do you think of this @Hakanto

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Hey all, just an FYI I’ll be away from the internet for the next two weeks so I’m not ghosting this project, just out and about.

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Hey all!

Pretty excited to share that I put out a 0.5.2 release of beam. Please see the below notes for instructions and catches about this release.

Breaking Change

0.5.x and later releases of beam use the v3 api and the new oauth flow for logging in. This is fairly new and experimental and it could be that there are some issues. Please report any issues here or on GitHub.

If you previously installed beam, you will have to completely uninstall beam from your system, and then re-install it. If that doesn’t work, you can completely clear your cache in beam using the Dev Tools. You use your keyboard to enter ctrl + shift + i. Then on the tabs along the top you’ll click on Application. There, find the Local Storage tab, see the file:// entry, and right click on it. Then click “Clear”. If that still doesn’t work, please reach out!

Finally, you’ll note that transitioning between songs takes a couple of seconds, and songs might not start playing right away. This is because of requiring authentication to be able to fetch a song’s file on the v3 api. We’re still figuring out a way around this.

Additional changes

  • We can now develop on windows machines!
  • Buying all songs on an album with one click.
  • Better integration with system audio player controllers on linux.
  • Some minor improvements to dark mode.
  • Control featured albums from the repository, so we don’t need to wait on someone upgrading their player.
  • Various bug fixes.

This release features contributions from @bwall @boopboop, @acharbonnet (don’t know their username on here) and @piper, massive thanks to them for contributing.

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Thank you for continuing to plug away on this!!!

Who is most active on the mobile project as of now? Want to know how I can better help promote efforts over this way in particular.

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For mobile it’s primarily @piper, though I’ve gotten it running on my local and we’ve been talking about the way forward with it.

Though I would say that the real need is backend devs atm.

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Hey @zetto.plus,

I’m more on the mobile app - the next main steps I hope to see with it would be to have a local build of the beam player (the one this thread refers to) as part of the mobile app package, instead of pulling from stream.resonate.coop as the source for its build. Here’s the issue created for the task:

We’ll need to complete this task on beam before we can switch the stream-app over to the beam local build.

Switching to a local build of the beam repository will make it more like a real app instead of the web player in an “app-like wrapper” - it will have local source files like other apps instead of hitting up the website. I’m hopeful that it could improve load times and general UX a good deal.

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@CPacaud and @Hakanto, I know you asked about fixing dark mode. Last night I introduced a fix that, pending review, will make dark mode users enjoy a more “complete” experience - the header icon and the music player will both now have full dark mode coloration like the rest of the UI does:

We’ll probably work to improve the header and footer visuals and work to better differentiate them from the main scrollable section of the UI, but this is a simple first start in the right direction.

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Hey all, just bumping to say that v0.5.3 of Beam has been released.

It includes a new feature by @boopboop and several fixes by @piper, as well as some other fixes!

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I have an old version of beam installed on xubuntu. I don’t know how to replace the old version with the new version. Old version won’t load anymore. Would appreciate some pointers (no rush).

sudo apt-get -- purge remove beam

sudo apt install ./beam_0.5.3_amd64.deb

Worked for me.

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