Playr 2.0: an AS3 Music Management Engine

Playr is a Flash Actionscript 3 class built to take the heavy lifting off your hands when building any kind of music player appliction in Flash, Flex or AIR. Yesterday Ronny released an update on his blog and it all looks very promising! Ronny has put up a dedicated site for Playr where all of the information, code examples, downloads are gathered. Almost a year ago, I started playing with the first version of Playr. I was working on a RIA project for school called ”Interlude”.

The main goal of Interlude was to provide an flex/air based mp3 player which offered you a user friendly music management tool. For the beta version, I was planning to implement  a smart playlist generator,  using the last.fm api and a cool personal mood feature. Via last.fm Interlude looked for similar artists and generated a playlist filled with matches from your own music collection. The mood feature allows users to create their own personal moods. This can go from ”music@work”, ”workout music” to ”sex music” and allows them to tag their mp3 files. Whenever they feel like creating a playlist based on what mood they are in, this feature allows them to quickly generate an optimized playlist.

This all sounds very cool but I never had the chance to finish it. I just did not had the time to work out the first beta version, and as some of you might know, in the beginning of the second semester I started my internship @ Boulevart and from that point things went very fast. Any way, the good news is that my colleague Maarten (flex developer) fell immediately in love when I showcased Interlude at the office. He decided to bring it back to life so we will be announcing the first beta version of Interlude soon. Here are already a few screenshots from the first designs.

There still is a lot of work to do, and I think Maarten will kick my ass if he sees the standard components, but hey its a start no? :) We will be using Ronny’s Playr class in this project as well. If you want to stay tuned on Interlude and if you are interested in beta testing send me an email at thomas.joos[at]boulevart.be