From streaming to my own server
Why my third Sailfish OS app is a music player for my own server, and the decisions that shaped it.
After a password manager and an authenticator, my third app for Sailfish OS is SailTune, a music player for the music on the phone and on your own Jellyfin server.
Why a music player
On Android, I listened to music through a streaming subscription. With the Jolla Phone, I wanted to get away from it: my music collection, on my own server, for the same reason I self-host a few other services at home.
What I was missing was a player for that server in the Jolla Store, made for music and for listening without a network. There are clients for self-hosted servers on OpenRepos, and that freedom of choice is a good thing. But as with SailVault, I believe there should be good native apps in the Jolla Store, because that is where most people will look first.
The decisions
Offline first. SailTune never opens on a login page, not even on the first start. It opens on the music on the phone, like any music player, and a server is something you add. When the server is out of reach, the app shows what is downloaded and plays it, with no network and no login.
Downloads you can rely on. Albums and playlists download in their original quality. A download that is cut off, because I left the WLAN or closed the app, continues from the byte where it stopped, and a file is checked against the size the server announced before it counts as downloaded. Since today, downloads can also go to the memory card.
Jellyfin first, more servers later. To ship sooner, the first version talks to Jellyfin only. Everything that depends on the server sits behind one line in the code, so that servers speaking OpenSubsonic, such as Navidrome, can follow without reshaping the app.
No stored password. The password is used once to log in and never stored. The app keeps only the server's access token, in a file only SailTune can read, and removing a server logs it out.
Music only. No video, photos, books or podcasts. Artists, albums, playlists and the queue are enough for me.
Building it
The one real surprise was playback. Qt's media player reports the end of a track a moment before it has actually stopped, so starting the next track on that report did not work. Waiting for the player to stop fixed it. Since then, SailTune has played my music over Bluetooth in the car, through a whole drive with the screen off, without interruption.
What's next
SailTune 0.5.2 is on its way into the Jolla Store (Harbour) and waits for QA. Until it is there, you can build it yourself as described on the project page. Next on the plan are OpenSubsonic servers.