#javazoom

The original concept had us reading in the song information from a file, storing it in an ArrayList, and using that information (with some input from the user) to create a playlist based on genre, artist, or mood. 

I wanted to keep a lot of that structure and add more, so my first step was to grab the old code and see what I could run of it. 

Not much apparently. 

After fixing the initial mini-bugs that always come with importing an existing project, I realised there was a huge issue with the Player I used to actually play the file - in short, it did not exist in my library. 

Do you want bugs? This is how you get bugs.

Apparently in my haste to get something working for the Hackathon, I found an older library called javazoom that worked with media files. After some googling, I found the site but as it was last updated in 2010, I figured there had to be other, more recent libraries to explore. 

And I was right. Kind of. 

After much digging, I came across javafx. Truthfully, I’m not sure of its full scope, but it does have a media player and related functions, and a rather nice API. So I started tinkering around with it, eventually figuring out how to play a song. 

Yup. It was Taylor Swift. Because my taste in music rocks. 

At first things were going up. I rearranged the code into a semblance of structure and began poking at the other methods trying to see what else worked. (Including figuring out how to control the sound - after nearly blowing my ears out, twice!) 

Unfortunately that’s where my progress has stalled. With the exception of pause() and stop(), the methods are less than obvious and when I went to run a full song as my last test, I discovered it stops after about 30 seconds. 

At least it’s pretty? 

I’m going to continue working on it, though I am serious considering reverting back to javazoom. I’d rather have well-written code using a slightly out-of-date library than mediocre stuff written with more modern equipment.