Hey everybody,
I wanted to put together a visual guide to the app in its current version and list the current and upcoming features. I encourage anyone to email me with feedback on bugs and feature requests.
With Kompoz Android I’m hoping to provide these main features to a Kompoz member:
- Monitor your projects and audition tracks when you’re away from the computer
- Provide a great way to “stumble upon” projects and artists and save or share your discoveries
- Playlist finished songs and audio tracks
- Listen to Kompoz radio stations
Here we go.
The new app icon:
After logging in, you get the main options:
Starting from the top left, we have access to the Kompoz radio stations. If you’ve created stations on the site, you’ll find them here. Selecting a station from the list will start a continuous playback of the songs on that station. Here, I’ve selected to play songs from my “Funk” station:
Playback of a song can be be restarted, paused or skipped. To the right of the transport is an icon that represents whether the audio is being streamed from the Internet (blue globe) or is playing from a downloaded file (green arrow). More on this in a moment.
Each menu has a series of actions in the options menu. Press the Android options button (the three parallel lines) to expose the options. For instance, in the audio playback menu these options are available:
Kompoz takes you to www.Kompoz.com.
Quit closes the player and background audio.
Share prepares a link to the song you’re listening to and lets you choose how to share that song:
Add track adds the track you’re listening to to a playlist you’ve created or allows you to create a playlist on the fly:
The artist tab shows a list of members who’ve contributed to the song. Clicking any entry in the list opens that member’s profile, which lists information about them including a list of projects they’ve started or contributed to. This allows a user to navigate the “collaborative web” of Kompoz’s song structure, browsing projects by interconnected member relationships while providing social media and playlist creation to save and organize for later listening or collaborating.
In this instance, let’s see what Sven’s been up to:
Selecting a member anywhere in Kompoz Android opens a tabbed menu containing profile info. Under the project’s tab is a list of the projects that Sven has started or contributed to, ordered by date. Clicking on any of the projects displays the project’s tracks.
Each file for the project is listed in some detail. Mix tracks display a turn-table icon.
To listen to an mp3 track, just touch the track entry and the audio playback menu will start. Currently, mp3 is the only streaming format available. Listening to another file type requires that the track first be downloaded. Long click on a track to view all of its options:
From here, a track can be added directly to a playlist or downloaded. Also, selecting the author of this track will take you directly to their tabbed profile menu.
Selecting to download a track will make it available immediately whenever it’s selected from a project or playlist. Also, you can choose to download it in the background:
Once downloaded, a green arrow shows up in the track detail to indicate that the file is available offline.
Once downloaded, clicking the track will play the file. Notice that the audio player now shows that it’s playing the downloaded version of the file with the arrow indicator in the lower right corner. The player always checks for a downloaded file before requesting audio from the net, so no matter where the playback is initiated — be it a project track list or playlist — if the song was downloaded, the local file gets played.
In this instance, playback will continue through all of the project tracks as long as they are either downloaded or are mp3 files.
No matter where you are in the app, if an audio track is playing you can get info on the track or return to the audio player through the standard options menu:
That’s all for now. There are a number of updates coming to polish off the current feature set. Stay tuned and let me know if you have suggestions.
Thanks!