Why can’t music be a social experience? This is the question I asked myself before I created this app, but now I don’t ask myself that anymore because I made it one! Back in my day we all used to gather around the campfire and listen to our tunes on the old radio… together! (I’m joking, I’m a Gen X).
You get the point. Now, I listen to my Taylor Swift alone with my headphones on, not getting to experience the great music with anybody else. No longer! MusicShare is an iOS app that fills in what’s missing in this age of ‘solo-listening’ (I just came up with that)!
MusicShare is an easy way to quickly see what your friends and family are currently listening! The app provides a streamlined interface that shows what you are listening too as well as a list of your friends currently playing, updates in the background as music changes, with a built in user profile system that establishes an account on a remote server including user-selectable profile pictures.
In addition to these features, MusicShare also allows you to interact with your friends and what they are currently listening too. Simply tapping on your friends name reveals a menu that lets you either “Play Song” which plays the song for yourself, or “Listen Along” which opens a listening session between you and your friend, allowing you to follow allow with what they’re listening to so you can rock out together! The listen along with keep you in sync with your friends playback, even if they scrub, seek, skip, or switch to a whole new thing altogether! When this session is opened, MusicShare finds a new home in your Dynamic Island (on supported devices) to indicate that it is maintaining its connection with your friend. In a future version this ability will be expanded on, allow for bidirectional control after permission is requested and your friend accepts, as well as controls to request/accept/deny that permission directly from the Dynamic Island. Take that, ‘solo-listeners’!
The app is written in Swift and utilizes SwiftUI for the design, graphics, animations, etc, MediaPlayer for playback capture, MusicKit for lookup of media metadata like album art, and PhotosUI for photo selection complete with permission-less upload. The backend server is written in Python and MySQL, storing the user accounts as well as currently playing information in the database, accessible through SSL requests.
I had a lot of fun creating this app and can’t wait to update it even more to include many more features!
Stay tuned for updates!
MusicShare: Say Goodbye to Solo-Listening™
