Back in spring I introduced the MusicBox mobile app: the remote control and the content manager I needed for my own children's box.
The iOS app is now in open beta for everyone, and the Android version is looking for testers so it can open in turn.
You can try it without owning a MusicBox
Until this summer the app needed a paired box before it would show you anything, so the only way to see what it looked like was to own one. It now opens up to anyone who wants a look, thanks to a demo mode you turn on from the app's settings.
You will find it under Settings, in the Developer section, on the Demo mode line. The app then fills up with a sample library and you can wander anywhere: the playlists, a content page, the player, the settings. Nothing is wired to real hardware, but everything is there. Just below it, a button resets the demo data if you have turned everything upside down.
Here is what you get, screen by screen: pairing a MusicBox, filling its library, putting a playlist together, starting playback, linking a card, sending your files.
Trouver sa MusicBox
L'app cherche les box autour d'elle et les liste avec leur puissance de signal.
La bibliothèque
Toutes les playlists sur un écran, avec leur nombre de pistes et la carte associée.
Créer une playlist
Un nom suffit pour la créer. Le reste se remplit ensuite.
La télécommande
Lecture, piste suivante, position et volume de la box, depuis le canapé.
Associer une carte
La box attend une carte, tu la poses dessus, elle est liée à la playlist.
Envoyer tes fichiers
Le transfert part du téléphone vers la box, suivi en direct.
What I am looking for
Feedback, and above all the unpleasant kind. That is the whole point of a beta.
A screen that makes no sense, a badly chosen word, an action you hunt for three minutes, a moment where the app felt slow or stupid: that is exactly what I want to read. Compliments are nice, friction is what moves things forward.
Two things interest me in particular:
- The first minute. What you understand, or fail to understand, between opening the app and the first useful screen. That is where people are lost, and it is the hardest thing to judge when you wrote every screen yourself.
- The vocabulary. I come from software, and I spent half the summer pulling words out of the app that have no business in a family object. There are surely some left. If a sentence makes you raise an eyebrow, tell me.
Android: I am looking for testers
The Android version exists, it works, and today it runs as a closed test. If it is not public yet, that is not because it is unfinished: it is because I am short of testers.
Google requires a group of people to install the app and genuinely use it for several days before it will allow an open release. Until that group exists, the app stays restricted to a list of addresses I add one at a time. That is the only thing missing, and it is exactly where you can help.
How to take part. Write to me at contact@theopenmusicbox.com with the Google address tied to your Android phone, the one your Play Store uses. I add you to the list, you get the install link, and the app updates itself from then on like any other. There is nothing to fiddle with.
What I ask in return is simple: install it, actually use it for a few days, and tell me what gets in your way. The more of us who do that, the sooner the Android beta opens to everyone.
If you are on iPhone, there is nobody to ask: the beta is open, install it, wander around inside, and tell me what you think.
And to talk about it, there is a Discord. That is where I answer fastest, where I show what is coming before it is written anywhere else, and where a bug one person spots saves someone else a wasted evening. Come say hello.
And if you want to go further
The app drives a MusicBox, and there is already one you can build today: the Prototype V4, around the development board designed by HermitX. It gathers the essentials on a single circuit, the NFC reader and its antenna, the amplifier and its speaker, the LEDs and the memory card reader, around the ESP32-S3 module the firmware expects. You assemble the board, you flash the firmware from your browser, and the app you have just installed has a real box in front of it.
It is a prototyping board, made for makers: it carries no regulatory certification.