Echo Box - Connect. Discover. Play

[JohnRSim]

Hello MediaGrid Team! Thank you for rolling out this plugin—I’m excited to share what I’ve been working on.

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🎵 Introducing Echobox

I’ve built a free Android music player called Echobox, initially just for fun and to learn the platform—but with plans to publish it on Google Play Store as a no-cost, ad-free app for everyone.

Why Echobox?

• Most Android music apps are bloated with ads or force you into streaming services.
• Many don’t let you load your own archive, or feel like they haven’t been updated since the late ’90s.
• I wanted something clean, fast, and completely under your control.

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🚀 Core Features

• Multilingual & Themeable: Switch languages and colour schemes on the fly.
• Custom Folder Scanning: Pick exactly which folders to index—metadata and album art are auto-extracted for deep search.
• Advanced Library Management:
  • Filter by artist, album, track or any tag.
  • View your most-played tracks or discover songs you’ve never played.
• Playlists & Favourites: Create custom playlists, mark favourites, and build your perfect queue.
• Download Access Made Easy: Android’s recent storage changes make “Downloads” tricky to reach—Echobox adds a one-tap shortcut to import from there into your scanned folders.

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🖼 Concept Art

Everything below is early UI mock-ups. The core player, metadata extraction, UPnP streaming, and library features are already working under the hood and I'm using it today:

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🔮 What’s Next

1. AI-Powered Smart Playlists

I’m planning to integrate a small LLM (with the option to connect your own cloud model) to:

• Auto-categorise your library
• Generate dynamic playlists based on mood, genre, or custom prompts

2. Spotify & HD Store Integration

• Pull in Spotify data to surface new releases & artist info.
• Add “Open in Spotify” streaming shortcuts.
• Link to high-res download stores (e.g. HDTracks) for in-app purchasing & offline import.

3. Extended Format Support

• Leverage Android’s Media3 + FFmpeg to play everything from DSD to AIFF etc.
• Experiment with Superpowered.js for advanced audio effects and visualizers.

4. Desktop App

• Duplicated App/Experience capabilities as mobile
• Sync and easily move music from your laptop to your phone and back with drag and drop.
• Power AI features, sound cleanup etc.

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I’d love your feedback on the plugin integration points, UI/UX flow, or any other ideas you have. Thanks again for building such a terrific foundation—looking forward to seeing where we can take this! (If you'd like to see an early video of it in action I'd be happy to ping one into here :) )

[wsamoht]

Very cool! So all audio is from the user and stored locally on their device it sounds like?

What is your long-term plan use of this plugin? Are you looking for features to be added or are you going to fork it as a starting point and add specific items you need?

[JohnRSim]

Yup, simple fun local offline music player.

I'll fork and then create pull request to try to keep in sync and share back to the community.

Playlists and the ffmpeg extension are the two at the top of my list that I'd like to get in here & Background audio but I think you are working on that one.

[wsamoht]

When I implement playlists, it will be a restructuring of the plugin's API.

What do you mean for background audio? We currently support multiple audio tracks playing at once (e.g. something spoken with background music).

[JohnRSim]

Sorry when I said background I meant disable app from going to sleep but I think it is best to let it sleep and use playlist

[JohnRSim]

An initial android pre-alpha is ready.. If anyone would like to try it and provide feedback.

ATM it's just a basic music player, choose a skin, import your music from a folder and select a playlist album, artist track etc.

• stripped out AI integration for now - working on support so you can download and plugin you own model ie (Qwen 3 4b works well on my S24 but lower models 1.7b is probably better choice), or connect to a third party cloud LLM or pay for credits and use my model.

• UPnP also stripped out , I need to enhance and improve before release.