In the past week, I’ve been pretty busy adding the finishing  touches to the features and fixing the last few bugs that popped up. Most of the last-minute changes are a result of using the class in one of my own projects.

It’s then when I realized I’m missing some key features like adding the music directory, and some properties of the PlayrEvents. I also added some ear candy like fadeIn() and fadeOut() methods.

On a more functional note: I’ve abstracted the playlist to an independent class. So now you’re provided with lots and lots of ways to customize and manage your playlists.

The shuffle mode is now smart. In English that means the playlist remembers what songs have played and which ones haven’t.

Finally I’m happy to tell you guys won’t ever have to write an XML playlist file yourself. I’ve got a PHP4 and PHP5 version of PlayrDiscovr which reads a directory and returns the corresponding XML listing the tracks and their properties.
On top of that, I’ve got some help from other people (I still need to contact you guys) who are willing to help me out with building PlayrDiscover in ASP, Ruby and Python.

Even though I’m listing all of the new features, the Playr class is still the easiest way of implementing any kind of sound-feature in any Flash/Flex/AIR application. But the simplicity shouldn’t be a limitation, which it isn’t: you’re still able to build full-feature media-playing applications.

One of the little challenges I still have to tackle is the Tween problem. I’ve implemented fadeIn() and fadeOut() methods. Those methods actually tween the volume property of the Playr instance. The problem with that is when using the Playr class in a Flex project, you get a cool error message telling you it can’t import fl.transitions (which is the class package for the Tween class and the easing package).
I still haven’t figured out how to work around this problem. If any of you have any suggestion on this problem, feel free to tell me about it.

I plan on releasing Playr 2.0 in the coming week (or 2) depending on PlayrDiscovr impementations, final changes, demo’s and site development (yes, I’m building a dedicated site for Playr ) Feel free to suggest other implementations you’d like