React Native Music Player

Ever since Facebook open-sourced React Native, I’ve wanted to try it out. This is why I created this demo app.

This is how it looks:

Demo video with sound

Things in scope that I wanted to learn:

• Practice React Native Layout and Styling.
• Practice Routing and how to present the flow and animation of different views.
• Use of Standard Native Components. (List, Images, Toolbar, etc)
• Use of third party React Native libraries ( In this case I used parallax-scroll-view and react-native-video
• I could have architected the app better using Redux but it wasn’t in the scope of this practice.

Interesting Things I learned

There aren’t a lot of good components to play audio. I started first with a library that only played local files. I read the code of that library and noticed it used a Native Module called AVPlayer. There I noticed it wasn’t going to be possible to play audios coming form the network . After some investigation I read that the appropiate native module to play network audios is AVAudioPlayer.

By looking at react-native-video code I discovered that react-native-video implemented this AVAudioPlayer so I decided to try out this library just using audio and it worked right of bat.