Auto Audio

I recently jumped into the world of Android Auto and Android Headunits in cars, 🤯. As usual i’m in the niche category of going beyond Android Auto default behaviours and find myself wanting more from the audio app offerings.

Problem: I listen to loads of stuff across lots of platforms – Spotify, Tidal, YouTube, SoundCloud etc – but don’t have a launcher or dashboard to quickly jump to favourited content across multiple sources. I want to reduce the amount of time I have to look at the headunit and be precise with touches.

https://github.com/OliPassey/AutoAudio

Installation instructions over on GitHub, but its packaged in a Docker container – so as long as you have a MongoDB instance running locally, just add your environment variables, spin it up and put it behind a domain, cert and reverse proxy. Simples.

It’s designed in two parts, the front-end that you hit from Chrome in your car (currently, you have to run Chrome locally on the headunit, you can’t cast it from your phone – niche, like I said), and /content.html which you hit from your home PC / Laptop.

The content page asks for;
Name
Service (Currently, Spotify, YouTube, Tidal, but working on others)
URL to content (Spotify etc Share Links)
URL to an image (will be saved in the DB, won’t hot link)
Colour (the widget background colour on the front-end)

All fields are currently required, but there are defaults if no colour or image are supplied.

In your car, set your chrome homepage to this, and then you can use the touch-screen to select and jump straight to your collated content. I also wanted to work with local audio files as I have a USB drive connected for times when there is no signal but this may end up fairly specific to my setup – so may not make it into the public code-base – will see what the future holds…

If you find this useful, or you want to assist in making it better – please get in contact. I’d love to turn this front-end into a proper Android Auto app so more people can use it – if that’s even possible (not an Android dev in the slightest)