Added October update
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One of our funded tasks this month was a complete rewrite of our audio player. Previously, we used a Javascript library called [Howler](https://howlerjs.com/) to handle our player and queue. Howler has served us well for many years, but we wanted to start expanding on our audio capabilities. [@wvffle] has spent the month working on rewriting our player and queue logic from scratch. He's replaced Howler with web audio APIs and has crafted new logic to make managing your playback and queue quicker, simpler, and more robust.
One of our projects this month was to align our SPA manifest endpoint more closely to the specs. We've added a new serializer to this endpoint and updated our assets to match. This will provide a much cleaner PWA experience going forward. Thanks to [@georgkrause] and [@wvffle] for their work on this!
You can see this in action on [Tanukitunes](https://tanukitunes.com/api/v2/instance/nodeinfo/2.0). Currently, we don't have any new endpoints set up on v2, but we can now serve data on this path. We've got some big plans for where we want v2 to go, so this was an important step. Thanks for all the work on this [@georgkrause]!
Funkwhale is a pretty chatty app. To keep up-to-date with federated instances, pods have to talk to each other pretty frequently. This can lead to quite a lot of resources being used. While looking at our logs, we noticed we were receiving quite a few communication failures due to pods being offline or unavailable.
[@petitminion] took some time this month to address this by creating a new task that checks the availability of pods on the network. If a pod isn't available, this information is stored in the database. Once it comes back online, this is updated and the last reachable date is recorded. We can use this information to stop calls to unavailable pods, reducing the resource usage. Thanks [@petitminion]!
[I've][@sporiff] also been pretty busy this month. One of the items we decided to tackle were the last documentation rewrites. This included our developer documentation and contributor documentation. As of this month, every single piece of documentation has been overhauled, and all reStructuredText files have been replaced with Markdown files 🥳
[@petitminion] also took some time this month to do some investigation into the [troi recommendation playground](https://github.com/metabrainz/troi-recommendation-playground). This is a collection of tools made by the [Metabrainz foundation](https://metabrainz.org/) to facilitate music recommendations and playlist generation.
As part of this investigation we've drafted [a feature spec](https://dev.funkwhale.audio/funkwhale/funkwhale/-/wikis/specs/troi) to showcase how we might be able to integrate this feature in future. We haven't got any plans for it yet, and the library still isn't stable. However, all signs point to it being compatible, so we're keeping it in our minds!
One of the biggest issues facing Funkwhale users is content curation. Funkwhale's library system grew organically with the platform. It's been there since the beginning and has been tweaked with each new update to user access and sharing. We know that our current tooling doesn't suit everyone's needs, so [@mjourdan] spent some time this month coming up with a solution.
Following a [long discussion in our forum](https://forum.funkwhale.audio/d/214-whats-wrong-with-libraries-and-a-path-to-fix-them) as well as some online meetings between the team, we've come up with a direction we're happy with. The resulting spec for the new **Collections** mechanic [can be found here](https://dev.funkwhale.audio/funkwhale/funkwhale/-/wikis/specs/collections). There isn't a timescale for this yet, but [@mjourdan] has already done a lot of the hard work by providing the logic and designs.
One other thing we've been doing this month is discussing changes to our release cycle. 1.3.0 has been in the making for nearly a year now. While this has been necessary due to the number of underlying changes, we don't want to leave you waiting this long again! We've opened up a discussion [in our forum](https://forum.funkwhale.audio/d/223-funkwhale-14-release-planning) about release planning and cycles. If you've got some thoughts, we'd love to hear them!