A Possible Media Player Option

[Coder_TimT]

Hey guys and gals, there's been a bit of discussion in the past about what media players might be available for Pandora, so I thought I would put together a post to gauge interest in a port of my gp2x player ommpc. I'm actually currently on the fence about going through with my reorder, so the amount or lack of interest might sway me one direction or the other. Anyway a couple of screenshots from my current gp2x dev version, the second one is actually a mockup as I don't have the now playing screen done yet...

Anyway, I'll go through the current features and then open for discussion.

1. Front end to mpd

• Plays most major formats
  
• Can be detached from player daemon to play in background, how well this works and cooperates with other programs depends on the audio drivers. It pretty much sucked on the gp2x...
  
• Gapless playback

2. Music Library

• Browse by Artist, Album, Genre, Filesystem
  
• Filter(search) each view

3. Playlist oriented

• Everything plays in a playlist
  
• Create recursive playlist from Artist/Album/Genre/subdirectory
  
• Random playlist-picks 50 songs at random from the library
  
• Save and load playlists
  
• Simple playlist editing...add/remove/move
  
• Just a m3u playlist, so can be created elsewhere also
  
• Create "queue" inside of current playlist of songs to play next either from library or song currently in playlist.

4. Bookmark location in long audio file
5. Instant seeking

• Time/speed sensitive FF/RW. As you FF/RW for a longer period of time the speed at which it FF/RW increases up to 32x.
  
• Analog FF/RW(not actually implemented yet, but see no reason not to implement FF/RW that is speed sensitive based on analog position).
  
• Instant jump via click/touch of progress bar.

6. Random and Repeat modes

• Picks random song from current playlist
  
• Repeats current playlist

7. Touchscreen/game control/keyboard friendly

• Fully configurable controls for keyboard and game controls
  
• Multiple key bindings for each action...so play can be bound to 'p', Space, and the 'B' button.
  
• Onscreen player controls available on all screens via touch/mouse overlay
  
• Touch/Mouse control of volume/rpt/random/seek bar
  
• Simple Touch/Mouse gestures for scrolling and back/forward while browsing library

8. Now playing screen with controls

• Displays album art and song information
  
• Controls available by touch/mouse

9. UTF-8 Internationalization.

• Need translations

 

[fuzzypinkunicorns666]

That looks pretty nice. I'd certainly be interested in a port. I'm hoping to replace my aging iaudio X5 with the pandora, and this app seems to be just what I was looking for! Thank you very much if you decide to port this to pandora.

But now I'll have to decide between this (if you port it) and (my planned attempt at) porting and running rockbox as an application. But I'm basically a total n00b to coding, so it'll probably be a while before I get much working. I know I can at least recompile it for ARM and have the touchscreen working as a mouse input, but it'd be a lot nicer to have it running at 800x480 with the actual buttons working. Probably trivial work to some people, but I'm not one of them (my coding experience consists of high school basic and java classes along with a few c and python tutorials I've screwed around with).


And come to think of it, I don't actually know of any other portable-oriented media players for linux, except canola (which will hopefully get ported to pandora as well, if the devs are kind enough).There are probably a few other ones available for maemo that I'm not aware of, though.

 

[krooked]

YES that is awsome, You must refund, one more dev, one more awsome app. stick with it, I gotz your back

 

[Capn_Fish]

But now I'll have to decide between this (if you port it) and (my planned attempt at) porting and running rockbox as an application. But I'm basically a total n00b to coding, so it'll

And come to think of it, I don't actually know of any other portable-oriented media players for linux, except canola (which will hopefully get ported to pandora as well, if the devs are kind enough).There are probably a few other ones available for maemo that I'm not aware of, though.


Rockbox can run as an application? It doesn't have to be the whole OS?

There's Quasar (http://katastrophos.net/andre/blog/software/quasar-media-player/), which I gather is nice (I haven't actually used it). VLC or XMMS could be quite portable-friendly with a skin.

 

[Vorporeal]

But now I'll have to decide between this (if you port it) and (my planned attempt at) porting and running rockbox as an application. But I'm basically a total n00b to coding, so it'll

And come to think of it, I don't actually know of any other portable-oriented media players for linux, except canola (which will hopefully get ported to pandora as well, if the devs are kind enough).There are probably a few other ones available for maemo that I'm not aware of, though.


Rockbox can run as an application? It doesn't have to be the whole OS?

There's Quasar (http://katastrophos.net/andre/blog/software/quasar-media-player/), which I gather is nice (I haven't actually used it). VLC or XMMS could be quite portable-friendly with a skin.


I'm pretty sure that Rockbox is only an entire firmware for PMPs. I've never heard of it being used as a standalone application.

 

[Coder_TimT]

But now I'll have to decide between this (if you port it) and (my planned attempt at) porting and running rockbox as an application. But I'm basically a total n00b to coding, so it'll

And come to think of it, I don't actually know of any other portable-oriented media players for linux, except canola (which will hopefully get ported to pandora as well, if the devs are kind enough).There are probably a few other ones available for maemo that I'm not aware of, though.


Rockbox can run as an application? It doesn't have to be the whole OS?

There's Quasar (http://katastrophos.net/andre/blog/software/quasar-media-player/), which I gather is nice (I haven't actually used it). VLC or XMMS could be quite portable-friendly with a skin.


Thanks for the feedback thus far folks. Now as for some of my thoughts on other players...

Quasar has Qt dependencies...I'm sure it will run fine, but you're more limited in which environment it will run in(X with Qt). It used mplayer for playback, so things such as gapless playback are a no-go if that's important to you. Also, can it have any kind of keyboard/non touchscreen control?

Similarly VLC is a great media player, but as an audio-only solution isn't very robust...with no music library support...no gapless either... If neither of those are important to you then maybe... I've never seen VLC skinned though... If it can't be majorly changed, it falls into the category of all other desktop media players(Amarok, Rythmbox, etc) as not terribly keyboard friendly and not optimized for the screen size. That's just MHO, I'm sure there are alot of shortcut keys that can be bound,etc.

XMMS might be viable as it has a pretty "small" interface, but you would pretty much be force to use the touchscreen as it really isn't laid out for keyboard/game controls input... I guess you can probably bind shortcut keys also though, so maybe it wouldn't be too bad.

Anyway, not saying ommpc is the best thing out there, I know it pales in comparison graphics-wise to some other players. But I think it can compete pretty well in regards to functionality/usability...

 

[gaterooze]

Sounds fantastic, good feature set and great thought for the Pandora's particular controls.

 

[xaim00]

Looks like a nice player. If you decide to port i will try it out for sure.

 

[maball54]

Looks like a nice player. If you decide to port i will try it out for sure.

Agreed.

 

[gruso]

Gapless playback and analog nub seeking? They're my two essential items. I won't just use your app, I'll send you earth monies.

 

[Pleng]

Looks and sounds brilliant.

Will it be an audio-player only? Or will it have support for video too?

 

[joa]

If when you release this into the wild. If it is complete and does have analogue seeking, ability to easily select different albums/tracks and add to playlist then i'd be happy to donate too!

really nice work.

 

[Lozrus]

Definitely interested. I never really used the GP2X as a media player simply because my 30gb Creative Vision surpassed it in every way. But with the Pandoras battery life and current (and future) SDHC capacities I'm certain that it will be a serious alternative! It just needs a comfortable, Pandora optimised player and UI, and yours looks perfect!
Plus, gap-less playback really is important to me, and the potential of having a real keyboard for searching rocks

So yes, very interested and willing to donate too.

 

[nickik]

MMhh its nice but to mutch 4 me

i just want drag a folder to the mediaplayer an drop it there. Like VLC on Computer i dont need iTunes or somethink like that.

 

[MiniSinisterMinister]

Please include a fast forward function and let it remember where you stopped last time in a podcast. Also the buttons for the controls should be as big as possible so that you can touch-contol it with your finger.

 

[Trip]

The ability to add to an active playlist on the fly, is a feature that most players seem to miss for some reason. Shame as I've always found that to be one of the most useful for any media player.

It certainly looks like you have a very nice feature set there and it would be a real shame if this wasn't ported to the Pandora, either by you or someone else

Just out of curiosity; will this be able to boot straight from the SD using minimal power and turning the Pandora into a dedicated music player or would that be overkill do you think?

 

[w1ll14m]

Also i would love to have rockbox as app on pandora.
Also they have much codecs and the codecs are pretty good optimized for arm (much assembly is used here).
most target run between 30 and 120 MHz 80% of the codecs run real-time under 60Mhz

 

[Bosbeetle]

looks good Im interested

 

[joseluisjazz]

This is great. All the features, really. But you know what I'd love?

What I'd really love is an scripting system framework, that'd allow to code things like assigning keyboard buttons to actions and macros. For example to rate the song by modifying a custom tag in the file, or to automatically increase the tag named PLAY_COUNTER after 1 minute of playing, or to store the date in FIRST_PLAYED tag if it doesn't exist, or even be able to choose what info to show in the interface with an script, and sort playlists by any tag...

And if it allows you to run external commands, then it'd be possible to use encoders and checksums tools and to open a browser page, or whatever... It would be the DEFINITIVE player. I'd be dying to code so many scripts...

 

[Coder_TimT]

Well, it looks like there is at least a modicum of interest... Let me try to address some of the questions...

Looks and sounds brilliant.

Will it be an audio-player only? Or will it have support for video too?

Audio only to begin with. I do have thoughts of also making it a mplayer video frontend if a better solution doesn't emerge.

The ability to add to an active playlist on the fly, is a feature that most players seem to miss for some reason. Shame as I've always found that to be one of the most useful for any media player.

It certainly looks like you have a very nice feature set there and it would be a real shame if this wasn't ported to the Pandora, either by you or someone else

Just out of curiosity; will this be able to boot straight from the SD using minimal power and turning the Pandora into a dedicated music player or would that be overkill do you think?

Well since the mpd backend is a general purpose player, it wouldn't have hardware decoding support...at least not without significant effort. But otherwise I guess this could be done... It's an SDL app, so not necessarily dependent on X or anything...

This is great. All the features, really. But you know what I'd love?

What I'd really love is an scripting system framework, that'd allow to code things like assigning keyboard buttons to actions and macros. For example to rate the song by modifying a custom tag in the file, or to automatically increase the tag named PLAY_COUNTER after 1 minute of playing, or to store the date in FIRST_PLAYED tag if it doesn't exist, or even be able to choose what info to show in the interface with an script, and sort playlists by any tag...

And if it allows you to run external commands, then it'd be possible to use encoders and checksums tools and to open a browser page, or whatever... It would be the DEFINITIVE player. I'd be dying to code so many scripts...

You don't ask for much, do you... In all seriousness, I've got way to much basic stuff to get right before I could even think of something like this. I'm not sure I have a robust enough framework to pull it off currently either.

As for external commands, with mpd you can detach the client, completely closing it down and the music player daemon will continue playing in the background. So start your playlist, kill the gui, and go about your business. With a good ALSA driver, this should work well. With the dodgy OSS driver on the GP2X, it never worked to it's full potential...