Ommpc2x V0.3.0

[Coder_TimT]

Okay, once again it's been longer between version than I'd like, but it's the best I can do. Now for the good stuff. Version 0.3 of ommpc contains the following changes...

1. Separate clock speed option while locked, mostly for the f200 so that you can have a reasonable speed while interacting with the program so that the touchscreen can still work and have a low clock when locked still. You will notice a slight skip when locking because the music must be paused during the clock change or a lockup is likely. The pause causes the buffer to be emptied, thus the noticeable skip. There is still the slight possibility of a lockup during this operation, but I haven't been able to trigger it in awhile. If you have problems, just set the clock options to the same speed and it will behave like previously.
2. Media Library - Browse by Artist, Album, Genre, Filesystem, or a flat list of all songs
3. Search/Filter - Filter lists being browsed with wildcard substrings. Use traditional or sql wildcards. So, *dog* will match all artists with "dog" in their name or g* will match all artists beginning with the letter 'g'. Obviously it's available for all lists...
4. Load folder/album/artist/genre as playlist. Pressing 'Y' on one of these items in the browser will make a new playlist will all songs under the item. So it will get all songs in a folder and its subfolders, or all songs in an album, or all songs for an artist, etc... Pressing 'A' will do the same, but append the items to the current playlist.
5. No more config file editing. If the folders don't exists that are in the config file when you first run ommpc, the options dialog will popup and you will be able to edit your paths from there. Of course if you prefer to pre-edit the file you can.
6. Since you'll now need to type, there is a new touchscreen enabled virtual keyboard that will present itself when needed. Obviously it can be used via buttons also... Not a full keyboard, but most everything you'll need should be there. It is still definitely a work in progress though. There is no cursor or cursor keys, so mistakes can only be fixed via backspace. It's a start though. I must once again apologize for any non-english users for my horrible lack of any internalization. It's something I really need to look into.

You will need to install the entire zipped directory once again as I've moved some things around related to skins and overlays, sorry about that...

That's pretty much it, at least I think it is. I'll update if I think of anything else major. I know I've left out a few other request that have been made, but I wanted to get this out there. Other things have been added to the list to be worked on in the future.

Quite a lot of work put in this time, and quite an opportunity for errors, so let me know what you encounter...

Can be downloaded from the below link or the Archive...
http://ommpc.googlecode.com/files/ommpc2x-0_3.zip

 

[EvilDragon]

Whhhoooaa!
My fav music player just got muuuch better!
Thanks for the Media Library, that was all I've been missing

Now I don't need to create manual playlists anymore

Thaaaaanks

 

[Coder_TimT]

You're weeeeelcome

Yeah the Media Library by itself wouldn't have been nearly as cool and/or functional without your suggestion of being able to add a Folder/Album/Artist/Genre as a playlist. I'm still a random playlist kind of guy, but it's nice to listen to an album sometimes or just grab a Genre of various artists...

Now to work on making it prettier in anticipation for andora1: .

 

[Tobriand]

And those are the features that make any media app into something as awesome as this. Must try this one sometime - it's now looking very mature .

 

[jjplano]

nice player man, congrats

but the touchscreen controls need work, and thats one of the best features of your player IMO

some work fine (like the scrolling and the file selecting) but the play/stop/ff/rw/etc controls barely work

i think you should make a screen that is exclusevely for touchscreen controls, with bigger buttons. that should be THE play screen, i mean the screen that shows you the id3 data, time and cover on top, and controls on most of the screen while the song is playing. but you can go to another screen with select button (like now, but with that screen as main and without transparencies, or the cover in large behind the controls, something like that)

anyway, thats what i would do if i knew about this

cheers

 

[quadomatic]

Wow, this player got a looooot better since I last tried it. Sound quality is superb.

I may look into picking up a 16GB SDHC now.

One problem though: occasionally, the sound gets realllllllllly quiet for some reason. I have to close the program and reopen it to get around it. Any ideas if I can change something in the configuration or something to fix this?

Thanks

 

[Coder_TimT]

nice player man, congrats

but the touchscreen controls need work, and thats one of the best features of your player IMO

some work fine (like the scrolling and the file selecting) but the play/stop/ff/rw/etc controls barely work

i think you should make a screen that is exclusevely for touchscreen controls, with bigger buttons. that should be THE play screen, i mean the screen that shows you the id3 data, time and cover on top, and controls on most of the screen while the song is playing. but you can go to another screen with select button (like now, but with that screen as main and without transparencies, or the cover in large behind the controls, something like that)

anyway, thats what i would do if i knew about this

cheers

I've been planning a "now playing" screen. I guess I could integrate controls onto that screen. But I don't think it's really going to make too much difference in the quality of the touchscreen controls. Might make a little difference not rendering transparencies, but I can't see it being that much better. I might try to see if I can improve the controls...but not really sure what I'll be able to do... I do realize they are sub-optimal though, so it's definitely something to look into...

Just curious, but what cpu speed are you running at? Touchscreen responsiveness degrades with cpu speed. with firmware 4.0.0, 160Mhz or so is bare minimum or it stops responding at all. With 4.1.0, I just found out it responds at lower clock speeds(I tried down to 105Mhz), but still responds better at a higher clock...

Wow, this player got a looooot better since I last tried it. Sound quality is superb.

I may look into picking up a 16GB SDHC now.

One problem though: occasionally, the sound gets realllllllllly quiet for some reason. I have to close the program and reopen it to get around it. Any ideas if I can change something in the configuration or something to fix this?

Thanks

Not sure anything can be done, if what you are talking about is similar to what I've experience in the past. For me, sometimes when I would be changing tracks, it would get quiet and play just kind of static-y. Sometimes I could Pause/Play and fix it...sometimes I could adjust the volume and fix it. Sometimes, I would have to exit. Never could figure out what the actual problem was though...

Haven't experience it near as often on my f200 as I used to in the past with my old f100... Actually only once thus far. I haven't been using it very heavily though...and when I do use it I generally just let it play and don't change tracks...

 

[jjplano]

Just curious, but what cpu speed are you running at? Touchscreen responsiveness degrades with cpu speed. with firmware 4.0.0, 160Mhz or so is bare minimum or it stops responding at all. With 4.1.0, I just found out it responds at lower clock speeds(I tried down to 105Mhz), but still responds better at a higher clock...

im running it at 200Mhz on the 4.0.0 firmware

the buttons respond well, but if youre lucky enough to press them and not anywhere else

thats why im asking if theres a way to make the buttons bigger and static, so you dont have to be SO precise

i think that a music player mostly operated by touchscreen its gonna be a good thing, because most of us had installed 2 or more players, and you have to keep reading (at first) what each button on the f200 does for that particular player, and keep pressing the wrong one, etc

if a player (like yours) eliminate that need (so you can opt between the two, touchscreen or buttons) and becomes more intuitive on the controls (like an mp3 player), can be the next "preffered player" by the mayority (like now, that we all like the gmu or the craigamp the better). of course there is a lot of work to do, but i think youre in the right path with this one, it sounds great and look good


and i wanna ask you something, you probably know this. why the homebrew music players cannot integrate equalization?

that always intrigued me (knowing that the firmware player has eq)

 

[DBH]

I also wanted to ask can ommpc2x natively play streaming .pls and .m3u files because I can send can it play them via MPD Minion on my PC but when I do ommpc2x closes and goes to the menu. Is there a way for it to just work like me chosing a playlist item?

 

[Coder_TimT]

Just curious, but what cpu speed are you running at? Touchscreen responsiveness degrades with cpu speed. with firmware 4.0.0, 160Mhz or so is bare minimum or it stops responding at all. With 4.1.0, I just found out it responds at lower clock speeds(I tried down to 105Mhz), but still responds better at a higher clock...

im running it at 200Mhz on the 4.0.0 firmware

the buttons respond well, but if youre lucky enough to press them and not anywhere else

thats why im asking if theres a way to make the buttons bigger and static, so you dont have to be SO precise

...

and i wanna ask you something, you probably know this. why the homebrew music players cannot integrate equalization?

that always intrigued me (knowing that the firmware player has eq)


Sorry for the delayed response.

I'm kind of surprised you're having issues with the button size. The touch areas around each of those buttons is 48px by 48px. I have seen issues sometimes where a click registers somewhere completely differently from where I touched. I think that's just the touchscreen jumping around as it does... Maybe it tends to jump around more when the overlay is on screen...

As for equalization, there is no reason homebrew players can't do equalization, it's just that's it generally a low priority item that never makes it in...

I also wanted to ask can ommpc2x natively play streaming .pls and .m3u files because I can send can it play them via MPD Minion on my PC but when I do ommpc2x closes and goes to the menu. Is there a way for it to just work like me chosing a playlist item?

I've played streaming pls files before...I have some crash before also. Never really looked into it... It's probably something simple... Let me know the stream you're trying to connect to and I'll take a look...

 

[DBH]

The stream I'm trying to connect to is:

ibreaks.co.uk http://live.ibreaks.co.uk:8500/listen.pls

It'd be great to get these supported natively or even an ADD URL function like how some of the MPD Clients have so that way I don't have to turn on my pc to connect to these internet radio stations!

EDIT: Ok I found if I copy paste the contents of the live link from the .pls and save that as a .m3u I can play the station without the need to turn my pc on. Only problem is it still crashes ommpc2x when the playlist is loaded.

 

[DBH]

I've managed to connect my external fat32 drive to my gp2x via the BoB I've edited the scripts so it points to /mnt/ext/sda/music/ but whenever I try and run ommpc2x it says no playlists found and just completely locks up! what's up with that? I'm trying to access 60gb's worth of music btw...

 

[Barracuda]

First of all, thanks for this great player!

I've got a little suggestion.. how about song queuing? (similar to winamp's) could be really simple, without order editing, just add/remove functions.
would be a little step closer to perfection

 

[Coder_TimT]

Okay, I completely missed these posts when they were relevant. But I'll go ahead and respond now...

I've managed to connect my external fat32 drive to my gp2x via the BoB I've edited the scripts so it points to /mnt/ext/sda/music/ but whenever I try and run ommpc2x it says no playlists found and just completely locks up! what's up with that? I'm trying to access 60gb's worth of music btw...

Any updates on this DBH? I don't know for sure, but it might not be locked up but instead trying to to catalog the music... But I thought I made it so you had to kick that off manually in the later versions... Hmm...

So did you go through the "Add music to database" step? How long did it take? Even overclocked, I would expect it to take quite a while....quite a long while....

First of all, thanks for this great player!

I've got a little suggestion.. how about song queuing? (similar to winamp's) could be really simple, without order editing, just add/remove functions.
would be a little step closer to perfection

Okay, I'm unfamiliar with winamp. What exactly is queuing...and how is it different than creating a playlist?

 

[trooper]

Okay, I completely missed these posts when they were relevant. But I'll go ahead and respond now...

First of all, thanks for this great player!

I've got a little suggestion.. how about song queuing? (similar to winamp's) could be really simple, without order editing, just add/remove functions.
would be a little step closer to perfection

Okay, I'm unfamiliar with winamp. What exactly is queuing...and how is it different than creating a playlist?


If i am correct, I think Barracuda is suggesting something like realtime playlist creation.

Eg.

Imagine you have your list of songs displayed on screen in Ommpc2x (And you already have a track playing), The list would/could contain a little checkbox next to every song, And every track you ticked would be the next track played, In the order the the boxes were ticked. But then later you could go back to that list, And add more tracks to the queue (with a tick) or removing unplayed tracks (by unticking) as the mood suits you.

I apologise for my rather confusing/cranky way of explaining it, But hope you can grasp my explaination.

Though i could be completely wrong in what Barracuda was actually suggesting. :rolleyes:

Trooper

 

[Barracuda]

hi,

yes its like trooper said, some way to set the order of playing without rearranging the playlist.

For example, when a song is playing, whenever a button was pressed on the highlighted song, that song would be next in line to be played (the current playback isn't interrupted), and so on... creating a sort of "stack", and another button would remove it from that list.

it would be useful for those who have somewhat large playlists, and would like to play some songs only, without user interaction

 

[Coder_TimT]

@Barracuda(& trooper) - Got it. Unfortunately probably won't be implementing. I'll think about it some more, but it doesn't mesh very well with how mpd operates, so to implement correctly the changes would have to be to mpd. It could be done at the gui level by internally rearranging the mpd playlist whenever anything is queued, but not reflecting those changes in the actual ordering on the screen... But that would definitely get messy...

 

[Manjuu]

This is kind of late...

Is it possible to rewind the song/audio a couple of seconds back when toggling between turning on and off the screen? When the clock speeds are set differently between these two states, it would skip a couple of seconds of the song/audio, and there is no way to rewind it when the key-lock is on.

Rewinding and forwarding are kind of slow, especially using the touchscreen GUI.

I really like the on-screen keyboard, but can it be tweaked a bit... the highlighted button is really hard to spot, and does it even need to be transparent? I sometimes unconsciously press the Start button as I'm used to it as Enter; this causes the Player Options to pop-up when renaming/filtering songs.

Some visual glitches that I noticed:

When browsing songs by albums or genres, selecting "--Unknown--" will result in overlapping of the "No song in database, update from Main Menu" message with the "Browse Album/Genre" label.

The "Playlists" label looks aliased compared to the rest of the text.

 

[Coder_TimT]

This is kind of late...

Is it possible to rewind the song/audio a couple of seconds back when toggling between turning on and off the screen? When the clock speeds are set differently between these two states, it would skip a couple of seconds of the song/audio, and there is no way to rewind it when the key-lock is on.

Rewinding and forwarding are kind of slow, especially using the touchscreen GUI.

I really like the on-screen keyboard, but can it be tweaked a bit... the highlighted button is really hard to spot, and does it even need to be transparent? I sometimes unconsciously press the Start button as I'm used to it as Enter; this causes the Player Options to pop-up when renaming/filtering songs.

Some visual glitches that I noticed:

When browsing songs by albums or genres, selecting "--Unknown--" will result in overlapping of the "No song in database, update from Main Menu" message with the "Browse Album/Genre" label.

The "Playlists" label looks aliased compared to the rest of the text.

I'm back dev-ing again, so I'll try to address some of these for the next release...

As for the skipping during the screen toggle...what is happening is that I have to pause the track when I change the clock speed, if I don't mpd is likely to hang if the clock is changed while outputting sound. When you pause, it dumps the buffer and then when you play again it starts at what would have been the end of the original buffer. So we could skip back a couple of seconds, but would never be able to hit the correct start spot exactly since the buffering time is dependent on what the clock speed is... So at this time, I'm probably just going to leave this one alone...

Had numerous requests about ff/rw speed, so I'll tweak that some this release...

On the keyboard... If you're using the touchscreen, the highlighted button shouldn't matter for you as it only responsed to keypresses. Actually yes it's needs to be changed...it's quite hard to see.

I like the transparency...I plan to have different keyboard "skins" also, so this will be addressed at that time...It won't be this release though...

As for hitting Start...I probably should grab those button presses and process them in the keyboard code...

I'll take a look at both the visual glitches...

Thanks for the feedback...