Pandora - The Music Player

[lardman]

QUOTE
Technically, just how much playing time could we get if all we left running were the display, the player and the necessary hardware?


We can't know until we get the devices and do some testing. The display is the big killer (the backlight that is). I guess that to decode mp3 wouldn't need a very high ARM clock speed, and the DSP could be shut down, so it ought to last for a fair while.

 

[TJSomething]

The alternative Quasar MP is not a bad option either, and is probably simpler to adapt. Shame it doesn't cover the entire screen though.

It does have a basic fullscreen mode that eliminates to taskbar and the title bar. Also, in response to the guy who didn't like the skin, the skin can be changed too, though I think that it only has basic graphics replacement and no control rearrangement.

 

[atomicthumbs]

The closest thing to what you're describing that I've used is Amarok. When I ran it on my laptops (1280x1024 and 800x600), it made excellent use of the screen real estate, as well as being an excellent player overall. I think it'd be a good choice for the Pandora.

 

[Tobriand]

Scratch that, I have obviously got it wrong.
Here is a quote from Mweston, the main hardware designer of the Pandora:
QUOTE
This is sort of the idea I had in mind when suggesting to Craig we could get 100 hours of battery life just playing music.

What I thought would be ideal is to suspend Linux to SDRAM and then put the external memory to sleep. Then, using the internal scratch pad RAM, and maybe using the DSP core and its RAM, a low power, low speed music player could be run to just play music and use the shoulder buttons to change tracks. It would be pretty basic, but most of the time, I don't even look at the display when playing music. I just put the player on random shuffle so this seems like a great idea for when you don't need any of the Pandora's other capabilities.

The alternative is to see just how little power we can use with the screen off, unnecessary features powered down, the clock speed reduced way down to whatever minimum keeps required external interfaces working, and still running Linux (since it has so many codecs supported already). This will take a while to master because I don't think current OMAP3 kernels even turn Smart Reflex features on yet.

Ah, that's the post I was thinking of, so I'm evidently wrong too. Apologies for the misinformation!

 

[closetwam]

AFAIK Amarok depends on KDE.

 

[kloplop321]

Amarok does depend on KDE, and KDE is quite large if you have a small memory card that you want music on.

 

[mcobit]

Maybe something like Geexbox could be recompiled to ARM architecture for a "just mediaplayer" setting on a sdcard.

It could be run from a sdcard with the music already included.

http://www.geexbox.org/en/index.html

 

[kloplop321]

or we can have the play command that can run in the terminal

 

[hells_dark]

or we can have the play command that can run in the terminal

ncmpc ! h34r:

 

[Nilsiboy]

Okay, I had forgotten the name and had to go look for it, but I found it again:

Canola looks like it's just what the OP was looking for - well, with the addition of picture, podcast and video modules, but I imagine they don't all run at the same time, so there shouldn't be much of a performance hit compared to "just" a music player ^^

It runs on Nokia's N-Series tablets, so a port should be possible, hopefully even simple. I'm not a dev though, so I can't really judge that, I have to admit.

Anyway, it has a touchscreen UI and supports YouTube, Last.FM and UPnP media streaming, in addition to looking pretty sleek imho.

The downside is that it won't have support for things like the Pandora's analog nubs out of the box, and I'm not entirely sure if it's even open source

 

[lardman]

QUOTE
I'm not entirely sure if it's even open source


It is recently completely open source.

 

[greenfly]

The thing worth keeping in mind here is that while there are a lot of great music players on Linux, most haven't been made with a portable device in mind--they are expecting you to use a mouse and a keyboard on a 1024x768+ screen.

For instance, I still prefer xmms and xmms-like MP3 players on Linux, but I think it would be a horrible interface for something like the pandora.

 

[phrosty]

The media player app sucks pretty bad, but I really like how Windows Mobile tries to do it: there's a separate media player app, but it also gets integrated right into the main screen.

 

[logokas]

Windows knows how to look pretty, unlike most of Linux.

Quasar still seems to be the best choise so far, but doesn't quite look very dynamic, which is something i want out of a music player.

 

[atomicthumbs]

Windows knows how to look pretty, unlike most of Linux.

Stop using TWM

 

[daffy]

Second the call for Canola. Slick.

I just picked up a Jabra BT headset that has a stereo headphones mode.

Hoping that will work with my panda, both as a headset and as headphones. And if it does, it would be sweet if I could use the controls on the headset (wheel and various buttons) to control the volume and playback.

 

[Nilsiboy]

QUOTE
I'm not entirely sure if it's even open source

It is recently completely open source.


Where did you find that? All the information I found seemed to be either pointing towards it being entirely closed or a mixture of proprietary and open bits...

 

[logokas]

Windows knows how to look pretty, unlike most of Linux.

Stop using TWM


What the hell is TWM?

 

[bigtruck]

Windows knows how to look pretty, unlike most of Linux.

Stop using TWM


What the hell is TWM?

An incredibly ugly window manager, and more likely than not a joke. It's X's standard window manager. TWM

 

[logokas]

That IS hideous.

But it was not what i was referring to.