With Pandora Work Well As A Media Player? (like Mp3 And Mpeg4, Ect..)

[hells_dark]

I just checked and according to the official site it's not. Well there seem to be some code source available for some of the component but that's it.
With "Canola is not opensource" written in bold on the developer page I guess it makes it pretty clear we are not going to be able to port it to the pandora.

Source: http://openbossa.indt.org/canola/developer.html

About canola, read those news : http://openbossa.indt.org/canola/news.html


QUOTE
Stay tuned for more news, confirmed feature set for beta10 and the new website for the opensource release!

 

[Trip]

Mplayer was one of the first things to get ported and tested, so it shouldn't be a problem.
There used to be a video on YouTube of a dev board playing Futurama, but I can't seem to find it now

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=v9RAPNa-55k
Mplayer on TI devboard

Ah my bad, thought it was on a Pand dev board.
Cheers for the vid link Mali.

 

[marshal]

I just checked and according to the official site it's not. Well there seem to be some code source available for some of the component but that's it.
With "Canola is not opensource" written in bold on the developer page I guess it makes it pretty clear we are not going to be able to port it to the pandora.

Source: http://openbossa.indt.org/canola/developer.html

About canola, read those news : http://openbossa.indt.org/canola/news.html


QUOTE
Stay tuned for more news, confirmed feature set for beta10 and the new website for the opensource release!




Now that excellent new
Didn't see a mention about the licence, but hopefully it will be GPL or similar.

 

[lardman]

QUOTE
SBC is a very, very low complexity codec. The batteries in your BT headphones would run out 10 times over before the encoding overhead made a noticeable dent in the Pandora's battery life.


Have you experimented much with it? Your version is apparently better optimised than mine. Certainly on the N8x0 the encoding overhead is not as negligible as one might hope for, though work is underway to improve matters (see the bluez list).

In any case, the point was a comparison of Bluetooth radio consumption vs CPU consumption, and assuming the Bluetooth radio consumes so little power, running the CPU at an extra 10% or so will presumably consume more, and that's neglecting the extra CPU cycles ALSA seems to consume.

 

[zzaz3]

So, as long as I can get find a good way to get around the headphone jack problem it seems like it should work fine.

I have another question though. From what I've seen Pandora can only run 1 app at a time. Would it be possible to play music while doing other stuff? I hated how the PSP couldn't do that.

 

[WizardStan]

Are you saying having BT turned on (and connected to some wireless plugs) would draw less power than sticking in a set of headphones?
I'm not saying that I know it for a fact, but it's possible. As a class 2 BT transceiver, the radio is limited to 2.5mW output. Granted that's RF output and I'm sure the transmitter isn't 100% efficient, but obviously the power requirements for the BT radio are minuscule compared to the 150mW (maximum) output of the headphone amp.

To clarify what what I think Chip is saying, it isn't that using BT uses less energy than wired output, just that BT theoretically uses less than the built in amp. You still need an amp of some kind, the difference is that it becomes powered by your earpiece instead of the Pandora itself. So total energy consumption is higher, but it's distributed between the Pandora and the headset, rather than the whole cost being in the Pandora.

QUOTE
I have another question though. From what I've seen Pandora can only run 1 app at a time. Would it be possible to play music while doing other stuff? I hated how the PSP couldn't do that.

Just where have you seen this? Certainly not any of the demos shown of the Pandora running multiple things at once.

 

[gruso]

I have another question though. From what I've seen Pandora can only run 1 app at a time. Would it be possible to play music while doing other stuff? I hated how the PSP couldn't do that.

AFAIK it was only Gmenu that had trouble multitasking, which is why the default OS is now Angstrom. Gentoo and Ubuntu are also in the pipeline. Any of these will give you a full desktop environment with multitasking, just like your computer.

 

[GuSec]

When it comes to audio quality, I think the Pandora will beat the iPod by long shot. iPod has been criticized by audiophiles for sounding bad a lot, but I haven't read any serious critic against the Burr Brown DAC that's confined within the Pandora. Of course it will be bigger than a little Mp3-player, and the location of the headphonejack is kinda odd, but the 100-hour battery life will make up for that!
Do anyone know if there are any small, goldplated angle changers for 3.5mm?

 

[joa]

Pandora will play anything you throw at it, within reason, but if you're looking for a UI as intuitive and easily accessed as the iPod then you're not going to get it here.

I dunno? Give it a few months what with the fanbase now following, As this device is pocket sized i an on the go interface will soon follow aimed at those listening to music on the move.

But yeh, we'll see.

 

[hells_dark]

AFAIK it was only Gmenu that had trouble multitasking, which is why the default OS is now Angstrom.

Gmenu is a gui, angstrom is a linux distrib.
Gmenu would have worked on angstrom.
That's matchbox that have been chosed instead of gmenu because of multitasking issues.

 

[gruso]

I knew someone would pick me up somewhere. You're right of course. I am aware that Gmenu is just a GUI, but I had forgotten that it was running in Angstrom to start with.

 

[MaxSteiner]

Whats wrong wuith you people, you're clearly all deluded

The Pandora will be pretty rubbish compared to a dedicated MP4 type player,
BECAUSE its huge, and clam shelled (And the head phone socket is in the wrong place).

Imagine 'Oh this tracks a bit crap, in fact I've just been put opff this album entirly, just gotta wresstle this DS phat sized player out of my pocket.... Just gotta wait for the screen to refresh... ok, what button was it to scroll back into my media folder, righto thats sorted. Just gotta close the clam shell and wrestle the over sized device back into my pocket.....'

It'll be alright for movies, but anyone whos trying to claim that a device this large with a clam shell design is a convienient music player when compared to a slimline device with dedicated buttons is having a laugh.
The important thing is it can play music surely

 

[WizardStan]

Imagine 'Oh this tracks a bit crap, in fact I've just been put opff this album entirly, just gotta wresstle this DS phat sized player out of my pocket.... Just gotta wait for the screen to refresh... ok, what button was it to scroll back into my media folder, righto thats sorted. Just gotta close the clam shell and wrestle the over sized device back into my pocket.....'

1) You'd have to pull an MP3 player out of your pocket anyway, so that's no argument.
2) Waiting for the screen to refresh is a red herring, since it'd be instant anyway.
3) There's suggestion to use the L and R buttons for forward and back, not unlike the PSP, so not so much searching as you suggest.
4) Otherwise, something like this becomes a very easy to use possibility: no need to mess with wires or pulling it out of pockets at all.
5) My DS fits in my pants and shirt pocket with the cord coming off the bottom. I don't see the Pandora causing much more problem, but maybe you have smaller pockets than I do.
Not saying you're wrong: it is a large and bulky device for convenient audio playback, but don't you think you're exaggerating just a bit?

 

[Prometheus]

Whats wrong wuith you people, you're clearly all deluded

The Pandora will be pretty rubbish compared to a dedicated MP4 type player,
BECAUSE its huge, and clam shelled (And the head phone socket is in the wrong place).

Imagine 'Oh this tracks a bit crap, in fact I've just been put opff this album entirly, just gotta wresstle this DS phat sized player out of my pocket.... Just gotta wait for the screen to refresh... ok, what button was it to scroll back into my media folder, righto thats sorted. Just gotta close the clam shell and wrestle the over sized device back into my pocket.....'

It'll be alright for movies, but anyone whos trying to claim that a device this large with a clam shell design is a convienient music player when compared to a slimline device with dedicated buttons is having a laugh.
The important thing is it can play music surely

I dunno, I use my DS Lite in conjunction with the Nintendo MP3 Player (GBA) cartridge quite often - it saves having to carry two devices, and actually isn't awkward at all. So, I can see why some folks would view this as convenient, from personal experience. (My own Pandora will be taking over this task, of course. )

The interface for the aforementioned setup is very quick and easy to work with (it's all d-pad and button controlled - I'll be happy to write up a more detailed description of how it works, if it would be useful to anyone ), which is obviously a big factor - any well-designed media-player interface for the Pandora would probably need to behave similarly, but I can't see why this would be overlooked, even if it isn't done right away.

 

[marshal]

Whats wrong wuith you people, you're clearly all deluded

The Pandora will be pretty rubbish compared to a dedicated MP4 type player,
BECAUSE its huge, and clam shelled (And the head phone socket is in the wrong place).

Imagine 'Oh this tracks a bit crap, in fact I've just been put opff this album entirly, just gotta wresstle this DS phat sized player out of my pocket.... Just gotta wait for the screen to refresh... ok, what button was it to scroll back into my media folder, righto thats sorted. Just gotta close the clam shell and wrestle the over sized device back into my pocket.....'

It'll be alright for movies, but anyone whos trying to claim that a device this large with a clam shell design is a convienient music player when compared to a slimline device with dedicated buttons is having a laugh.
The important thing is it can play music surely

I don't expect anyone to buy a pandora just for music playback.... that would be crazy and way too expensive. But if you carry a pandora around for gaming, browsing (...) you might as well use it as a media player.
I agree it's bulky and the clamshell design might not be perfect but it's better that carrying 2 devices. Beside this SD card as becoming so cheap that it would perform favourably again most other flash based device. And the output quality should be better than average (obviously this hasn't be tested yet... but we will see).

Personally I am not interested in bluetooth headphone. I prefer to use a some better quality wired one's. And if the battery go flat no more sound...
However a simple and pretty inexpensive bluetooth remote that can last for a long time.... why not. I don't know if those really exist and if it's will be easily supported by the pandora but it could be interesting.

 

[AireTamStorm]

SBC is a very, very low complexity codec. The batteries in your BT headphones would run out 10 times over before the encoding overhead made a noticeable dent in the Pandora's battery life.
It is also quite low in quality by default. Many BT headphones don't support the higher quality settings, too.

Good to know that the Bluetooth transceiver is class 2, though.

 

[Hotcooler]

QUOTE
BT radio power requirements are negligible. Possibly less than the headphone amp power requirements.


But you forget about more powed drain from CPU due to recompressing for BT. All my previous devices such as Toshiba G900 and Qtek something had a significantly reduced battery life when listening to music through BT. around 50-75% compared to headphones. But anyway that the only way I will listen to stuff on pandora.

QUOTE
'Oh this tracks a bit crap, in fact I've just been put opff this album entirly,
That's why I love my Jabra BT620s you have all the control buttons on your headphones.

I have a question though. Would I be able to connect a phone via BT to pandora and a Jabra via BT to pandora. Listen to styff from pandora, and when a phone recieves a call it would pause music and pass through a call?

QUOTE
It is also quite low in quality by default. Many BT headphones don't support the higher quality settings, too.


Plantronics and Jabras I used, supported maximum Bitsettings you can set on WinMobile and true stereo sound (not JointStereo wich is enabled on WinMobile by default). Thou I lowered the settings on all devices.. 200-400mhz Samsung CPU's cant keep up with encoding..

 

[lardman]

QUOTE
It is also quite low in quality by default. Many BT headphones don't support the higher quality settings, too.


Yeah, there were deficiencies in the long standing bluez-utils sbc implementation, these are being addressed and it does sound much better (IMO). I'm guess more could also be done by fiddling with the bitrates, etc., that ALSA wants to use.

 

[Chip]

I have a question though. Would I be able to connect a phone via BT to pandora and a Jabra via BT to pandora. Listen to styff from pandora, and when a phone recieves a call it would pause music and pass through a call?
I'm going to have to say "probably not". There's nothing in the BT spec or Pandora hardware that prevents it, but it would require some software trickery on both the Pandora (doable) and your phone (probably not doable). Your phone likely only has two connection modes - either data for tethering and syncing or audio for headphones. To do what you're asking, there would either have to be software on your phone that would forward the voice data through the Pandora to the headphones, or your headphones would have to be able to pair with both the Pandora and phone at the same time. There may be headphones that will pair with multiple devices simultaneously, but I am not aware of them.

 

[Hotcooler]

Ok. The pandora gateway probably will need some testing

But. Theoretically (according to specs) I actually can pair it with 2 devices simultaniusly

QUOTE
Use with your PC, music player or other Bluetooth device
One of the great things about the Jabra BT620s is that it can be used with various Bluetooth devices** You can connect your Jabra BT620s with 2 devices, enabling music playing and phone connectivity at the same time. This means you never have to miss a call unless you want to, and you don’t have to change your headset when you want to listen to music on another device.

** For example, it can be connected to a phone and a music player simultaneously or to a PC and a phone, etc. The BT620 cannot be connected with two mobile phones simultaneously.

Linky

So I'ts looking doable to use a phone and pandora simultaniously I guess.. Now I just need to figure a phone (Now I have an Iphone wich will be sold as soon as I have P in my hands ) wich can keep 2 connections alive simultaniously a data one and a voice one