Control pandora with android-phone for music-playback. Possible?


lomaxx

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Sep 22, 2008
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I decided to give mpd (music player demon) another go on my linux-pc. The configuration was a bit of fiddling (as often in Linux), but now that it works it does it's job very well (as often in Linux). The most interesting part is that there are clients for android-phones, which let you control the mpd, like stop,start, volume adjust, skip song, ... but also playlist-editing and some more things.


It would be rather nice if something like that could be achieved by using an android-phone and the Pandora. I'm thinking about a setup where you connect the Pandora to some large speakers on some private party (where you can trust the visitors in not stealing your Pandora or the SDCards) and sitting close to a campfire with your android-phone and handling song-requests of your guests or your own favorite songs - with the rest of the music-hardware standing further away.


The Pandora should be able to establish a WLAN-connection with the phone without further hardware, i.e. act as wlan-station, right?


Of course other setups are possible as well, where you carry the Pandora with you (as client, e.g. with "ncmpcpp") and connect some other hardware to the amplifier running as mpd-server. But for now using the Pandora as Wlan-station and player-server is the most interesting one for me. Note that I don't want to stream mp3s over the wlan, just send control-input/output.


So what's the situation on that topic? Would porting mpd be much of an effort? Are there other very similar solutions available already, for example through other already ported musicplayers?


Oh, and while I'm at it I will hijack my own thread and ask a somewhat related question:


Does it already work (software-wise) to connect the Pandora to car-soundsystems via bluetooth (more or less automatically when entering the car) and play the music (mp3s) stored on the Pandora's SD-card? Just like it is possible to do with smartphones. If so, what steps do i need to do? I never did that with a smartphone myself either, but know that it's not that complicated there.
 
In theory this should be possible:

  • first thing should be to get the WLAN connection up and running. Network Mananager provides the possibility to create a WLAN Network -But I can't tell wether this works or not - my Pandora always freezes after creating one - But maybe there is already a wireless infrastructure that could be used for that ?
  • Second thing would be to bring mpd to the Pandora. This could be done via the angstrom repo and the included opkg client, but is not recommended. I suggest to start a alternative installation from SD, this could either be the Current System via SD Installer, Slackware ,panDebian, ArchLinux (don't have links for the last two though)
 
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The VNC-solution is not what I'm thinking of. But it should work, right.


Seems like there is no closely related solution currently available. So i will try around sooner or later. Thanks for the feedback.
 
Got some partial success. I didn't manage to setup a wlan-hotspot with the pandora, but:


I downloaded the mpd-sourcecode,


unpacked it,


launched the c/c++ development tools (pnd),


changed to the unpack-dir,


ran "./configure"


ran "make"


ran "sudo make install".


Then i copied over my mpd-configuration, change some things, started mpd and connected the Pandora and an android-phone to the same wlan-network. I was able to control mpd with mpdroid.


The only problem is that most supported input-plugins where not recognized due to missing libraries. Only ogg was being played. mp3, flac and other formats were not.


So for someone with a little porting knowledge it should be not much of a hassle to gift us with a full working mpd-port offering much more formats. ;)


The biggest issue for the above mentioned setup is how to setup the Pandora as a hotspot, that the phone can connect to.
 
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I haven't personally tried these, but maybe it's worth trying experiment with the WebUIs of XBMC and VLC, both available for the pandora? Those work fairly well on PC.
 
Little update: got flacs and mp3s and id3tag-support running. So together with with oggs that makes three different fileformats for now. Adjusting the Pandoras volume from the android-phone now works too. That needed a little config-file-modification. Sidplay-support is currently bugging me, but I will hope to get that going. modplug-support and maybe some others plugins are on my list as well.


However, for now I am just building all these libraries with the c/c++-devtool-pnd and installing them directly to my outdated hotfix-Pandora-os. It's unbelievable how long that already keeps me busy. Would be so fast if i only knew enough about the backgrounds to be sure what I should be doing. ;) Anyway, putting this all into a separate directory (or pnd) without installing all libraries will take me even more time. Hopefully I have the patience to get this to a release-worthy result some day.
 
Little update: got flacs and mp3s and id3tag-support running. So together with with oggs that makes three different fileformats for now. Adjusting the Pandoras volume from the android-phone now works too. That needed a little config-file-modification. Sidplay-support is currently bugging me, but I will hope to get that going. modplug-support and maybe some others plugins are on my list as well.


However, for now I am just building all these libraries with the c/c++-devtool-pnd and installing them directly to my outdated hotfix-Pandora-os. It's unbelievable how long that already keeps me busy. Would be so fast if i only knew enough about the backgrounds to be sure what I should be doing. ;) Anyway, putting this all into a separate directory (or pnd) without installing all libraries will take me even more time. Hopefully I have the patience to get this to a release-worthy result some day.
Nice, but if you aren't patient enough, release everything anyway - maybe someone will pick it up
 
So far I am still patient enough and it seems to pay off. With having more time at the weekend, I spend the whole afternoon on this topic and managed to successfully compile in:


- sidplay2-support (which also offers songlength-database-support)


- modplug-support


- zzip-support (so you can browse through zip-packed files containing sids or mods)


The complete list of available and non-available options so far are as follows:


########### MPD CONFIGURATION ############


Archive support:


(-bzip2) (-ISO9660) (+ZIP)


Client support:


(+IPv6) (+TCP) (+UNIX Domain Sockets)


File format support:


(-AAC) (+C64 SID) (-FFMPEG) (+FLAC) (-FluidSynth) (-GME) (-libsndfile)


(-MikMod) (+MODPLUG) (+MAD) (-MPG123) (-MP4) (-Musepack)


(-OggTremor) (+OggVorbis) (-WAVE) (-WavPack) (-WildMidi)


Other features:


(-libsamplerate) (+inotify) (-SQLite)


Metadata support:


(+ID3)


Playback support:


(+ALSA) (-FFADO) (+FIFO) (+File Recorder) (+HTTP Daemon) (-JACK)


(-libao) (-Media MVP) (+OSS) (-OpenAL) (-OS X) (-Pipeline)


(-PulseAudio) (-ROAR) (-SHOUTcast) (-Solaris) (-WinMM)


Streaming encoder support:


(+FLAC) (-LAME) (+Ogg Vorbis) (-TwoLAME) (+WAVE)


Streaming support:


(-CDIO_PARANOIA) (+CURL) (-Despotify) (-Last.FM) (-Soundcloud)


(+MMS) (+SOUP)


##########################################


Maybe I will also try to compile other features as well, although I'm starting to become unsure which of them are of higher priority.


Also i successfully compiled "ncmpc" a console-based (text-based) client. "mpc" (a command-line-player) might also be interesting (e.g. for setting up hotkey-commands) and should hopefully be easy portable.


Last but not least I started to put everything needed to run the whole thing (binaries/libraries/some scripts) into a directory and configured everything so that it runs on any Pandora (not just mine with full installed libraries). I tested it by booting from NAND instead from my SD-card and it seems to work. I hope it will also run on systems with the latest HotFix installed. I plan to release a tarball that weekend so it can be tested.


Regarding a direct connection between the Pandora and an Smart-phone in order to run MPDroid: I didn't manage to achieve that. Both - adhoc-connections and setting up the Pandora as hotspot - does not seem to work. I can start wlan-tethering on the phone and connect the Pandora to the phone, but that's not what i want.


Some Linux-HotSpot-HowTos mention the command "iwconfig" and running "iwconfig wlan0 mode Master", but the master-option is not available on the Pandora. I guess the driver simply does not support it. If someone is curious he/she can try it as root under SuperZaxxon. If not it's OK too. I guess I will switch to the new OS soon anyway.


So much for now.
 
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nice, keep up the good work.Unfortunately you are right about the driver not supporting adhoc connections - Ed mentioned it a while back in the 3.2 kernel issue thread
 
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