Pandora - The Music Player


logokas

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Since just about every other area of discussion seems to be covered by now, here's something moderately new:

Most of you will appreciate the high battery life and will put it into use as the ultimate portable music player. Forget your iPods and MP3/4 players, this is going to be next generation platform for portable music.

However, with great power should come appropriate eye candy. Thus, this particular topic is for the users to discuss what kind of players are available/usable/personal favourites out there in the vast internet.

We know of the basic stuff of course. VLC is a possible port, and there's also the standard XMMS, Amarok, etc

I, in particular, am looking for a fullscreen solution music player that would make full use of the graphical display and do something awesome with it. Something along the visual style of ProteinDS would no doubt look great on the large Pandora screen, and the touch enabled goodness makes it only better.

Anybody know of a fullscreen audio player that'd fit within the requirements of Pandora? Or perhaps one that could be turned into one with sufficient coding? It could very well be that there are none, and that such a player would have to be made from pretty much scratch. If so, what are the possibilities?

Speak your mind!
 
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I've used VLC, XMMS, Audacious, mplayer, etc, but none of them have a fullscreen interface like the one you describe. I'm sure one could be made, but just in case you were unaware: the ProteinDS author has expressed his interest.
 
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Yeah, i saw that. But ProteinDS is specificly for DJs and the like, a music mixing program rather than an actual player.

So it pretty much looks like that if we want a fullscreen music player, we have to pretty much make one ourselves?

This could mean the beginning of a Pandora specific music player.
 
That'd be pretty awesome. Actually a better idea would be to fork Audacious and just add a fullscreen feature and a new theme; it's a great music player. Even better, however, would be a fullscreen interface for mplayer, that way we could have a movie mode.
 
Do you use Ubuntu? Debian should work similarly:

sudo apt-get install audacious gnome-mplayer

Then just run audacious and gmplayer respectively. Mplayer's gnome frontend is much further from what you desire; the point here is that frontends can be written that utilize mplayer behind the scenes for playing/displaying content.
 
Sorry, but currently the closest thing to Linux running on my machine would be a liveCD running in a virtual machine.

I'm a die-hard windows guy.
 
gp32rich said:
Anything that doesn't need a display! :p

Keeping the battery long! ;)
there are so many music-players for linux, I won't make a list ^^

bmpx would probably suite the pandora well as a desktop application.
For Fullscreen there are media-centers like elisa, mythtv, freevo and stuff like that. Surch them in youtube to get an impression of theyr usability.
Mythtv is already in Angstrom and I will probably use that, as I can use it as a client for my vdr for tv in the garden ^^
 
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What we need is Banshee, so we can have music libraries. I won't be able to cope without a music library.
 
I've been waiting for an handheld like the pandora for so long that i can't beleive it's about to be released. I've missed the first preorders, but i'll wait 2009 to buy my own one...

Speaking about music player, i've read that we can expect a battery life of 100 Hrs playing music. Is it realistic or is it just a dream of the developpers ? I guess that to reach this, we need to switch off everything but the music player processor.

I don't know how it will be possible because i'm not a developper at all, but we need a player that can both
- play music with an eye candy fullscreen display
- or play music only (switching off the screen, main processor, wifi, bluetooth...) to reach the 100Hours


Mplayer is used in a lot of big projects like xbmc (http://xbmc.org/) because you can build the GUI you want over it. Speaking of that... xbmc would be a great port on pandora ;) (if only i could help :( ...)
 
XBMC looks huge, but it has has massive eye candy, which is what i'm looking for. Every other player was just bleh. Freevo looked like something more like it, MythTV is obviously meant for TV streaming, not music, and elisa is such a common word that i was not able to find elisa the music player with one quick search.

So there still isn't any sign of an actual music player devoted to fullscreen, touchscreen friendly controls and info, plus some nice eye candy.

I'm gonna have a look around, see if i can find something.
 
I'd just like a MP3 player that can handle huge amounts of files. Since that is the hardest part for most mp3 players managing 100000+ files. Id like my pandora to access files that are on my network HD so it should also be able to play files from a smb shared drive.
 
The only reason i might use this as a portable music player is that i may not be arsed to carry the pando and my mp3 player around. With the right software it might make a slightly awkward but passable replacement. I don't see "ultimate" there by a long shot.
 
Pandora can be a really good music player (large battery, big screen > good interface..) but don't compare it too a basic ipod because it's not the same usage : the ipod is way smaller.
You can't make sport with a pandora in your pocket ;)
 
I was at one point working on a media player with the pandora in mind, but when I started my game, it got put off. It was going to be similar to oldplay (but not oldplay) in that it supported a crap-ton of formats. Unfortunately it probably will never be released.
 
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