[Canola] Canola2 Beta9: playing FLAC files

[maillaxa]

Hi,

This is the requested steps to follow in order to "force" canola see your FLAC files with latest Beta.

1. Start canola and go to the Settings panel (Menu->Media Library-> Audio Folders) uncheck every folders and close canola.
2. Delete your old canola database located in /home/user/.canola/canola.db
3. Start canola and check only the folders containing FLAC files (see step 1)
4. Go to your "My Music" and tadam ! There are entries for your FLAC files.

Thanks to chenca and handfulOf_nothin on #canola for the help even more since I told them that canola was not the kind of program I would use given its features and limitations (from my own needs). I am not the target but since it can play my files, I will stick with it (in windowed mode nah ;)).

Happy listening

[Vrette]

Any luck streaming FLAC via UPNP? That is my holy grail... and I can't get it to work except via Slimserver, and I want to use my Twonky server instead.

Thanks

[handful]

Well. Vrette... the problem mainly here is that FLAC is really heavy to stream it with quality will quite hard : / I don't know if the quality will be good :/
I will see if we can test it!

MArcelo

[Vrette]

That would be great. I was able to stream flac via the Nokia mediastreamer and by installing dsp-flac (https://garage.maemo.org/projects/dsp-flac/) but it would occasionally hang because for some reason the combination just would not play certain songs. I think it had to do with the way the bit rate of the flac file, or something like that, but I never dug in deep to figure it out. Also, the Squeezebox is able to stream flac via wireless G, so it may not be as bad as you think (unless the CPU in the N800 just isn't up to it).

[handful]

Vrette: that's the point :) cpu is on it's limit, add Canola to the equation heeheh :)
But, the hang is probably out of memory but let's see what we can do. Unfortunately this is really a more specific media case, and we have some things higher in the priority queue

Marcelo

[Vrette]

I thought that might be the case, but the size of the file didn't seem to matter. In other words, it would play a 20MB file, but not a 15MB file.

Anyway, it would be a great feature if it is doable. FLAC is gaining popularity since storage is getting cheaper by the minute, and FLAC files do sound superior to MP3 (to some people).


the hang is probably out of memory but let's see what we can do.
Marcelo

[handful]

Yeah Vrette: but still a very "niche" user pool, inside the user pool. And to be honest, most of users in recent user testings are not able to differentiate sound quality between the mp3 in 192 and the flac (probably because they don'
t have good ear phones etc)

But we will try doing as we can, but this difference between the files Chenca (who did the upnp was explaining) exists, and as we cannot guarantee that the user has the support for playing flacs installed it's really hard to support it : /

Maybe, this will be the need of a third party plugin just for the FLAC users. If a developer think can do it we can help!

Marcelo

[Vrette]

I completely understand. Anything you could do would be greatly appreciated.

[maillaxa]

Second this :)

[st5150]

I'm a huge flac fan, but I have to agree with handful. There is virtually nothing to be gained by having flac on the N810. The N810's headphone out is so weak, I can't imagine why anyone would want to use their NIT to stream flac files. You'll need an amp to drive any worthy headphones with it, and to top it off, I haven't been extremely impressed with the sound quality from the N810. I haven't done extensive listening tests, but it seems to roll off the lows and highs prematurely. Take your flac files and rip them as ogg -q3. Enjoy the space savings and good music :) -q6 if you think you can tell the difference. Anything more is just a waste imho.

[Vrette]

The issue issue has more to do with fact that all of my music is in FLAC and I don't want to make duplicate mp3 copies of everything. Right now I use Media Monkey to convert my FLAC files to mp3 files for my ipod on the fly, but I would like access to all of music via the N800. One way I use it is to stream music wirelessly to the N800 attached to a Denon receiver via the N800 headphone jack.

[maillaxa]

I am like you. I do not want to waste ... time duplicating my FLAC files into nuemrous extra formats for the sake of it. If I can find a tool (under GNU/linux) that would transcode my FLAC files into ogg vorbis files, that would be ok. The problem is that I did not find anything that can sync with the N810.

[st5150]

I think Grip can do what you want. Ripping your flac collection as -q3 ogg won't take up much room at all, relative to the flac file size. Maybe 10% of your existing collection size.

http://www.nostatic.org/grip/

Foobar will do it under windoze:

http://www.foobar2000.org/

Not to mention you'll easily be able to fit a bunch of -q3 ogg files onto your NIT's SD card for when you're on the go.

[vaiodon]

I'm working from exactly the same position as Vrette & Maillaxa, FLAC is my primary -"gold copy" - format & I'm reluctant to have to think about transcoding to another format.
I've played my FLACs with partial success on my N800 with Canola but the file & playlist management is severely impaired and that's something I've brought up on another post.
I'd really like to see Canola implement an MT-DAAP client as my home setup is is built around Firefly Media Server hosting & streaming FLACs out to varous clients ( it does this as a WAV stream ). Alternately, maybe Firefly might get uPnP functionality first.
However, Canola has competition in the maemo space - I tried Mediabox Media Center and It does FLACs pretty good. It listed my albums as found in the selected directories, it displayed artwork as per the thumbnails in the folders/embedded Images and read the playlist files. Only gripe so faaar is that it's not playing a playlist in track order.
Brazil (iNdT) & Germany (Martin Grimme) should get get together on media player dev to help each other out and deliver a blindingly great media tool.

[handful]

Hi Vaiodon!

Thanks for the feedback on FLAC. We are happy that there's competition :) and we are even more happier to see that our effort to promote python end up with a great application like mediabox, and even better it's one man's fight, so it's really standing out at least in the point we've defended it so hard: productivity :)

About the improvements, we are improving as much as we can each time, and the priorities are set on request numbers. As you may already know the forum is the biggest " published" door to requests, but the site's contact and feedback form generates the biggest number of complaints, bugs, etc. While it's really bad as 30-45% of people there don't place their email (killing further conversation / debugging) it's also true that I get actually a lot of request also there, that helps me in "ranking" requests.

Please, I am not placing FLAC or anyother non-mainstream format below the main stream ones, I'm not judging anyone's choice of codecs enconding... BUT:

FLAC is a really "special" way to store music, used by a really small percentage of our whole user base. So this is the biggest "multiplier" when ranking. While we would like to bring back DAAP support (one of our guys was responsible for the port of Dmap library that gives support to maemo to use DAAP shares) we do have the problem of resources now to do that, as we have only here in our small office 12 projects demanding full attention :/ (not justifying, it's just our habit of playing a clear game).

SO... We will keep improving it, unfortunately... slower than what we would like. Even being so I have already started a couple of university cooperation projects where some students will get scholarship to learn to develop for Maemo / Python etc, and as the first training is Maemo platform I think dmap is also a great thing to do with them. Of course it will take a little bit more than one of our experienced maemo devs would, but he will be able to code review and make sure the quality is nice.

In the end, at least one thing makes me happy: maemo still have choices to solve your problem (grimme's work) and I think he's really doing a great work to a lot of complaints about canola. So it's nice to see that we don't " agree " in several points, and thus we have solutions that really fits MORE people than if we were mere copies of each others. He places "select spot" on items, he scrolls the list on white solid background, he scroll a smaller area (thumbnails) all of this create a really faster and better scrolling effect for example than we have today :) but we are more experimenting, pushing boundaries, and sometimes (I admitted that here quite a few times) we push too much :))))

Anyways... I will contact you later to hear more about your use case. This is even more important, once I understand and describe it, I can reproduce it with the new guys, and try to figure out what is the best strategy to improve it

Marcelo

[tbrminsanity]

The only files I can't see via my UPNP drive is .mov files. All my .ogg files are visible and play beautifully. All I did was download the ogg support from Maemo's site.

[pycage]

Hi Vaiodon!
Thanks for the feedback on FLAC. We are happy that there's competition :) and we are even more happier to see that our effort to promote python end up with a great application like mediabox, and even better it's one man's fight, so it's really standing out at least in the point we've defended it so hard: productivity :)


I am happy to be competition. :)
MediaBox is a real fun project for me, and I think developing in the OpenSource scene (where it's about fun and not money) is much more fun when having good competion (well, Canola is not really OpenSource, but it's a free and fun project for the INdT guys, too). In the end competition improves quality on both sides.
I think it would be real boring if there was only Canola, or only MediaBox.


In the end, at least one thing makes me happy: maemo still have choices to solve your problem (grimme's work) and I think he's really doing a great work to a lot of complaints about canola. So it's nice to see that we don't " agree " in several points, and thus we have solutions that really fits MORE people than if we were mere copies of each others.

I fully agree. That way the NITs can appeal to more people as media players.


He places "select spot" on items, he scrolls the list on white solid background, he scroll a smaller area (thumbnails) all of this create a really faster and better scrolling effect for example than we have today :) but we are more experimenting, pushing boundaries, and sometimes (I admitted that here quite a few times) we push too much :))))

Yup, pushing boundaries is fun! :)
I am amazed at how well Canola scrolls when considering they're scrolling with transparency and alpha blending.

Should we join efforts to work on a common media player? Well, IMHO (and Marcelo seems to think the same) this would not be the best option. Not every user prefers the same user interface. Some users like it simple and clean (the built-in media player), some users like eye candy (Canola), some users like building playlists (Kagu), some user like big cover art (UKMP), some users like their media to be accessible with just a few clicks (MediaBox), and some users don't even like a fancy GUI (mplayer, mpg123, etc.).
But nothing can be said against sharing code to avoid reinventing the wheel. Many media players on maemo are written in Python, which makes sharing easy.

[lhanneus]

why that news is not yet written on http://flac.sourceforge.net/ ???

Few portable devices can play flac, so I think it's a great improvment.

[handful]

Lhaneus : :)
We just added support for mplayer and flac on some of our components :) so mplayer is doing the magic.. we don't need credits for it. We are just "Friendly" with FLAC files... now :) mplayer does the dirty / heavy work!

BR

Marcelo