Best program to listen to music n800?
 

i want to use my n800 as an mp3 player, which program is the best and more comfortable if i have hundreds of mp3s.

thanks

Re: Best program to listen to music n800?
 

1. Canola - easiest and very stable player
2. Kagu - nice kinetic scrolling (like the iTouch) but crashes alot
3. UKMP - my favorite player IMHO, sometimes it freezes

Re: Best program to listen to music n800?
 

I am sorry to say this, and I am sure almost everyone might disagree with me, but I find the default media player that comes with N800 to be the best one. It will the perfect one for me if only it supported creating playlists and remembering my preference of "Repeat" and "Shuffle" settings between sessions.

Canola is probably the second best player but it doesn't support creating playlists either, and I couldn't find the 'repeat' or 'shuffle' option if it is there at all. I was also not able to play media streamed through TVersity server in Canola though it played fine in the default media player, but I am in the minority here because lots of people on the Internet have confirmed that Canola plays shared media quite well.

The above two can play both audio and video files. I might be using older versions of the above players, so if have made a mistake, I am sure somebody will correct me.

UKMP and Kagu are Audio-only. Both have horrible user interface(except kinetic scrolling) if you ask me but many people seem to like it. UKMP takes forever to load on my tablet and I can't uninstall it without attempting several times and can't install a new version without uninstalling the older one.

I find these two players to be in a complete mess at this time but both look so damn good that I keep wasting many hours in trying to sort out their issues :D

I end up using Kilikali most of the time for the simple reason that it has the BEST support for creating and using the playlists.

Re: Best program to listen to music n800?
 

Being a bit of a Linux old foggee (I think of myself as a purest) I really get into using xmms. It just does what I ask, no more no less.

Re: Best program to listen to music n800?
 

I kind of agree with you. Even though UKMP and Kagu look good, I think once you have more than a few dozen albums, their usability dramatically drops. Plus they are written in python... Heavy, slow to load... Think Sun Java on windows machine, and you'll know why it is better to stay away from python; which incidentally makes me very worried about the new version of Canola.

I wish there was a simple directory based player, which only does music, fast, efficiently, and well. Enough of those tag based classifications.

Re: Best program to listen to music n800?
 

Yup. An Irfan View for the N***'s, if you will. :)

Re: Best program to listen to music n800?
 

Another vote for the default media player. It does what you want and is nice and simple.

Re: Best program to listen to music n800?
 

Let it go. The code is filled with bugs and security holes all over the place.

Re: Best program to listen to music n800?
 

I agree, the default media player is plain, boring interface but efficient. Canola is my second; awesome interface, but I have found some weird things, maybe in next releases will be fixed. p.e., I don't know why you don't have in each screen a close button and minimize button, I mean you have to go back over and over to exit the program...Maybe I'm missing something, but did'nt found that option. But I love Canola for Podcast listening.

Re: Best program to listen to music n800?
 

I vote for the default player, but it would be nice for it to use the kinetic scrolling from the Miaouw library and some album art. Otherwise it does a lot from a simple interface.

Re: Best program to listen to music n800?
 

Just press the "escape" key for some seconds.

Does anybody know if Canola can use the internet radio stations I have saved in the old mediaplayer? Seems I have to enter everything again....

Re: Best program to listen to music n800?
 

While I am finding this discussion very interesting, and useful in the abstract, my choice is limited to Kagu in that I listen to my music with Bluetooth stereo headphones, which the other media players don't for now permit. For the present Kagu is additionally my choice in that it has so many useful features as well as a team of dedicated developers behind it. However, many of those features are annoyingly imperfect, a situation which I trust will gradually be remedied over time. Yet, as generally pleased as I am with Kagu, if the new N800 firmware update incorporates, or can easily be made to accommodate, the use of Bluetooth stereo headphones for other media players, I may reluctantly have to rethink my choice.

Re: Best program to listen to music n800?
 

(OT aside) I don't think you should worry about that. Most of the startup time and memory usage of Python apps in Maemo come from the loading of PyGTK, the Python bindings to the native graphics toolkit for Hildon (and Gnome), or sometimes pyGame, which does the same for SDL. These are indeed slow and greedy.

The graphics engine for the new Canola will be based on EFL (the Enlightenment libraries), which is compact and very fast. The Python bindings for that engine have been created by the INdT team, specially for the tablets, also with speed and memory footprint in mind.

I expect that Canola V2 will not "feel" like a classic Python app at all. If you try out the two available demos (Edje App Launcher and Edje Virtual Keyboard), they start and run quite fast, you wouldn't guess they're scripted with Python without being told.

I agree with that. On my desktop I use mostly "1by1", something similar would be just fine.

Re: Best program to listen to music n800?
 

While we're on the topic - is any of the music players able to remember the last played track and position in it? I'm listening to podcasts a lot and not having to remember where I finished last would be great.
I know Kagu has this in its TODO list but it's keeps being postponed. How about Canola, UKMP or the default media player? Anybody knows?

Re: Best program to listen to music n800?
 

I just installed UKMP and Kaku yesterday - and while the UKMP GUI is very nice - it doesnt bring in Album art for unknown albums (non-english) that I have. Kagu on theother had did it much better . Also the user interface of Kagu is better I feel. Ultimately I am sticking with Kagu for my music player needs. The kinetic scrolling is really nice.

I particular (about Kagu) I like that there is an exit button to exit straight out of the app - I canb control volumen from within Kagu itself, nice colours-sotthing on the eyes, inertial scrolling is good and some nice settings to choose from. Overall a nice user interface.

The built in app is simple and is also good - in the functional sence.

Re: Best program to listen to music n800?
 

I will love this. Even the default media player doesn't allow folder-browsing, or playing an entire folder. (Correction: kilikali allows folder based playback.)

I can select by folder when playing streamed media through a UPnP server but can't do the same for local mp3s. We don't tag all our songs with Artist names(there may be more than 15 for a single album), so supported tagging methods only create confusion.

@tomas.rollo I can't think of even a desktop media player that remembers the last played position of media files(other than DVDs) except Miro. Does iTunes remember the last played position of podcasts? Current media players for N800 don't remember even the last played album/playlist except for Kilikali.

Re: Best program to listen to music n800?
 

You can also tap on the graphic icon on the top-left side of the screen to directly jump to one of the top menus. For example. when playing music, there will be a graphic icon which may look like a speaker. Tap on it and you will go to "Music" section directly.

Re: Best program to listen to music n800?
 

xmms!!
:D

Humm I wonder why it's in debian stable then... I didn't know debian stable was full of bugs and security holes. Maybe you should contact and help debian developpers? :rolleyes:

Every software has bugs.. xmms is supposed to be not maintained anymore but the snapshot in debian is very stable.

xmms2, audacious, bmpx (comparable) are to my mind still beta.

Re: Best program to listen to music n800?
 

XMMS is in Debian stable because everything in Debian stable is old and crusty, not because it's actually stable.

Re: Best program to listen to music n800?
 

I wouldn't mind the default player, however it doesn't play ogg, which is just silly (and has been discussed elsewhere).

If anyone knows how to make it play ogg vorbis files (particularly the OS 2008 version - I've decided to leave that on my N800 in the end), I'd love to know.

Otherwise, I may code up a player in Python and use mplayer as a backend, or perhaps mpd. Both will play ogg vorbis files (and virtually any other music format) with very low CPU usage.

For the time being I'm using mmpc and mpd (running on the tablet). It has some challenges when changing playlists (the mmpc interface needs some work) but its very usable for my purposes, which tend to be:

- start up playing a large playlist (1000's)
- put it on random
- leave it alone

Folder-based playing should be a feature in all players but isn't. An ideal player would allow me play all music in a directory and subdirectories with a minimum of clicks and also of course allow for easy selection of playlists.

I could do without album covers and the like. Optional on the fly (but cached) lyric lookups on the other hand would be handy from time to time.

(edit, more detail added)

Re: Best program to listen to music n800?
 

I seem to remember someone saying that installing ogg support and then renaming your oggs to .mp3 was enough.

And yes, it is silly.

Re: Best program to listen to music n800?
 

iTunes does remember the last position for podcasts, at least on the Mac side.

Re: Best program to listen to music n800?
 

Actually xmms did just release an update. It's become a lot like utils, not much left to do.

As for zerojay, it doesn't have to be 'new code' to be good (in truth new code usually has as many if not more bugs), second I've been searching and the newest xmms specific security alert was 2005. In 2006 I found alerts related to the codecs (affecting windows too) And in 2007 SuSE had a compiler bug that affected a number of apps.

If you have more, that you have found, I'm sure there are a lot of distro's that want to know. Xmms's biggest 'problem' is it allows you to keep using the system for other things while listening to music. Not like winmobile or iPhone where it's all single threaded.

Re: Best program to listen to music n800?
 

renaming files doesnt do the job - the default player still trips over the file format.

Re: Best program to listen to music n800?
 

My biggest problem with XMMS is that it cannot display non-ascii characters in music titles etc.

Re: Best program to listen to music n800?
 

For music, I use Kagu(mmm, kinetic scrolling is so tasty) and kilikali for my .ogg's.
I used Canola for a while, and it's solid. I loaded up UKMP and didn't care much for it for some equally intangible and arbitrary reason.

I still check out the new versions of all the media players, just to see if my preferences change with the updates. They're all impressive in their own right, and for being products of the community, even more so, IMO.

Does Kagu play .ogg? It sees them fine, even fetches covers and band images for them, but silence is all I get when I try to play them. I assume that they aren't currently supported, but that the player is aware that it's a common audio filetype, anyway. If they work renamed .mp3, I'd rather not bother, lol.

Re: Best program to listen to music n800?
 

I installed the OGG support package (from one of the repos) and then I had installed Kagu.
I seem to be able to play my ogg files that I had burned previosly just fine. Copied them over from my desktop to the Nokia N810 and it plas in Kagu absolutely fine.

Did not need to rename the files or anything silly like that.

Re: Best program to listen to music n800?
 

Hmm, I'll have to mess around with it. I haven't put much (read: any) effort into getting them working with kagu, since kilikali works fine in a pinch.