Vrette | # 11 | 2008-05-26, 02:15 | Report

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 | # 12 | 2008-05-26, 03:57 | Report

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 | # 13 | 2008-05-26, 08:12 | Report

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 | # 14 | 2008-06-11, 23:15 | Report

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 | # 15 | 2008-06-12, 11:49 | Report

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 | # 16 | 2008-06-12, 14:14 | Report

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 | # 17 | 2008-06-12, 20:06 | Report

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.

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

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 | # 18 | 2008-07-09, 21:55 | Report

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 | # 19 | 2008-07-11, 12:44 | Report

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