Pandora/pianobar GUI - maemo.org

bobbarker | # 1 | 2010-01-02, 03:25 | Report

http://maemo.org/community/brainstor...-pianobar_gui/

Originally Posted by

Pandora is an online radio service similar to last.fm. They are fairly 'closed source' and don't have an API available (unliked last.fm). A program called pianobar has been written which gives a CLI interface to Pandora. It has been ported to the N900 already and works rather well (much less resource hungry than running the flash based webpage).

What is needed is a simple "finger friendly" GUI wrapper to the CLI pianobar program.

This is a fairly simple project. Someone with the proper experience could bang this out in a weekend.

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fatalsaint | # 2 | 2010-01-18, 04:35 | Report

I just wanna voice my support for this. I love Pandora Radio and would love to see a good widget/GUI app show up for the N900. I use pianobar and it's decent, but annoying to have a terminal open for it.. a GUI would make things simpler. It seems to me PyQT4 could handle this.. in order to make it (hopefully) support the next Maemo release as well (which will be more QT based).

Last edited by fatalsaint; 2010-01-18 at 04:50.

bbns | # 3 | 2010-01-18, 05:12 | Report

I am second to this. :-) Then I could simply ditch my iPod Touch. =P

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ViciousXUSMC | # 4 | 2010-01-18, 06:44 | Report

Yeah I was happy to "know" the N900 supported flash so I could just use Pandora from the browser, I had no idea how dissapointed I would be in the flash performance of the N900 though so a dedicated application is definitly needed.

I know iphone/itouch has one and heck my bosses blueray player even has one. Its a great service and a good way to find new music so I hope we get a iphone quality application for it soon.

I do not know how good pianobar is, if its already good then we just need a simple script or gui to lauch it and run it I suppose.

fatalsaint | # 5 | 2010-01-18, 06:59 | Report

Pianobar is actually very impressive.. but not the most intuitive in creating/editing stations. it's possible.. but it's all done with key shortcuts.

next is easy enough "n", and thumbs up and down is +/-.. but beyond that it gets a little more indepth.

Pianobar supports a FIFO file, according to the man page, that you have to manually create with mkfifo and then you can control it with something like:

Code:

echo -n 'n' >> ~/.config/pianobar/ctl

As an example. Also, python has a popen ability to open a read/write to a binary command... so I'm thinking this can't be too difficult. I might try and code it but I don't have an N900.. just the SDK.

Also, the pianobar has not been packaged yet it doesn't look like which is extremely easy. I'm beating my head on a desk right now I don't have the money for a real device. I may just package it into a deb and send it to intervigil who started the pianobar thread to test it.

The other thing about pianobar... it allows you to give it a last.fm username/pass and it will send that song title to last.fm as a recently played if you allow it to play past a configurable percentage (default 50%). Pretty cool.

intervigil | # 6 | 2010-01-18, 07:20 | Report

Packaging is on my todo list, although unfortunately not a very high priority given how busy work has made me the last few weeks. If you want to write/package pianobar-related stuff I'd love to test it out for you.

ViciousXUSMC | # 7 | 2010-01-18, 07:28 | Report

I'll be more than happy to test stuff for bugs and try to help with developing from a tester standpoint but I have absolutely no coding ability.

I'll sit tight till we have something in the repo that I can download.

fatalsaint | # 8 | 2010-01-18, 18:55 | Report

Originally Posted by intervigil View Post

Packaging is on my todo list, although unfortunately not a very high priority given how busy work has made me the last few weeks. If you want to write/package pianobar-related stuff I'd love to test it out for you.

I made a package in your thread:
http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=38786

I would be careful with this as I haven't had any ability to truly test it other than my scratchbox SDK.

fatalsaint | # 9 | 2010-01-21, 15:16 | Report

Well, it works. I am absolutely in no way a designer. I fail horribly at anything regarding buttons, layout, or pointy-clicky crap.

I am calling on UI designers here to help me out... I can redesign this to work with whatever you can get me. All I need is a graphic showing what the layout should look like, and separate graphics for the individual items (like buttons and what-not).

Obviously the intent with this UI is to have the top and bottom labels be Song Artist and Song Title.. and the big textbox in the middle will eventually (I am thinking) be replaced by an updating graphic of the album that the song comes from. But that'll take a while as I need to learn how to interface with one of the free online song-search databases like FreeDB.

I am by no means attached to this design, as you can tell it's extremely rudimentary and took me probably an hour of total time (including tweaking) in getting it situated right. The hardest part was learning QT Designers layout buttons in order to make the whole thing expandable.

Of course the buttons are intended to be little graphics like an actual square for stop, not my totally awesome [ ]

... and a real triangle for play - I mean, I know |> is revolutionary and all.. but....

Anyway... consider this a proof of concept. It works.. I still need a whole interface for settings.. you need username and password at the least, then I also want to include the last.fm username/password scrobbling since it's a simple configuration change. I actually intend it to directly control the /home/user/.config/pianobar/config file and write it with settings from the UI. Obviously this means you can't have different configs for pianobar and the PyQT4 app (I'm currently referring to it as pyPandora - I'm so imaginative, right?! - but due to copyright issues I don't think I'll be able to release it under that) unless you manually move the configs around every time.

In any case.. here's a pretty (ugly) proof of concept for you guys to look at. And really.. I think it's pretty obvious: I need UI help!!!!!!!!!! .

Attached Images

Last edited by fatalsaint; 2010-01-21 at 15:20.

Thorprime | # 10 | 2010-01-21, 23:42 | Report

Not sure of the feasibility, but here is a pretty fast mockup of a simply (N900 centric I admit) GUI. Might require using QT5 rather than qt4 also, but at the very least, I can hand you some non-ascii icons :P

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