Newbie N900 user here. I'm having problems specifying songs to play.
On my main (linux) computer I have a huge number of music files (oggs/flacs/mp3/wavs) most of them having no useful embedded metadata. Instead, they are stored in an elaborate directory structure with help from symlinks.
Now, I've copied over part of that structure to .sounds on the N900, but the media player doesn't seem to know what a directory is and aggregates files from all directories in a single "unknown" blob.
I also tried playing via the File Manager, which knows what a directory is, but it won't let me "play" a directory, only individual files one by one.
Are there other media players that will let me play a directory, or software that can make a playlist from a directory?
You can also make simple playlist files (ls *.mp3 > myplaylist.m3u) for each directory. Open it in file manager and the playlist gets imported in mediaplayer, then save the playlist in media player with a meaningful name and you'll be able to reopen it when selecting "playlist" in the mediaplayer music menu.
I've always found the crawler/meta data approach to media playback to be a generally awful approach to media playback.
Mediabox probably does the best job of directory oriented content playback on the N900. My biggest gripe with it is that pausing and then un-pausing the audio often times causes it to restart playback from the beginning of a file. Extremely annoying when listening to audio-books.
Canola is another option for file/oriented playback. IMO it was the best overall media player for the N800/N810, but suffered from a lot of bugs when you tried to run it on the N900. Thankfully, a programmer named Andrei Mirestean has been working on updating it for use on the N900 as part of Google's "Summer of Code." Expect to see a new version out shortly. Here is his most recent post on the subject:
I've always found the crawler/meta data approach to media playback to be a generally awful approach to media playback.
It is. At first. Especially if you don't have your tags sorted out. It took me almost a year to edit tags on my 400GB collection. But if you have all tags then it's much easier then browsing through folders. And my folders/albums were really well organized. The problem is that most player can't handle well with such huge collection. But guayadeque does it very well.
Several useful replies! I found that symfonie seems more polished than EasyPlayer (audio doesn't stutter when screen goes into powersave-mode and it can also handle portrait mode). Both apps use too much vertical spacing between items though, so very few files fit on the screen.
Didn't know m3u files were so simple you could make them with a simple "ls". Smart idea!
