BREAKTHROUGH: play music while surfing possible

Asheboy · Post by **Asheboy** » Wed Jan 30, 2008 10:14 pm

I do love the human mind. Thank you for this great piece of thinking that seems so simple.

justlikethat · Post by **justlikethat** » Tue Feb 05, 2008 12:20 pm

iTouchMyself, I am pinching myself after reading your posts...Thanks a million for your out-of-the-box thinking...

Asimio · Post by **Asimio** » Sat Feb 09, 2008 8:06 am

Are there any FREE user-friendly pdf to image converters than anyone knows off?

I've been at it for so long, either their shareware or that they just don't work for me.

Flatsphere · Post by **Flatsphere** » Wed Feb 20, 2008 2:01 pm

find below a perl script to generate xspf for all folders and a menu.html file to play all of them.
.create dir /Data/xspf
.copy player.swf in /Data/xspf
.edit A605 mount point $pathA605 in the script to fit your mount point

it works as is on my box. it certainly needs some improvements but that's a starting point. You can now play all your music and surf at the same time.
please don't ask me for support.

Can someone please break this down for me. I understand the theory behind this. I dont know what to do to make it work for me. A mini 'dummys guide' would be fantastic! For example how to get this done on a windows box?

iTouchMyself · Post by **iTouchMyself** » Thu Feb 28, 2008 9:42 pm

Hi Flatsphere,

sorry I can't really help because I do not have any windows xp/vista/mac systems and that is the main reason why I declined support for the script.

Though it should not be too hard for other users here to change the parameters in the code to fit a default windows/mac.
Eventually compile it with the PAR module to generate an .exe so unexperienced users do not need to install perl.
Any volunteers?

Flatsphere · Post by **Flatsphere** » Sun Mar 02, 2008 3:06 am

I thought you might say that. I did do a bit of a google and when it offered to teach me how to install a perl module I figured that this might be a linux kinda thing.

I completely understand you not offering any kind of support, thanks for taking some time to give me an answer!

I will remain in hope that someone will take pity on us XP users in the future!

Much appreciated.

divx118 · Post by **divx118** » Sun Mar 02, 2008 11:10 am

Well if i will find some time this week I will write a little script for windows, it is not difficult to port the script to a ws script for windows.
If someone beats me and write it first just be my guest, because I can't promise if I will have time.

Maurice

Flatsphere · Post by **Flatsphere** » Wed Mar 05, 2008 11:49 am

Cheers divx118, I would very much appreciate it.
I will wait with baited breath!

divx118 · Post by **divx118** » Sun Apr 27, 2008 9:21 am

I just tried this to get it to work. The player loads and reads my playlist, but it doesn't play the mp3 files. I have the 1.8.03 firmware.

Anyone with 1.8.x have got this to work?
Or could it be the bitrate? I will try some files with lower bitrate.

I have some time this week and want to try this and then make an easy playlist builder for windows.

Maurice

divx118 · Post by **divx118** » Sun Apr 27, 2008 9:42 am

I have found it already it was the filename Music/Queensryche - Operation mindcrime/08 - Queensr├┐che - Suite Sister Mary - Operation- Mindcrime.mp3

I changed the ├┐ into a normal y and it works. I will check the code of the swf and see if there is a fix, but I doubt it.

Maurice

foxblock · Post by **foxblock** » Sun Apr 27, 2008 11:52 pm

hmm, I am no expert in flash programming terms and I never tried to make a flash-music-player, but I once made a presentation which loaded team-names (it was for a competition) out of a txt-file (and a normal m3u playlist is nothing more than that)...
the problem was that it did not load symbols like german-umlauts and I think your ├┐ falls into this category... well, long story short, the solution was to save the txt-file in unicode-encoding (can be done with notepad - just select it from a dropdown-menu in the save as-dialogue). After that it loaded all characters correctly

I hope this helps, but I am not quite sure if this also matters for this problem, because as far as I read also other file types (xspf?) are used here and I there are some things I do not understand at all...

foxblock out

divx118 · Post by **divx118** » Mon Apr 28, 2008 7:40 am

The xspf file is an xml file UTF-8 encoded so the reading of the file is not the problem it also displays the name correctly on the screen.
The problem lies in opening the mp3 file from the HD I still didn't look at that.

BTW the player and the source can be downloaded from http://musicplayer.sourceforge.net/ The source is included in the zip file when you download the Extended version 0.2.3
I am not a flash guy but understand the actionscript, because it is also very similar to javascript.
You gave me an idea. I think it is much easier to change the flash player so it can read m3u files. No hassling around with different playlists.
Now we only have the problem you can't choose the playlist.
I think the best solution for that is to make an inputbox so you only have to enter the name of the playlist.
What do you think?

Maurice

foxblock · Post by **foxblock** » Mon Apr 28, 2008 3:39 pm

divx118 wrote:The problem lies in opening the mp3 file from the HD

yeah this is a basic problem of Flash/ActionScript, because unlike Java/JavaScript it is not built to read (and much less write) files. I am not sure if this also applies to media-files, but I encountered the problem while working on my game a lot.

In Flash you can load txt-files, but unlike Delphi or C++ not line-by-line, no, the files (read: every line) have to look like

Code: Select all

variable_name=value

and after you loaded (LoadVariables() - see this or this) you have all the variables declared in the file imported to your flash-document. Thats it!

The only thing interesting here might be that you can use PHP/CGI or Perl-scripts as well to load the whole stuff (and it also its the only way apart from SharedObjects to save things to a local file), but I do not know any of these so I can't help here...

Well, there are two other possibilities:
1) You can load XML-files as Adobe included XML-reader class (called XMLConnector - specifications) and I think the Audio-Player uses this as XSPF-files are XML, but then we have the problem, that everybody here has m3u-playlists, so we would need a converter (is there any?)...
2) The MediaController component, but I don't know how well it is implemented and I think we would still have the playlist problem and we would have to build a new program, too

So I think it sounds easier to use "normal" m3u-playlists, but only in theory. In fact it would be very hard (if even possible - I doubt it) to implement, so we might have to stick with these darn XSPF-playlists (they don't appear to be so bad after all, do they? ^^)...

divx118 wrote:Now we only have the problem you can't choose the playlist.

Well, this might help, but I only had a short look at it and I don't know if it is suitable or how hard it would be to rewrite it so it does what we need (and to change these ugly colours

), but there should be a dozen things like this out there... This definitely would be easier than an input box (you always had to remember the name of your playlists)

I hope I could help a bit and provided some useful links

foxblock out

Edit: Just a quick edit,

I tried the MediaController/MediaPlayback and by accident discovered the Sound class... well all I have to say is, that the MediaController is highly useless for what we want to achieve, it can play mp3-files, but only mp3-files (according to the help) and has only a very limited amount of functions to access/control the file (no id3 -.-).
Secondly, the Sound class... it supplies some more functions (like id3 support), but has no interface attached so you would have to build it yourself (no big deal...), but as the MediaController it is also very limited (

- no album cover) and the id3-tags did not load correctly or not at all...

I still had no glance at the XSPF-player, but now I really want to know how they did it (what class did they use? are there any hidden functions I did not find...?), but I think I won't have time until tomorrow...

PS: I don't want to sound negative, but I think the best thing we can do is to build a m3u to XSPF-converter, because erverything else (Flash m3u support/embedding) will be hard to realize...

divx118 · Post by **divx118** » Mon Apr 28, 2008 11:59 pm

It is really not that hard to read an m3u file with actionscript it is just the same as an xml file only the parsing of the string you will have to do yourself. (the whole file will be readed into one string)
I have it almost working, but get called to work today (big problems) so I didn't finished it yet.
I hope I can leave tomorrow early from my job and do some more work on this.

Maurice

divx118 · Post by **divx118** » Tue Apr 29, 2008 6:51 pm

An update:

Well reading the m3u files made by the archos was a peace of cake. I have it working. Now changing the interface so it is easy crontrolable with the touchscreen and we will have a decent music player while browsing. or reading html e-books.
I looked at the directory browser you suggested, but don't you need a webserver for that?
I think I just implement an input field for a playlist and some predefined playlists like Rock, Pop etc

I just tested m3u playlists created by the archos, so no ext m3u files are supported yet.
Maybe it would be nice to get some info from the id tags, but i didn't look at that. BTW the xspf player is also using the sound class.
The album art could maybe be retrieved form the _arcthumb folder. I don't know if the browser can display ATF files I have to check that.

Maurice

foxblock · Post by **foxblock** » Wed Apr 30, 2008 1:29 pm

divx118 wrote:Well reading the m3u files made by the archos was a peace of cake.

phew, thanks for the info, it's an ease to hear that...
well, I did not know you could use the XML-class to load text-files like m3u playlist - you never stop learning

divx118 wrote:I looked at the directory browser you suggested, but don't you need a webserver for that?
I think I just implement an input field for a playlist and some predefined playlists like Rock, Pop etc

I still had no look at it (I had a little surgery lately and hardly could move, but now I have some time, so expect some more info soon), but I think it should be possible to edit it to read local directories... I still don't like the textfield version...

Edit: Forget it, you were right.. we need PHP to browse directories... so textfield wins

divx118 wrote:I just tested m3u playlists created by the archos, so no ext m3u files are supported yet.

Hmm, I am working on a playlist convertor (archos m3u <-> normal m3u) for some time now (well it's nearly finished, but I haven't done anything on it in the last 3 or 4 month...)

I would like to have a look at the code, so if you like to you can send it to me, maybe I also can help out with problems...

foxblock out

foxblock · Post by **foxblock** » Wed Apr 30, 2008 6:01 pm

sooo, if you are going to implement a text field I have some thing for you:

Intelligent edit

it's a simple thing I built - made quick and dirty, so it might need some optimization, but it works

what it does:
it is a ComboBox (pre-defined component, so the interface is not changeable and it's a bit slow - if you include it I can build another one with MC's) - so it is an edit-box with a drop-down menu, which remembers what you have entered.
All items (entered strings) are arranged alphabetically and it checks for double inputs, they are saved in an SharedObject (which appears to be pretty stable) and therefore loaded every time you restart the program.
Comments are included.

I think this would make it a bit easier, because you only have to remember the playlist name once and after that it can be selected from a list.

btw, currently the flash app does nothing - the text output is only for testing purposes

divx118 · Post by **divx118** » Wed Apr 30, 2008 7:25 pm

I am out of town now and writing this on my archos. I should be able to use a computer later tonight to log into my dev machine and copy the code for you. Normaly i have my notebook with me but it is currently in the repaircenter.
I will also look at the examle you posted.

Maurice

Waysid · Post by **Waysid** » Thu May 01, 2008 9:48 pm

Has anyone been able to get a flash music player running with the new 2.0x firmware? The flash app will run but I can't get it to read an mp3 file. If I use the app when my archos is plugged in as just another drive then ( ie I click on the html file from my computer ), then it finds and plays the file fine.

Any help would be appreciated.

divx118 · Post by **divx118** » Mon May 05, 2008 9:29 pm

Waysid wrote:Has anyone been able to get a flash music player running with the new 2.0x firmware? The flash app will run but I can't get it to read an mp3 file. If I use the app when my archos is plugged in as just another drive then ( ie I click on the html file from my computer ), then it finds and plays the file fine.

Any help would be appreciated.

It looks like a security thing introduced in flash 8, but i didn't have much time to dig into this yet. If I am right about this then flash can't acces any local files anymore, but hopefully there is a way around this. If I have some time this week I will look into this some more.

Maurice