MinAmp – Pandora Music Player
May 14, 2011 - Reading time: 5 minutes

MinAmp for Pandora

Introducing MinAmp for Pandora (and desktop Linux), a minimal music player mainly designed for use as a car player. This is my first application for the Pandora. Actually it’s my first C++/SDL application. Feed free to provide feedback on this application, you can also suggest changes and features requests.

On first run MinAmp will look for the Music directory on your mounted SD cards (either “music” or “Music”). If running on desktop Linux it will look for music or Music in your home directory. If this fails to find your music for some reason you can manually edit the "minamp.conf" file but hopefully this won’t be necessary in most cases.

I have assumed that your music directory is organised so that each artist is in its own directory with each album below that in it’s own directory. In each Album directory you can have a "cover.jpg" with the album cover art. If this doesn’t suit you I’m sorry, I may entertain alternate layouts but may need some incentive ;)

At present I support the MP3, OGG & FLAC file formats, I tried WMA but track length and reliability issues made me take it out. Audio output can be sent to the default, digital (SPDIF) or Bluetooth outputs. Bluetooth on the Pandora may require modifying the .asoundrc file and has had limited testing (See the forums).

Controls:

  • The touchscreen is active, and hopefully fairly obvious in operation.
  • Click an Album cover to play that album.
  • Click on the progress bar to jump within the current track.
  • Shoulder buttons are Previous/Next track, very sensitive at the moment (probably not good for jogging but works for cycling).
  • Press a letter “a” to “z” to seek to the albums that start with that letter (ie “c” for Coldplay).
  • Left/Right Arrows (Nub) to move the album list left and right.
  • Up/Down Arrows (Nub) are Previous/Next track.
  • Enter plays the Album in the center of the list.
  • ESC exits the player (Also clicking on the X on the screen).
  • HOME (or “A” button on Pandora) goes to beginning of Album List.
  • END (or “B” button on Pandora) goes to end of Album List.
  • SPACE is used to pause or un-pause the current track.
  • BACKSPACE/PAGEUP (or “Y” button on Pandora) goes to previous track.
  • PAGEDOWN (or “X” button on Pandora) goes to next track

Numbers keys 0-9 will select tracks (eg Press 1 for track 1 and then again for track 11)

If you exit the player while it is playing a track, on next use it will try to start from the same track.

Possible Future Enhancements (Keeping in mind it is supposed to be a minimal player):

  • Random Play
  • Album Queue
  • Options to make Shoulder buttons less sensitive, (Maybe double click or hold for next Album)
  • Fix some issues with the resume track function.

I still consider this software to be an Alpha release, features and functionality may be changed, added or removed. Enjoy and don’t hesitate to provide feedback and comments below.

To download MinAmp for the Pandora please go to the Pandora Repo (and don’t forget to vote ;) )

For Linux desktop/netbooks you can download the 32 and 64 bit versions here (Sorry no Windows version yet, may or may not happen)…

MinAmp 0.31 for 32 Bit Linux (x86)

MinAmp 0.31 for 64 Bit Linux (x86_64)

MinAmp 0.31 for 32/64 Bit Linux (Manual Install)

MinAmp is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

Dd
Written by Dd on November 7, 2019
Hi, I search exactly the same interface type for a raspberry car projet . Is youe source code aviable somewhere ? thx
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Bill
Written by Bill on November 16, 2011
Hi Esn, Thanks for the comments, glad you like the player and thanks for adding it to the Wiki. I looked into the ABXY buttons, I never actually assigned them on the Pandora but they function because my desktop Linux versions uses Page-Up/Page-Down/Home/End and those are the keys the Pandora maps to. I will update the post accordingly to save confusion. You are right about the pause button and I do already have enough ways to select next & previous tracks, so I will make the space bar the pause key as you suggest. I have no intention to change the function of the shoulder buttons, as I use them in the same way you do with the lid closed. If I make any changes it will be by way of selectable options.
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Bill
Written by Bill on May 20, 2011
Hi Stuart, Glad you like the player. I will take up your offer on the graphics as I plan to add skin support in a future release, and my gimp skills are limited :)
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Stuart Foy
Written by Stuart Foy on May 20, 2011
This was exactly what the Pandora needed, a nice finger friendly MP3 player! If you need any help with sprucing up the graphics a bit, send me an email, I’ll be able to help :) f*****o*****!!y!@****gm*****x.c*om (remove * and !)
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Nathan
Written by Nathan on May 18, 2011
[...] that is user friendly and offers many useful features. to find out more about Minamp head over to http://linux.kewley.name/?p=61 This entry was posted in News. Bookmark the permalink. ← Open Pandora [...]
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Esn
Written by Esn on May 17, 2011
Is it possible to add support for unicode characters in folder names? Some of my albums have titles in other languages (i.e. Russian).
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Esn
Written by Esn on May 16, 2011
Thanks, looking forward to it. It’s already what I use for music, though. :) And thanks for adding it to the Repo! Now I can get automatically notified by PNDStore whenever there’s an update (which is only the case for programs submitted to the Repo, so far). Also, an idea: make “F1″ bring up the controls guide that’s there when you start the program, but that disappears when you select your first track. One possible small bug that I encountered: when I tap on the “time” bar to go to a particular place in the song, the green bar doesn’t always change, even if it goes to the right time. i.e. I went back to near the start on the song, but the green bar stayed at the half-way point – only it didn’t start getting longer until the song itself got to that halfway point.
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Esn
Written by Esn on May 16, 2011
Also, I like the shoulder buttons as they are… I don’t usually listen to music when I’m jogging or cycling, but when I’m in one spot, so it’s comfortable to be able to press the shoulder buttons with the Pandora closed to switch tracks. If you really want to change their function, you could maybe add a “jogging mode” or something. One of the other main players, PanPlayer, doesn’t have the shoulder buttons do anything at all for precisely this reason, and that’s also the reason why I don’t use it
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Esn
Written by Esn on May 15, 2011
Ah, finally! Very-nearly a perfect audio player for the Pandora, at long last. I also added your program to the wiki: https://pandorawiki.org/Software_projects The one thing I really miss is a “pause” button; I’d prefer a physical button rather than pressing it on the touchscreen. Maybe you can use “space” for that, considering that “down” on the d-pad already moves to the next track, so you don’t really need a second key for the same function? Also, what do ABXY do? They seem to do something, but I don’t see documentation… By the way, if you’d like to get more feedback, you might want to start a thread in the Beta Testing forums: http://www.gp32x.com/board/index.php?/forum/71-beta-testing-pandora/
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