MinAmp – Pandora Music Player
May 14, 2011 Reading time: 5 minutes See Comments
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.