I was poking around the openembedded build environment when I ran across musicpd. Musicpd is a music playing daemon that can be controlled from a front end that connects to it over a network connection. GMPC and Glurp are two Gtk front ends to this daemon that as of 12/19/2005 build with no errors out of the OE dev tree. The memory requirements are impressively low, especially without a front end running (music continues to play when the front end is closed). MP3s and OGGs play fine (though OGGs take 60% - 80% CPU time!). Theoretically it should support AACs and FLACs but I haven't tried either. Glurp has an interface that I find is a nice match to the 640x480 resolution that my C1000 does. Anyways, down to the important part, how to make it work.
I attached the packages that I built. They're for the C1000 so they should work fine on the 5600 and up IIRC, but the interface seems to have a resolution of at least 640x480 in mind. If they depend on things not in the default GPE feeds, you might try looking in one of these two feeds:
If the dependencies aren't there tell me what it asks for and I'll try and post that package as well. If it just complains about a minor version mismatch it's probably fine to -force-depends. Also attached is a sample configuration file, mpd.conf. I added an mpd user, added him to the audio group and chown'ed /dev/dsp and /dev/mixer to be root.audio. You could of course make them world writable if you wanted to. I didn't want log files to be written to flash, so I pointed thos at /var/log. Because of permissions the user mpd won't be able to write there by default. You can either make a /var/log/mpd subdirectory or do like I did and touch the two log files and chown them to mpd.mpd before starting mpd. GMPC comes with a desktop icon. Glurp does not. I included the one that I hacked up for Glurp. It uses the same icon that GMPC does because I couldn't be bothered to search for anything more suitable. You should change the music and playlist directories in mpd.conf to point someplace more suitable for your install.

Warning: Use these at your own risk! They are barely tested! All I can say is they work for me.

-John

Hi John. Thanks for the pointer from this topic. I do get one error though:


There's no libflac4 in the test5 feed. I did find it at ipkgfind, but I've never had too much luck using packages from there, so I figured I ask first. thks

Here's a libflac4 ipk. It was compiled at a different time as the other ipk's and hence against different library versions. If it doesn't work out I'll take down the other mpd/glurp ipks and re-upload a whole new set with matching versions.

Thanks, got it. Seems to be ok, but couldn't find the mpd.conf you mentioned. Was that suppoed to be separate? And where should it go once I get it, /etc? thks

Oops. What I meant is that you need to *make* your own mpd.conf based on documentation on the musicpd.org website. And yes it goes in /etc. I'll post mine here as an example, but you'll need to change some thing to make it work right on your Zaurus.


In this case I've created the user "mpd" but you can probably have mpd run as your user and that might make more sense anyways. Also, be sure to point music_directory and playlist_directory at the places where your music and playlists are. It handles subfolders fine so no need to list them separately. You don't need to worry about keeping the log files on flash since barely anything gets written to them, but if you're paranoid you can stick them in /var or /tmp. After that start mpd as root (from a console) then run the front end you've selected.

-John

What, you mean I have to RTFM!! geez, you ask a lot!!

All up & working now. I put my settings in my user's ~/.mpdconf & all of the logs & db in ~/.mpd/. I didn't think I'd like it at first, but after playing with it for a bit it's kinda cool. Especially with the state file (if it get's killed) & being able to control it with mpc on the command line, I think I could get used to this.

Have you tried to get this into the gpe feeds? I have no idea how to go about that. Thanks for the find.

Good to hear you got it sorted out. Now, here's the cool thing: It's already in OE (which is what OZ/GPE is built from) so getting it into a GPE feed is just a matter of asking whoever built that feed to add it. Also, through all the fun surprises of following the .dev version of OE this is one of the packages that has never been a problem to compile. I really think glurp + mpd is just about the best music playing solution for GPE right now. There might be more fully featured players but often (always?) you pay for those features in lots of dependencies and heavy RAM/CPU usage. Plus, if you feel really stingy about resources you can start playing some music, then just close the front end you're using.