Wednesday, June 13, 2007

UKMP 1.2

It's Wednesday and as promised, I'm launching UKMP 1.2.

The major reason why you should upgrade to this version is party mode.
WTF.
Party mode is basically a queue of the songs you want to be played next.

Let me demostrate to you.

Install 1.2
Open UKMP.
Click on any album of yours.
Looks a bit like this:

At least if you chose Norah Joneses new album (very good - highly recommended).
Ok, what's new in this picture. You see on the right a button: Continuous mode. Click on that and it will switch to party mode. Now, click on a few songs and after each click the song you clicked will get a play order number at the end of the song name. Like this:


Also, the button will tell you that the queue size is at the moment 8. All right, I also chose songs from another album in the mix. Yes, you can switch back to cover list, click on another album, choose songs from there, add them to the mix and in a few minutes you have DJd yourself a sweet mix of music and you are ready to transform and roll out ( - if you are a transformer - if not, maybe just take your n800 to your car and don't worry about clicking while driving. It's dangerous. Just listen to your set of relaxing and antistressing tunes while driving in the traffic).

And that's not all. There's also support for using your existing collection of cover images. It works the same way as canola. Just put a cover.jpg a folder containing mp3 files. It will then default to that image for all albums in that folder.

Also, by popular reques (yeah. I requested it myself), UKMP will skip any folders titled: Maps. This improves living besides maemo mapper.

And last but not least, accidental clicks in cover view are now handled a bit better.

I may post up a video demonstration tomorrow.

Ahh... The links.

Remember, you need to have python installed. If you don't have it, you can install it from here:
http://pymaemo.garage.maemo.org/installation.html

And UKMP you can install from here:
http://maemo.org/downloads/product/ukmp

If you need ogg support, you can install ogg to your device from here:
http://ogg.garage.maemo.org/ogg-support.install

I was able to make a quick one take video and put it on youtube. It demonstrates the functionality in a quick manner. I wish I had the time to make these things in a proper manner.

9 comments:

  1. (You can kick me for not reading the documentation, but...)

    There are any plans to add support for plugins?

    I was thinking about something to send played tracks to last.fm...

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  2. No plans yet. I have been thinking about that kind of support as well, but it'll basically have to wait a bit longer. However, the thought is a very interesting one. I'll look into it during the summer. It will basically need a configuration dialog, but should otherwise be pretty simple to make.

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  3. UKMP is looking sweet. But, I can;t get it to recognise new albums I add. Where do they have to go? What do I have to do?

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  4. You just put them into your memory card.

    Where have you tried to put the files now?

    email me urho.konttori@gmail.com so we can discuss the problem in more detail.

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  5. Just a note, you should take the 's' off of https on that install link, otherwise the page requires a log-in

    ReplyDelete
  6. Thanks!

    I've fixed the link now!

    ReplyDelete
  7. My only complaint about UKMP is that the "Shuffle/Random" mode is too much like...a programmer's idea of random mode. ;)

    It seems like there's just an array with numbers representing the songs, then it literally just picks a completely random number. More often than not, the "random" selection is the same song as before or the one played right before the current. Most media players seem a little more intelligent, given the proper amount of items to choose from. The way it appears to me, they randomize the order of the given items, stick them in a sort of temporary playlist, then just go down the list, requiring "repeat" mode to be turned on for it to do it again.

    There are songs I have on the card that NEVER get played because they're not lucky enough to be chose by the "random" mode. Any plans to do something better there?

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  8. @Chris:

    Indeed. As I said in the initial release, it's a poor shuffle implementation. I will improve it this summer. Let's say that in two or three weeks it should be in better condition, although still far from the great implementation of ipod shuffle. Oh, and at the moment, the shuffle is even worse than you described. It selects first album in random and then one song from the album by random. (so, it's even badly biased)

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  9. Anonymous11:52

    Please support aac files.

    ReplyDelete