Simple audio player needed

[tempestuous]

Could it be that Mplayer is using some sort ot hardware acceleration or something that ffplay isn't?

I considered that, but didn't bother to investigate because the difference in CPU usage was evident even with audio files.

[greengeek]

It's a bit "hacky" but this works - run these commands -

Code: Select all

cd /path/to/my/music/collection
xhippo

Now when you right-click the xhippo window you're in the correct location

Thanks, I see what you mean. That gave me another thought based on the same idea by placing a script in my Music folder as follows:

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#!/bin/sh
xhippo

So now xhippo sees that Music folder as it's default and displays the folder contents upon rightclicking the xhippo window. That way other members of the family can also have their own "version" of xhippo in their separate music directories too.

[mcewanw]

It sounds like you're piping the output of ffmpeg, and for MP3 files it looks like you're doing a similar "trick" with lame. In both cases I don't think it needs to be as complicated as that - just use the ffplay executable instead..

Sorry tempestuous, I just noticed your post after uploading a new xhippo dotpet (thanks to goingnuts patches) including the changes I suggested. I'll check out the measures you are suggesting and implement whatever works best in future upload. In the meantime, you can find the dotpet (including its current known issue) here:

http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=86753

Since you are an expert on compiling the gtk2 xhippo, perhaps you can work out why the icon isn't being displayed on the first button. Goingnuts didn't have time to look into it a year ago, and though I can program fluently enough in C itself, I'm not very familiar with gtk toolkit programming. Alternatively, I expect goingnuts himself or maybe thunor could sort that issue out.

The following tests using Slacko533 frugal installation on Pentium M 1.6GHz, 1 MB RAM laptop.

EDIT: @tempestuous: Actually I was and am using lame | aplay for mp3. I haven't tested this as yet, but I imagined that would be lower resource usage than ffplay, which as 01micko says isn't in all Puppies by default anyway. I was already using mplayer with option -really-quiet for all and any video types I could think of and also for ogg audio with options -really-quiet -vo null, which were already suggested as a commented-out alternative to ogg123 in the original default xhippo.config file.
As a sidenote, I used lame|aplay arrangement back in 2007 in some old program I wrote - maybe it was wiakrecord, so it was the first thought that came to mind; also used ffplay in pavrecord because it accepts input from stdin without buffering chunks the way mplayer seems to.
EDIT2: Now tried ffplay for mp3 audio, but uses more CPU than the lame|aplay arrangement I provided and much more RAM.
EDIT3: meant to put an exec in the xhippo_mp3 script, but I now think it is fine without since running as a separate shell process group anyway.
EDIT4: I'm surprised to find that mplayer -really-quiet -vo null appears use to even less CPU than lame|aplay for MP3 files... However, uses a lot more RAM so I'll leave lame|aplay in for the moment whilst considering the matter further. I'll install mpg123 and see how that does in comparison.
EDIT5: Downloaded tempestuous mpg123-1.14.2.pet and modified xhippo.conf to use that for mp3 playback. Odd, according to top, mplayer used 3% CPU on this old machine, mpg123 used 4%! Very surprised. mplayer appears to win in terms of CPU use (but not RAM use). Overall, it would appear, mpg123 would give lowest resource usage for a very low powered, low RAM machine of course, albeit very slighty beaten in CPU usage by mplayer in my tests! However, I'm sticking with lame|aplay for mp3 playback; it's there by default and pretty good low-resource (RAM and CPU) performance anyway. (Note: I thought using lower quality -q 9 might cause lame to use even less CPU, but made no difference; come to think of it, I'm not sure the -q switch has any meaning in lame decodes- maybe just for encoding, but it doesn't seem to cause any harm so just leaving it in).

[greengeek]

Just had a weird thing happen with peasymp3 - when it started to play one of my videos, the video window partially overlapped the peasy window, so I moved the video window downwards and found that a large section of the peasy window was blank.

I wanted to access the control buttons that should have been visible on that part of the peasy window, so I tried moving both windows around in the hope they would "redraw" themselves, but all this did is make the entire peasy window go blank and I couldn't get the buttons back.

Any other window that ended up behind the video window had no problems.

EDIT: Just figured that this only happens if I have the playlist window open at the same time. Soon as I close the playlist the peasy window redraws ok. (Problem occurs even if playlist window is minimised and offscreen - so just close it)

[rcrsn51]

Just had a weird thing happen with peasymp3 - when it started to play one of my videos, the video window partially overlapped the peasy window, so I moved the video window downwards and found that a large section of the peasy window was blank.

This is an artifact of gtkdialog - you will see the same effect in other Puppy apps. There is a fix for it, but it introduces other potential problems. I will revisit the issue.

If you want to continue discussing PeasyMP3, please go here.

[mcewanw]

new xhippo dotpet now uploaded. Just 31KB in size. Works in probably all current Puppies and many older ones:

http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=86753

With this version if you rightclick most any mediafile in ROX window you can immediately select Play in xhippo.

You can also rightclick a directory of mediafiles and immediately select Play in xhippo.

Finally, you can select several directories in ROX, then rightclick and choose Open With... Play in xhippo

[tempestuous]

mcewanw
Let me say at the outset that it's great you're improving and refining xhippo for modern Puppies.
Every eager music user I have referred to xhippo has been impressed. The initial reaction tends to be disappointment at its "sparseness" but eventually you realise that it handles the basics of music playing, and does it well, without bells and whistles.

perhaps you can work out why the icon isn't being displayed on the first button.

No, sorry, widgets and GTK are black magic to me. Personally the absence of icons on the buttons doesn't bother me.

A more important improvement, to my mind, is your fix for filename spaces. Spaces in filenames is a long established convention, and needs to be addressed.
A few more comments, which you might wish to consider:

I'm surprised at how well the "lame | aplay" regime works - even "pause" works. I had previously experimented with such methods, but usually as a two-stage process for quality - the compressed audio file is first decompressed and stored in ramdisk, before a separate application such as aplay (or better still, brutefir) then plays this file.
But you seem to have reserved this regime as a special case for MP3 files, via the lame executable. Why not do the same for ogg and flac (and also WMA, AAC and ALAC)?
For example, most audio files can be uncompressed with ffmpeg in a similar manner, as such -

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ffmpeg -i myaudiofile -f s16le - | aplay -f cd

As you can see the syntax to pipe ffmpeg is a little messy - you must specify the "raw" audio stream format (s16le) instead of wav file format, and also aplay cannot automatically determine the correct stream format, so you must specify it with "-f cd" (16 bit little endian, 44100, stereo). This effectively "hard-wires" the audio format, so if you were to use non-standard audio files at 22.1kHz or 48kHz, for example, it wouldn't work. But the principle remains.

Also you could consider adding other dedicated decoders - such as flac for flac, and ogg123 for ogg.

I suppose your configuration choices have been made considering the pre-existing situation with modern Puppies, especially the presence of ffmpeg. Personally, I consider the original addition of ffmpeg to be a bizarre and somewhat ill-considered development for a Linux distribution which prided itself with being small!
And for what? All major video and audio codecs could already be played ... ffmpeg simply added ENCODING features - something that I think the average user will rarely want or need.
Oops, I'm ranting about Puppy development again. I will stop there.

[mcewanw]

A more important improvement, to my mind, is your fix for filename spaces. Spaces in filenames is a long established convention, and needs to be addressed.
...
I suppose your configuration choices have been made considering the pre-existing situation with modern Puppies, especially the presence of ffmpeg

Thanks for your useful comments tempestuous. Yes, I based my choices on what is in current Puppy by default. I have used ffmpeg in similar (but not identical) manner to what you suggest to pipe to aplay, but for the moment I just stuck to straight mplayer because it (surprisingly) seems to provide very low CPU usage. Otherwise, yes, I would have tended to use ogg123 and so on.

One thing I should point out, as I have in the download post, the fix for filename spaces is entirely the work of goingnuts, who kindly sent me his patches almost a year ago: http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=86772. So all credit should go to him for that. I'm hoping in fact that goingnuts, or someone else with sufficient gtk2 programming skills, will get back to this and find the solution to the missing RESTART icon problem and that BarryK and others will consider putting xhippo into future Puppies as a default for those of us who prefer its usage simplicity yet powerful flexibility. It's small enough anyway.

[greengeek]

ffmpeg simply added ENCODING features

Just want to thank all of you guys who have the skills to identify the details that help keep things trim, tight and efficient.
I still believe our best defence against data intrusion is to make sure every byte does only what we intend it to do - even when we are only talking about audio reproduction.

[greengeek]

In response to the original post for this thread I highly recommend Peasy Carousel:

see here:
http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic. ... 4&start=22

Install the .pet, run Peasy Carousel, and drag'ndrop your music folder, (or browse to it if you prefer) - and if you tick the checkbox it will randomly play the entire collection including subfolders. Awesome.

Can also just rightclick on a folder and "open with" Carousel directly.

(and the whole Peasy / Carousel .pet is only around 3 kb. Hows that for trimming the fat...)

[darry1966]

The Link below is for Audacious Classic which plays on Puppy 4 series upwards and is a small download.

Link: http://412collection.co.uk/multimed.php

Enjoy

darry1966

[Pelo]

AlsaPlayer is a Simple audio player, tested to day. Just to see.
Because it is in the menu (Puppy 421 multiusers by Pizzasgood)
Xhyppo tested with Toutou 4.3.6 in France, but should need some FFMpeg if i remember
orpheus topic here yellow fonts prevent me using it.