Just press the "escape" key for some seconds.

Does anybody know if Canola can use the internet radio stations I have saved in the old mediaplayer? Seems I have to enter everything again....

While I am finding this discussion very interesting, and useful in the abstract, my choice is limited to Kagu in that I listen to my music with Bluetooth stereo headphones, which the other media players don't for now permit. For the present Kagu is additionally my choice in that it has so many useful features as well as a team of dedicated developers behind it. However, many of those features are annoyingly imperfect, a situation which I trust will gradually be remedied over time. Yet, as generally pleased as I am with Kagu, if the new N800 firmware update incorporates, or can easily be made to accommodate, the use of Bluetooth stereo headphones for other media players, I may reluctantly have to rethink my choice.

(OT aside) I don't think you should worry about that. Most of the startup time and memory usage of Python apps in Maemo come from the loading of PyGTK, the Python bindings to the native graphics toolkit for Hildon (and Gnome), or sometimes pyGame, which does the same for SDL. These are indeed slow and greedy.

The graphics engine for the new Canola will be based on EFL (the Enlightenment libraries), which is compact and very fast. The Python bindings for that engine have been created by the INdT team, specially for the tablets, also with speed and memory footprint in mind.

I expect that Canola V2 will not "feel" like a classic Python app at all. If you try out the two available demos (Edje App Launcher and Edje Virtual Keyboard), they start and run quite fast, you wouldn't guess they're scripted with Python without being told.

I agree with that. On my desktop I use mostly "1by1", something similar would be just fine.

While we're on the topic - is any of the music players able to remember the last played track and position in it? I'm listening to podcasts a lot and not having to remember where I finished last would be great.
I know Kagu has this in its TODO list but it's keeps being postponed. How about Canola, UKMP or the default media player? Anybody knows?

I just installed UKMP and Kaku yesterday - and while the UKMP GUI is very nice - it doesnt bring in Album art for unknown albums (non-english) that I have. Kagu on theother had did it much better . Also the user interface of Kagu is better I feel. Ultimately I am sticking with Kagu for my music player needs. The kinetic scrolling is really nice.

I particular (about Kagu) I like that there is an exit button to exit straight out of the app - I canb control volumen from within Kagu itself, nice colours-sotthing on the eyes, inertial scrolling is good and some nice settings to choose from. Overall a nice user interface.

The built in app is simple and is also good - in the functional sence.

I will love this. Even the default media player doesn't allow folder-browsing, or playing an entire folder. (Correction: kilikali allows folder based playback.)

I can select by folder when playing streamed media through a UPnP server but can't do the same for local mp3s. We don't tag all our songs with Artist names(there may be more than 15 for a single album), so supported tagging methods only create confusion.

@tomas.rollo I can't think of even a desktop media player that remembers the last played position of media files(other than DVDs) except Miro. Does iTunes remember the last played position of podcasts? Current media players for N800 don't remember even the last played album/playlist except for Kilikali.

You can also tap on the graphic icon on the top-left side of the screen to directly jump to one of the top menus. For example. when playing music, there will be a graphic icon which may look like a speaker. Tap on it and you will go to "Music" section directly.

xmms!!


Humm I wonder why it's in debian stable then... I didn't know debian stable was full of bugs and security holes. Maybe you should contact and help debian developpers?

Every software has bugs.. xmms is supposed to be not maintained anymore but the snapshot in debian is very stable.

xmms2, audacious, bmpx (comparable) are to my mind still beta.

XMMS is in Debian stable because everything in Debian stable is old and crusty, not because it's actually stable.

I wouldn't mind the default player, however it doesn't play ogg, which is just silly (and has been discussed elsewhere).

If anyone knows how to make it play ogg vorbis files (particularly the OS 2008 version - I've decided to leave that on my N800 in the end), I'd love to know.

Otherwise, I may code up a player in Python and use mplayer as a backend, or perhaps mpd. Both will play ogg vorbis files (and virtually any other music format) with very low CPU usage.

For the time being I'm using mmpc and mpd (running on the tablet). It has some challenges when changing playlists (the mmpc interface needs some work) but its very usable for my purposes, which tend to be:

- start up playing a large playlist (1000's)
- put it on random
- leave it alone

Folder-based playing should be a feature in all players but isn't. An ideal player would allow me play all music in a directory and subdirectories with a minimum of clicks and also of course allow for easy selection of playlists.

I could do without album covers and the like. Optional on the fly (but cached) lyric lookups on the other hand would be handy from time to time.

(edit, more detail added)