A new mplayer front end is hitting the scene: Aura Media Player

thecombjelly · 2009-09-20 18:17:26

ugkbunb wrote:

If your guys intention is to make a full fledge media player one that can compete with Amarok for playing music... then I would suggest making sure that it is capable of handling super large music libraries 50k+ songs... for example support for mysql as a database and/or other tricks that make handling of such large of a music collection not bog down the player to a slow crawl.

Yes this is definitely our plan. We currently use an internal java sql database, but we plan to provide the ability to use mysql or maybe other db backends when we roll out our media collection functionality. Already though the playlist is plenty capable of handling much larger collections. My large test case is dumping 500k songs on the playlist, as long as you have enough ram (storing all of the meta information in memory...) it runs the same as having 2 songs on the playlist.

ugkbunb wrote:

Also command line options such as:
amarok --play --load file (adds the designated file to the playlist and immediately begins playing it)
amarok --append file(s)/folder (appends the file or files or folder of files to a the bottom of the current playlist)
amaro --queue file(s)/folder (appends the file or files or folder of files to the top of the current playlist after the current playing song)

We already do support some amount of command line options. Currently if you load auramp from the command line with a file path, aura will load and start playing the track. We have others, not documented other than in the code tho...

-data=~/.config/aura - sets the data directory to use for aura
-clean - deletes all of aura's settings
-multi-instance - can be used to load multiple instances of aura
-stop - sends a 'stop' signal to the primary running instance of aura

...as you can see we have a stop signal that we can use to pass to running versions of aura. This is passed through the network and we have plans for much more. Essentially we hope to make it so that you can completely control aura through the command line and network (well mostly control).

Last edited by thecombjelly (2009-09-20 18:18:23)

ugkbunb · 2009-09-20 22:21:52

Awesome looking forward to following the development of this project. I have signed up on a number of a media players forums and suggested the ability to control it from the commandline and so far my suggestions have fallen on deaf ears. Thanks much for taking our suggestions into account and best of luck with your development.

Last edited by ugkbunb (2009-09-20 22:22:42)

thecombjelly · 2009-09-22 18:33:05

I've been playing around with aura and how it performs vs memory usage. To run on 32bit arch linux openjdk aura needs less than or about equal to 30mb. Between 30mb and 40mb (on my cheap eee), aura performs ok on 35mb of ram, but it isnt super responsive. It seems it needs 40-45mb to be responsive enough where you dont notice any delays.

So if you do have a more light weight system, aura is light enough to run and depending on if you value memory or cpu more, you can tune aura to your needs. ...Something that would be much more difficult if we had written it in c++...

Also, it seems the jit compiler will adapt to your system. On my eee it uses the jit hotspot client compiler, whereas on my much more powerful desktop, java opts to use the jit hotspot server compiler.

DeeCodeUh · 2009-09-25 01:41:15

Also, any feature requests can be put on here. You will be talking straight to the 3 developers of this project.

m_l · 2009-09-25 17:18:39

Just finished trying it out, very nice. Really like this front end, tabs are great. I will be using this as my front end when I need one. I mainly use mplayer from the console.
Thank You for your work on this and keep up the good work Looking forward to future versions.

Stagnation · 2009-11-02 23:38:45

Just installed it and tried it out. It runs great on my system and only takes about 2 seconds to load. Looks like it reserves about 150MB or RAM when opened but that's only about 4% of my total memory so it doesn't matter.

One thing I've been getting is a "System tray unavailable" error upon startup. I'm using OpenBox with Tint2. Disabling the system tray icon in the Settings gets rid of the error.

I've also noticed that it won't auto-open avc1 videos in a .mkv container. If you load the video manually it will play but when you try to run the video by opening it from a file manager it gets added to the playlist but will not play.

sakrag · 2009-12-27 22:24:25

Hey! I havn't worked much on Aura in the past couple of weeks, busy with finals and work and the holidays. I was running Aura though on a pentium 3 system and was a little disappointed with how long it took to start up. I can see what you guys mean by that now (my system is an intel q9550 with 8gb ram so its not usually noticeable). I have also run into many issues with platform dependent features, such as dealing with the screen saver, and dealing with unicode files on ntfs in windows, that are proving very difficult to handle in Java. I have also been developing more in C++ lately and I think im going to branch the project and start prototyping a version of Aura in C++. I also want to start prototyping an actual media library for Aura too, like Amarok, but for both music and video, hopefully performs better, and supports querying services like IMDB. I would love to also have an option, if available by the file system, to allow the use of ADS (I know that ntfs supports this and reiser4, but i dont think the more common unix file systems support it).

robmaloy · 2009-12-28 10:07:43

i don't even know if it's possible, but could you do it like VLC and let the user amplify the audio volume above 100%? some videos are way too silent

and a "queue" that precedes the playlist (like winamp does it) would be nice imho too. or maybe an option in the context menu to jump to the selected playlist item when playback of the current file is finished

gonna give this a look as soon as i get home, sounds like a nice project.

and maybe you should just be quiet about the java stuff so you don't get flamed that much

edit: found a bug (?), auramp won't play files with spaces in their paths/names

Last edited by robmaloy (2009-12-28 21:39:01)

descendent87 · 2009-12-28 23:00:55

Sounds interesting, downloading now.
More interested in a C++ port though so keep us updated with that, a -git, -svn (or whatever you will use) version would be great aswell

EDIT: I like it, removed smplayer and going to use it for a while as my main video player.
One suggestion is to stick to 1 icon, in the kickoff menu and right click menu the icon is a bomb (imo the best out of the 3), on the taskbar it's a play sign and in the system tray a music note. Get's a bit confusing with the 3 icons

Last edited by descendent87 (2009-12-28 23:12:49)

sakrag · 2009-12-29 03:45:37

edit: found a bug (?), auramp won't play files with spaces in their paths/names

About 3/4 of my files contain spaces, and many even contain unicode characters. Don't see any issues with opening it from inside of Aura. If your passing the file on the command line, file paths that contain spaces must be placed in quotes or use url encoding (replace the spaces with %20) otherwise Aura will see this as two different command line options. If your still having trouble, I would be interested in knowing what file system your using and what the path is.

but could you do it like VLC and let the user amplify the audio volume above 100%?

This is already possible, just tweak these settings under settings->audio: Enable the software volume mixer if not already enabled and set max amplification to your desired maximum. If you set it to 200%, then when the volume slider is all the way up, it should play at 2x amplification.

One suggestion is to stick to 1 icon

Lol, yeah we had a bit of a problem with this. We have no graphics artist on our team and each developer that was working on different parts at very different times chose different icons. I chose the play symbol, its about the only thing to a unique icon we have. The system tray code hasn't been worked on in over a year probably, and he chose a music note for it I guess. The guy who manages the arch package chose to use a bomb since its beta apparently. I have built, though not released, some Slackware packages as well that all use the silver play symbol. I would be interested in opinions on what the icon should be. If someone with graphical skills wishes to design an official icon for aura and maybe other artwork, we would greatly appreciate it.

ndesmoul · 2010-05-03 20:19:25

This player is really interesting, and with the few tests I have done so far seems to work great. I hope you will continue to work on it.

I think you should stick with Java, as your program will be safer than in C++, simplier to develop, and almost as fast. The only drawbacks of Java are the startup time (only a problem with relatively old machines) and the memory consumption.
For the startup time, I know C or C++ players which takes more time than your program to start (and your gui is fairly complex), so if you use a recent JVM I'm not even sure it is really a problem.

To ameliorate the startup time, you may try to use a tool like Proguard (http://proguard.sourceforge.net/). It enables to shrink the binary size and can add some optimisations. No guaranty it will ameliorate the loading of your application, but at least the binary will be smaller.

One problem though: on your website (http://auramp.org/) it is presently impossible to download your player. That's really a shame. It prevent your player to be known, and maybe to attract potential contributors.

And on sourceforge, I think you should add more released than the linux ones. At least a source package, as the only way to get the sources on your player is to use CVS, which is not the easiest method for the ones who want to test your soft.

Arch Linux

#76 2009-09-20 18:17:26

Re: A new mplayer front end is hitting the scene: Aura Media Player

#77 2009-09-20 22:21:52

Re: A new mplayer front end is hitting the scene: Aura Media Player

#78 2009-09-22 18:33:05

Re: A new mplayer front end is hitting the scene: Aura Media Player

#79 2009-09-25 01:41:15

Re: A new mplayer front end is hitting the scene: Aura Media Player

#80 2009-09-25 17:18:39

Re: A new mplayer front end is hitting the scene: Aura Media Player

#81 2009-11-02 23:38:45

Re: A new mplayer front end is hitting the scene: Aura Media Player

#82 2009-12-27 22:24:25

Re: A new mplayer front end is hitting the scene: Aura Media Player

#83 2009-12-28 10:07:43

Re: A new mplayer front end is hitting the scene: Aura Media Player

#84 2009-12-28 23:00:55

Re: A new mplayer front end is hitting the scene: Aura Media Player

#85 2009-12-29 03:45:37

Re: A new mplayer front end is hitting the scene: Aura Media Player

#86 2010-05-03 20:19:25

Re: A new mplayer front end is hitting the scene: Aura Media Player

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