Kagu Media Player Released 1.0.6
 

A new version of Kagu Media Player for maemo is out! You can download it here:
http://maemo.org/downloads/product/kagu/

This new 1.0.6 release includes:
* Ability to view album covers seperately (i.e. zoom in)
* Editable playlist support: Enqueue whole album, individual song, and clear playlist buttons
* Improved album seperation logic: Support compilation albums
* Filename parser as a fallback to the ID3 parser
* Initial OGG support (requires ogg support in the system, upstream ogg on n800 may be broken)
* Fix installation/run problems on Nokia 770
* On screen Volume button
* Plenty of bugfixes
* Performance and UI enhancements
* Updated theme

Everyone currently running a previous version should upgrade as this release is an all around better performer.

Thanks!

Re: Kagu Media Player Released 1.0.6
 

Great job!!

Re: Kagu Media Player Released 1.0.6
 

Update went smooth as silk.
If only all apps installed/updated that smoothly...
Good work, keep it up!

Re: Kagu Media Player Released 1.0.6
 

Updated well... Can I simply queue up and play my entire collection in a shuffle or random mode?

Re: Kagu Media Player Released 1.0.6
 

With a single button click? no. but you can enqueue an album at a time with the CD+ icon.

Re: Kagu Media Player Released 1.0.6
 

Kagu is eating lot of cpu power when playing compared for example to ukmp.

Re: Kagu Media Player Released 1.0.6
 

Nice, I like the playlist option. Is there a zoom option to view the album covers, if so I can't find it.

Love your work thanks. :)

Re: Kagu Media Player Released 1.0.6
 

Kagu is easily becoming my fav for my n800.
using it more than anything right now.
cant wait to see where its at, at version 3.0 and better.:rolleyes:

Re: Kagu Media Player Released 1.0.6
 

I have language-learning mp3 files that crash Kagu or the uk player. Each word that is pronounced appears to come with a graphic that Kagu thinks is an album cover. The company that distributes them (Transparent) says that they should work with mp3 players but especially with iPods. Scanning works, but when you try to play one of the files, Kagu opens to a black screen and does nothing.

Re: Kagu Media Player Released 1.0.6
 

Turn off the screen, or background it. This will stop the CPU usage.

Re: Kagu Media Player Released 1.0.6
 

Yeah, tap on an album cover (upper left in SongView, or lower right in NowPlayingView).

Re: Kagu Media Player Released 1.0.6
 

We would need samples of these to figure out what is going on.

Re: Kagu Media Player Released 1.0.6
 

Ah, one of those "Enhanced MP3s" where pics are layered in chapters.
I never liked those myself, they only really work well on iPods and in iTunes.
If you can, send Trev one of the smallest complete files you can.

Re: Kagu Media Player Released 1.0.6
 

Thanks for another useful update! The playlist is a really great idea and I'm happy about the volume icon too.

After disq posted last night that you guys were just about to release an update, I wandered over to your site to browse some of the source code (hooray for open source!) and it looked like Kagu would be easily skinable. So today I put together a really quick "theme" for Kagu just to see if I could do it. I'm not crazy about the theme so I'm calling it the "test theme" since I just threw it together to see if it would work. Here's some screen shots on Flickr:

http://flickr.com/photos/54804764@N0...n/photostream/
http://flickr.com/photos/54804764@N0...n/photostream/
http://flickr.com/photos/54804764@N0...n/photostream/

Now that I know that I can do this, I'm hoping to find some time to create a more complete theme. Thanks again for the great software!

Re: Kagu Media Player Released 1.0.6
 

Ooooooooh... wicked cool! I'll put a high priority on having user selectable themes and a theme distribution/installation system for the next release! Let's get some new themes into the mix!

Re: Kagu Media Player Released 1.0.6
 

Fantasic. I just upgraded and the one problem I posted about (equates to compilation of songs in a directory) is fixed. And I must say it pales in comparison to the other enhancements. I do have to get used to pushing harder on the scrolling as I continually keep selecting things I don't mean to select. Great work, indeed!

Next I will try it out in the car, and see how the usability is while driving. Knowing ahead of time you didn't design it to be easy to use in that kind of environment (ie, not really looking at it).

Re: Kagu Media Player Released 1.0.6
 

trevarthan actually uses Kagu constantly in the car, so it being quite usable would be my guess. There's a "turn screen off" button/function coming in the upcoming release which will help with the screen distraction.

Re: Kagu Media Player Released 1.0.6
 

Yes. It is usable in the car. However, my advice is to make your playlist and do your seeking BEFORE starting to drive. It's best to keep your eyes on the road and only use the volume and pause hardware buttons on top of the n800 (and maybe the dpad to skip forward/backward) once you're moving. The scroll widget is cool, but I find that it takes a bit too much concentration and can distract you too easily.

Drive safe. The last thing I want is a Kagu induced auto accident.

Re: Kagu Media Player Released 1.0.6
 

Nice release but it crashes while downloading covers. It works well when i deselct the download covers option during start up. Any advice to make it download the thumbnails befor crashing??

Re: Kagu Media Player Released 1.0.6
 

Will do, and I will actually try to use the dpad selectors while in the car since there is more of a tactile feel to them.

I was just enjoying my compilation directory playing and after several songs I wanted to check the title of one song. I touched the screen to get the display back and noticed that the song list didn't actually scroll to have the song on the screen. I had to scroll the list manually to see the highlighted song. Is this the intended behavior? I was thinking that the playing song would be on the screen (ie, the list scrolled by itself).

Re: Kagu Media Player Released 1.0.6
 

Quick Question:
Is there a way to force the installation of dependencies?

I'm missing the follow and some are not listed on the App manager.
libgnokii4
libsdl-ttf2.0.0
libgdbm3
libreadline4 > 4.3-1

Re: Kagu Media Player Released 1.0.6
 

ummm, python 2.5 is the only real dependency. Install that and it should take care of everything else. You can get it from http://pymaemo.garage.maemo.org/

Re: Kagu Media Player Released 1.0.6
 

No, that's a bug. I think it used to work in previous releases. Ticket: https://www.guardiani.us/projects/ka...ket/92#preview

Re: Kagu Media Player Released 1.0.6
 

I'm confused. Probably just being stupid ... but how do I just play an album? Do I have to add all the songs to a playlist manually?

Re: Kagu Media Player Released 1.0.6
 

Ok tapping on the album cover centers the cover but the size is no more than 10% bigger. Is that normal or a "bug"?

Re: Kagu Media Player Released 1.0.6
 

The CD+ icon adds an entire album to the playlist. It will start playing automatically.

Re: Kagu Media Player Released 1.0.6
 

Did you choose "High resolution album covers" when you ran kagu-scanner? If so, they should be a good bit larger. Some albums aren't of course. But most are. It just depends on what last.fm sends you.

Remember, if you have a cover.jpg, we'll use that instead. So if your cover.jpg is small, it'll be small when you tap the album.

We don't actually zoom on the albums. If we did that, they'd look terrible and pixelated. Instead, we show them at their normal size (1:1). If the normal size is larger than the viewable area, we scale it down to the viewable area.

For best results, use a cover.jpg with a very high resolution. But last.fm's high resolution album art is usually pretty good. For a good example of a high res last.fm cover image, check out the middle screenshot here: http://maemo.org/downloads/product/kagu/ (it's a lot bigger than +10%)

Re: Kagu Media Player Released 1.0.6
 

Thanks for the info. It seems most of my covers are not able to be zoom (only one).

Re: Kagu Media Player Released 1.0.6
 

That's odd. Post some of the album + artist names here. I'll look into it.

Re: Kagu Media Player Released 1.0.6
 

First I'd like to say a big "Thank you!" for Kagu!:D


I have the "High resolution" checked but still don't get much bigger images.

I have cover.jpg files in all sub-directories.

To get good large high resolutions images in Kagu what is the best size to save the 'cover.jpg' files?
.

Re: Kagu Media Player Released 1.0.6
 

"Eat A Peach" The Allman Brothers Band, "Hot Buttered Soul" Isaac Hayes, "Life" also "Anthology" Sly & The Family Stone.

Re: Kagu Media Player Released 1.0.6
 

Yeah, that's why. We don't download cover art if you have a cover.jpg for that album.

The viewing area is 530x480, so anything that size or larger would take up the whole area.

Edit: BTW, 300x300 makes a nice compromise between viewability and file size.

Re: Kagu Media Player Released 1.0.6
 

Yeah, let's take "Eat a Peach" as an example. Here's the query we run to retrieve the album art for that artist/album pair: http://ws.audioscrobbler.com/1.0/alb...Peach/info.xml

If you look at the result of that query in your web browser, you'll see that this is the <large> image: http://images.amazon.com/images/P/B0...CMZZZZZZZ_.jpg

The image above is 160x159px. Our normal album art (i.e. in the lower right of Kagu) is 125x160px. So there's not much difference there. Last.FM's idea of "large" just isn't very large in that case.

As a similar example, take the artist/album pair (Linkin Park)/"Minutes to Midnight" and the resulting query: http://ws.audioscrobbler.com/1.0/alb...night/info.xml

Here, the large image is this: http://panther1.last.fm/coverart/300x300/3276381.jpg

Which you'll notice is 300x300px, considerably larger than the lower left icon's normal size of 125x160px.

In short, sorry, but I think you just got unlucky. If you can find higher resolution images, you can always dump them in your album dir as a cover.jpg and then you'll have better quality.

Re: Kagu Media Player Released 1.0.6
 

Ah... I was right. I was being stupid.

Thanks. And thanks to you and your colleagues for the hard work. Job well done.

Mike.

Re: Kagu Media Player Released 1.0.6
 

Ok, I attached what I hope is a usable sample of the language-learning files that crash Kagu and the uk program. (they work beautifully in canola, I just discovered). If this one works ok, maybe it is the large number of them that causes the problem.

When I ran Kagu scanner on this, I saw that lots of interesting picture files were being downloaded, some of which seemed possibly inappropriate for language learners -- full frontal male and female nudity, for example. But it kept my interest, if It had worked. I turned off the high rez and download options to make things as easy as possible for Kagu.

Re: Kagu Media Player Released 1.0.6
 

Once again, great job on the new version, trevarthan...each update gets better and better, and I have yet to have any problems updating or using Kagu. No crashes, it just works the way I want it to. No more Canola, no more UKMP for me, Kagu is the best of the bunch for playing music...

I saw a few posts back that you are going to add my "screen off" button suggestion in the next version. Will this also give the reduced CPU & battery usage that minimizing and/or locking the screen does, and will a screen tap turn it back on?

I like the new playlist feature, very handy. I saw someone else mention this, but I wish there was a way to add a "shuffle all songs" option that works across all albums and artists. This is the way I listen to my iPod most of the time, I just let it shuffle everything. Kinda like listening to a radio station, all random...

Re: Kagu Media Player Released 1.0.6
 

Thanks for taking the time to explain the "zoom cover" limitations.

I also would like to see the playlist have an option that gave us ".....a way to add a "shuffle all songs" option that works across all albums and artists....".

Re: Kagu Media Player Released 1.0.6
 

Well, gee, that's like three requests. I'd be insensitive if I didn't add it. :) https://www.guardiani.us/projects/kagu/ticket/93

Not sure how to make it happen though. It's a very un-kagu idea. :)

Re: Kagu Media Player Released 1.0.6
 

Can't wait. :D

Re: Kagu Media Player Released 1.0.6
 

Such an accomodating software developer :)

Now let me get my three-page list of requests out...

1.) Transform Kagu interface to 3-D holographic supporting voice and mind control.

2.) Add Sirius & XM support with ability to record and playback.

3.) ... and so on


;) Just kidding of course, but the "all shuffle" would be nice...