My favorite is the built-in os2008 media player, actually. I tried out Canola, UKMP, and Kagu, and, eh, They look pretty, but they suck a lot of CPU so it's harder to multi-task and it eays battery, they take up memory and space, and they sound exactly the same as the built in

I received my new N800 yesterday to replace both my 770, and Archos Gmini400. I have also dropped 2 16GB cards into the beast to hold most of my music. I mainly listen to music in random mode over the whole library, so obviously the more files on the device the better. I would also like eyecandy to ward off the iPod and iphone fanboys at work, as I often have the device on my desk plugged into speakers, and I like coverart displayed when playing, and I really like the album art scrolling on the ipod/iphone. I have briefly tried Canola2, Kagu, and UKMP along with the default media player.

Canola2 - looks very pretty, but a bit on the sluggish side on 2008, seems slower than the pervious version on my 770. I really like the fact that there is a random mode for the entire library. I'd prefer the cover art to be a bit larger. I also found that it does not like to run at the same time as Maemo mapper, I think that they are both reasonably hungry. Didn't like the fact that it does not seem to like my cover art. I use folder.jpg, and albumart tags on most of my files which works great with the archos, window media player, Mythtv, and slimserver.

Kagu - very nice, bit of a pain to get to the random mode for all tracks though, doesn't display the album and track name clearly on the cover art screen. they are there but realy small on the bottom right. Again seems a bit sluggish with lots of "loading" messages between menus. which like the track info is a bit irritating after a while.

UKMP - Love the cover art scrolling. Hate the fact that it scans everytime it starts, takes a while with my setup. I cannot fathom how to randomly play all my tracks, and when I start to play a track from any album, it just stops, although the app is easilty killable.

Default Media player - nice and lightweight. ticks all the boxes apart from the eyecandy - cos it does look basic. Not a problem in the car as I usually have maemo mapper running, but on the desk, it's not very pretty.

So what we need is a music player with a similar but prettier interface to the default (themable probably), with a albumart view like UKMP's, now playing like Canola's but with larger coverart (minimize the background, or have the art as the background!) and a quick option to randomly paly from the whole library, like a party, or radio mode. I can see a home page applet, which would function like a Squeezebox, knowing about all the music, and changing the background to the relevant coverart when there's a song change. Damn, wish I could code!

regards

Gary

Today I found my personal favorite: Mediabox. I'm about to uninstall my other players (Kagu, Ukmp and Canola2) since Mediabox is just so much better!

Finally happy...

I highly recommend to check that out. I think it is in one of the standard repositories.

Just checked out mediabox on your recommendation, and it looks very promising, but it has a couple of major flaws.

It's missing a shuffle feature, which is basically how I normally listen to my music. Also I closed it and reopened it and it could not see my music anymore, which meant rescanning, which takes a while on 16GB of mp3s.

The kinetic scrolling is really nice, but the album art needs to be larger for it to be really cool.

I dropped a comment of my own on the Canola site, and was planning to use it for this usefull thread. However your contribution covers it all, including the other stuff like UKMP. So I'll keep it short.

There was (26/12/2007) no problem installing Canola from the Canola site. Very smooth and helpful site ! Found it using Google. My earlier uploads from Maemo and the N800 OS2008 Application Manager failed.

Very sleek Canola UI. My kids (> 28, sorry) love it: "now it's some Thing!" The Photo Views are absolutely great. One star more than Quiver ! (Which is already an excellent and excellent tool and providing more freedom in functionality / choices).

Yet for Audio I use the standard mediaplayer on my N800 OS 2008. Canola finds less wma / mp3 files on my cards than my mediaplayer and mixes up titles, genres, albums etc. Don’t know exactly what’s wrong, but it is confusing. I like the fact they included the possibility for Pod- and Vodcasts. I'm sure this all will improve in the coming weeks. It’s still a Beta. And the nice thing of Canola is that it blingblings. And that is needed in Commerce. Sex sells.

However the OS2008 standard Media Player does all I want it to do and has all the functionality required. Also the information (titles, albums etc). are well and accurate displayed. The OS2008 version is better then the old one. Also looks better -good enough for me.
Perhaps it needs a nicer name to cope with the strange habits in this Tablet world environment (LiIgnhlrt 6XXX or something ).

But, next, I'll take a look at he MediaBox as mentioned by Mara

Thanks for the useful comments,

Abel.

Small (for most of user, big for me) correction:
Canola is not opensource

Best video player for my pc and IT:
mplayer

In addition to my earlier comment about Mediabox, the features I like most are:
1. automatic picture rotation for optimized view
2. ability to quickly move between modes

Canola is also very nice, but the menus are too deep: For example, it takes too many clicks from music player to photo viewer... unless I'm missing some obvious shortcut?

Ok, any idea where i can download mplayer ? I have the OS2008 with the 'temporary repositories' and tried downloading mediabox from both the application manager and maemo download. Both want mplayer. UKMP says broken installation file.
I checked the Mediabox thread on this forum but didn't find help. Any ideas ?

Abel.

Ok,i am with you on that, but i still need mplayer for some files. Don't know why, but's a fact Any idea where I can find it for Os 2008

Xks, Abel

Hope this helps:
http://www.gronmayer.com/it/dl.php?id=141