Notices

As of 20. July 2010 epage has accepted to be the maintainer of this software.

Wiki page for Nqaap.

Original content:

I just promoted my project "nQa Audiobook Player" to extras-testing (again), so hopefully it should be available soon.

* What?
Nqaap is a simple audiobook player that has the following features:

• Plays books saved as multiple .mp3 or .awb files
• Automatically changes to next chapter.
• Remebers position in multiple books.
• Sleep timer

* How?
** Setup

• Install nqaap from extras-testing.
• Create ~/MyDocs/Audiobooks directory.

** Create book

• Find audiofiles for the book in either mp3 or awb format (encoding instructions later)
• Ensure that files are named in such a way that a lexical sort places them in playing order.
• Create dir under ~/MyDocs/Audiobooks with the name of the book
• Place audiofiles in this dir, all files must be in this directory. It cant find files in further subdirectories (for now).
• (Optional) Place an imagefile in the directory. If present this file will be used as the cover of the book.

** Play

• Open nqaap
• Open menu
• Select book
• Press play

* View?



* Why?
On my S60 phones i really enjoyed the nokia audiobook player, and I was dismayed that it was not available for the N900. So I wrote nqaap for myself, and hopefully a few of you guys can use it as well.

** Problems with audiobooks in std media player.

• Does not remeber position
• .mp3 files in "all music" playlist

* Wait, what?
Nqa is obviously not really a word. It could be short for "not quite a", which would make nqaap "not quite an audiobook player" which might be a good description at this state.

"N-Q-A" sounds (to me) at little like NoKiA, and since nqaap is inspired by their player it fits somewhat.

* How
Written in python with gtk and tested on my N900.

* What now
Test it if it sounds like it is something that migth be usefull to you, and please report back with problems and suggestions in this thread.

This sounds pretty handy. I'll have to look it up and see how it works for me. And thanks again for your effort.

After a quick try:

Downloaded and moved my books to Audiobooks folder. The app didn't recognize a folder structure of Audiobooks/book/cd1/file1.mp3 , Audiobooks/book/cd2/file1.mp3 and so on.

Changed the structure to Audiobooks/cd1/file1.mp3 , Audiobooks/cd2/file1.mp3 and had to delete the previously created indexes and current status from /home/~user/.nqaap/ to stop it crashing on start.

Otherwise works great.

Thanks for testing.

I should have mentioned that all the files for the books must be in the same folder (unless I should consider this my first feature request).

I will update the first post, as well as the included documentation to include this information.

I think I know what caused your crash and will fix it as soon as possible.

Hi Pengman, and thanks for your nice application.

Just a small enhancement request for version 0.7.1-1 actually in Extras-Testing: is it possible to change the behaviour of your app when pressing the progress bar? Actually, all it does when clicked is to interrupt the audio flux for a bit: instead it should go to the point I've clicked.

Actually the only way for moving through a chapter is to drag the selector, it should be nice to have a more finger friendly "click and go" feature.

Thanks for reading, regards.

Tried a few thing now that I'm not 5 mins away from leaving to work. The app/gui/maemo/whatever handles arabic and cyrillic. I think the maemo 5 is utf-8?

This is not a given though, as I have konqueror on my desktop giving me issues with some utf-8 non-romanic characters.

Deleting the currently listened folder gives an error of :
This is solved by deleting the file /home/~user/.nqaap/current .

Yeah, I tried to make it work like that, failed and then forgot about it. I will make another attempt.

I don't understand, are you having trouble with books with cyrillic/arabic characters in their titles?

I hoped this was fixed in 0.7.1 (in testing since this morning), do you know if you have that version?

Thanks to both of you for your feedback, I will try to get a new release out tonight or tomorrow.

It seems I was wrong, according to this page 0.7.1 should be in testing , but on my phone it still shows as being in devel.

Anyways, I just pushed 0.7.2 with the "Click'n'Go" seekbar to devel and will try to push it into testing later.

Is there a limit on how often I can move stuff from devel -> testing? If there is I must consolidate the releases a bit more.

Pengman-

I am going to try as well since I miss Nokia Audiobook player. The question for me is: what does nQa have that Pannucci lacks? If it just allows one to load up a whole folder instead of one book at a time, that might be enough.

Fred

just testing this now after downloading Pilgrims Progress. I like the sleep timer. Am going to try listening later but it looks like a useful app. Well done Pengman for the hard work.

I'm afraid I can't really answer that. Back (in January I think) when I tried Pannucci, it did not automatically change to the next chapter when one was finished, nQa does that. Also I dont think Pannuci plays the .awb files that was needed by the nokia player. But I must admit that I haven't kept up with Pannuci features since starting this.

Anyways, give it a whirl if you have the time and perhaps report back here,

I hope it you enjoy it.