Rockbox as an Application (Android, WebOS etc.)

[dip]

Is there a way to avoid that the internal memory of the Galaxy S is searched for without having root access to the phone?

It would be great if one could e.g. specify the directories in which music files should be searched for. This would avoid that during generation of the database thousands of directories are search for (e.g. in the internal memory) and would improve the speed of database generation drastically.

At the moment I stick with the *panic* error message and cannot generate the database to test browsing by tags

[dip]

Try putting an empty file called "database.ignore" in the root of your file tree.  Then put another empty file called "database.unignore" in the base directory of your music collection.  Certainly, no spurious files will be added to the database if you do this, though it's not clear to me that this will work around the overflow you are seeing.  Still, it's worth a shot in the short term.

Can anybody please point me to the source file and variable which must be changed in order to avoid the described overflow. Or has anybody another suggestion how the database can be successfully built on the Samsung Galaxy S?

Thanks a lot in advance.

[saratoga]

Try putting an empty file called "database.ignore" in the root of your file tree.  Then put another empty file called "database.unignore" in the base directory of your music collection.  Certainly, no spurious files will be added to the database if you do this, though it's not clear to me that this will work around the overflow you are seeing.  Still, it's worth a shot in the short term.

Can anybody please point me to the source file and variable which must be changed in order to avoid the described overflow. Or has anybody another suggestion how the database can be successfully built on the Samsung Galaxy S?

database.ignore isn't in the source, its just a file on the player's hard disk that tells that folder to be ignored.  If that doesn't make sense to you, take a look at the manual (doesn't matter which, all devices have the database).

[dip]

@saratoga:

I didn't mean database.ingnore which I know is a file and not part of the source code. As previously described I tried already to use database.ignore and database.unignore but this did not help. One problem is that I have no rooted phone and can thus put a database.ignore file only in the root directory of my SD card but not in the root directory of the internal memory of the phone. So I cannot avoid that the internal memory of the phone is searched for music files.

On the other hand, I have the impression that putting a database.ignore file in the root directory of the internal memory would not help anyway. As mentioned by torne previously in this tread:

"The database scanning process still counts files which are in ignored directories, since it still has to traverse the whole lot looking for database.unignore files, so the number will go up to something large whatever you do."

This sounds to me that the counter will increase even if I could put a database.ignore file in the root directory of the internal memory. And it seems that simply an overflow of the counter happens regardless whether music files have been found or not. That's why I asked for the source file and variable which comprises perhaps a definition of a max value for the counter (which I then would try to increase).

Maybe I am totally wrong with my idea, but I have at the moment no clue what I could try to avid the *panic* error message whan trying to build the database for my Galaxy S.

If you have any other advice, I would appreciate to test it.

[kmz]

I have tested the prebuilt of the Android version on my Samsung Galaxy 3. When I bought the phone I was a little sceptical about would it be good enough to replace my old mp3 player equipped with Rockbox. So I was very happy to see that Rockbox was available to Android also, even if it is still early phase of it’s development.

It took me a while to learn the controls, but when you learn them, they are actually pretty good and logic, since I have already used Rockbox a couple of years in my Sansa e280.

The playback works very well and I haven’t had any difficulties at all. Well, sometimes when fast forwarding a song, it gets stuck and doesn’t start to play before I press stop and then resume playback. But that has happened only a few times so far.

However, I can only browse my songs via directory at the moment. I tried to initialize the database, but it just never finishes. If I open the database_tmp.tcd file in a text editor, I can see all my tracks there. I let it initialize over a day, but it still hadn’t finish. It just says it has found about 10 000 000.

So does that really mean it has found so many files? I just checked and there are 3456 files on my sdcard, about 2000 of them are music files. I don’t know how many files there are on the phone’s internal memory, but would it be possible that there are millions of files?

Then I tried to create a playlist. I could save it to the default folder (/data/data/org.rockbox/app_rockb) but when I tried to play it nothing happens. If I save the playlist on the sdcard, it works fine. But of course, then I don’t get it listed on the Playlist Catalog and I have to manually search it from the directories.

So I thought maybe I should have a root access since the Rockbox files are located on the phone’s internal memory and I can’t even browse them to add fonts or themes. It took me a while, but finally I succeeded to get the phone rooted. Then I used Root Explorer software to browse the files and went to the /data/data/org.rockbox/app_rockb folder. I gave all the permissions (read, write, execute) to my playlist files and now they are working fine.

Still can’t initialize the database though. I even tried to create the database with my computer using songdb.exe. It created the database files on the sdcard in .rockbox folder. Then I used Root Explorer to copy them to /data/data/org.rockbox/app_rockbox/rockbox and gave them all the permissions. But when I try to go to the database on Rockbox, it still tells me to initialize it.

In Android 2.1 you can’t install apps to sdcard, but maybe it will work better in Android 2.2 when you can do that. And even though there are some problems, Rockbox is already better than other music players on Android, since the stock player doesn’t even allow you to adjust the volume low enough when listening in silent places, not even to mention the gapless playback.

[droidhacker]

noone said it was ready for users... and read the manual which has probbaly linked in this thread already

No kidding?
So maybe now is a good time to offer constructive suggestions so that when it IS ready for users, it won't end up undergoing major changes to how basic things work!

I was actually expecting something more along the lines of "yeah, its on the todo list" or "thanks, that's one more vote for changing the controls."

[AlexP]

"thanks, that's one more vote for changing the controls."

Just as a note, votes don't matter - it is what the developers want that matters

[JdGordon]

I was actually expecting something more along the lines of "yeah, its on the todo list" or "thanks, that's one more vote for changing the controls."

99% of rockbox is perfectly usable with a touch enables skin, and that is something any user can easily contribute to the project....

[droidhacker]

"thanks, that's one more vote for changing the controls."

Just as a note, votes don't matter - it is what the developers want that matters

And speaking as an engineer, I will offer you this perspective: if I were to build something that just **I** wanted, the client wouldn't end up with what THEY want. Therefore the developers SHOULD be interested in what other people want, and quite frankly, rockbox wouldn't have lasted so long if the devs didn't pay attention to the users.

[JdGordon]

There is a big difference to being paid for the work and doing it as a hobby... and on that note, discussion closed (leaving the thread open in the hope that it goes back ontopic though)

[corbet]

Imagine that your screen is a 3x3 grid, where the middle is used as the selector, left-right-up-down are used as cursor keys. The other directions have special functions in some screens, e.g. in Now Playing screen with the upper left you can access some playback mode settings.

I am sure glad I read through the forum before posting my "it doesn't work at all" message.  For any Android user, this mode of interaction is a major violation of the principle of least surprise.  Any particular reason why things were done this way?

Once I got past this, I was able to get the application to play music on my N1 (first song: Passing Thru by Leonard Cohen).  Major cool.  Congratulations and thanks for getting this done!  Maybe I can begin to worry a little less about what happens when my H340 finally dies.

Has anybody done any investigation into battery life yet?

Thanks,

jon

[AlexP]

Imagine that your screen is a 3x3 grid, where the middle is used as the selector, left-right-up-down are used as cursor keys. The other directions have special functions in some screens, e.g. in Now Playing screen with the upper left you can access some playback mode settings.

I am sure glad I read through the forum before posting my "it doesn't work at all" message.  For any Android user, this mode of interaction is a major violation of the principle of least surprise.  Any particular reason why things were done this way?

This is the first touchscreen mode Rockbox got (for other touchscreen targets that came before android), and not every little bit of Rockbox has yet been converted to absolute mode (which you can switch to, with a touchscreen enabled theme as I think the default should be - someone can correct me here).  As Rockbox hasn't been released for Android yet, anyone playing with it is doing so "at their own risk", but I can pretty much guarantee that it'll be switched to absolute mode before release.

[JdGordon]

Really the only thing it needs to be switched is a touch enabled base skin. Without one then enabling stylus mode would be just as bad for new users as grid mode.
The wps is already touch enabled so there isn't really much to be done. It just needs someone with a tiny but of artistic ability and a button layout that someone can make into a theme.

[blackhawk]

Congratulation to Rockbox Android port developer. Rockbox work on my first Android device Samsung Galaxy 5, including the database builder! This is the best thing since I bought my phone. Working on Rockbox Motorola EZX port has stopped long time ago, maybe now I have an area to contribute 

[h.finn]

Hi everybody.................very exciting to find Rb might be available as an app.!!!
I'll try it on my Galaxy too.
................
I read all the thread but could not understand: about the iphone/ipdo touch.............is there any hope of an app in the future?
I now have Rb on an iPod video 5.5gen. & a Mini.
As I'm planning to change my (old) nokia phone..............I was kind of hoping

Many thanks for your work guys,
H.