Switched to Android and programmed my own player

[rokboxyo]

I've been a happy user of Rockbox for a decade, I was particularly happy that the LUA scripting enabled me to create my auto-DJ script that let me regularly switch the playlist every X minutes and it was perfection. But my ClipZip finally died and as we all know it's become more difficult to get a hold of a hardware MP3 Player these days.

Since I have some talent for coding I decided to take a look at android coding, I was reluctant at first, but none of the appstore players was satisfactory. It turned out, android dev can be a breeze if you know the correct tools. I managed to recreate a MP3 player with integrated auto-DJ very fast, despite a couple technical hurdles(like for example finding the sdCard directory name, which changes per device, and managing foreign characters in filenames), but I finally did it.
 I think if I kept working on the interface I could recreate most of Rockbox functionalities, it's just that interface design requires some patience and I just wanted my own app to use for  personal comfort.

I'm just putting this out here, because I think it could be helpful for a programmer who has specific needs for a music player:
-To program and deploy on android, I recomend using Processing (processing.org), it's the easiest way to code on android.
-To play the music, just use the MediaPlayer class which is a default on android. (I just use MP3s so I can't vouch for other formats)
-For reading the MP3 tags, processing offers an optional library for that.
-I don't manage the sound output, but you can download sound plugins if you need a compressor or something like that on top of the standard phone/tablet settings.
My app is lightweight and doesn't prevent me from using other apps while the music is playing, and it's very easy on the battery.

Hope that will be of use to someone out there.

[nezzled]

Pardon the offtopic question, but how would you make such an "auto-DJ script"? New to rockbox and curious how such a thing would work.

[rokboxyo]

Pardon the offtopic question, but how would you make such an "auto-DJ script"? New to rockbox and curious how such a thing would work.

It's just a script that changes the playlist after a certain time elapsed. Record the time and switch to a different playlist after the end of the current song.
I need this because I have many different playlists with different genres/moods and I wanted to not have to choose the playlist myself when I start driving, and playing the same playlist endlessly gets boring

[Frankenpod]

The concept makes me again think there ought to be such a thing as a meta-playlist or nested-playlist, i.e. a playlist-of-playlists.  Similar to the idea here, but possibly allowing playlists to be sequenced in different orders or shuffled.  To get really silly I suppose one could have unlimited levels of such a structure, but hard to imagine any use-case for that.