(old)Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

lamip is a simple audio player which can be run from the command line, or various gui's are available. But the gui's are at beta stage and are buggy, so I packaged lamip with the minimalist xhippo front end.
xhippo is very basic, but at least it provides play/pause/load/playlist funtions. Most of these functions are accessed by right-clicking in the main window.

I configured lamip with input support for:
mp3, mp4/m4a/AAC, wma, ogg, flac, and wav.

Audio CD input support was also configured in lamip, but it doesn't work! And xhippo probably wouldn't display the track names, anyway.
So for audio CD support I recommend XfreeCD, from the pet-packages-4 repository -
http://distro.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/dis ... .9.0.1.pet
You may need to check that your CD audio channel is unmuted and raised in alsamixer.

lamip's default audio output is ALSA, but this can be changed to OSS by opening /usr/local/etc/xhippo.config in Geany and changing all instances of "alsa" to "oss".

UPDATE June 2012:
Updated xhippo to version 3.5,
and repackaged as a dotpet for Puppy 4.1.x and higher. It might work in earlier puppies, I'm not sure.
But the dotpup version for older Puppies is still here -
http://puppyfiles.org/dotpupsde/dotpups ... +lamip.pup

tempestuous, it seems like lamip needs the lamip-output-oss plugin to be able to run on the ebox-2300. Can this be fixed easily?

Paul

Argh. You're always creating work for me, Paul
Give me time, and I will recompile xhippo+lamip.

That's what you get for doing good work

Paul

Here is xhippo by itself. You can see it's very small. It uses just 1% or 2% CPU while loading/playing audio tracks. And while the track is playing the CPU usage for xhippo drops to almost zero.
I have configured it to use madplay to play mp3's, and wavplay to play wav's. Both of these applications are already contained in Puppy.
You can modify the configuration file by opening /usr/local/etc/xhippo.config in Geany. Apart from defining applications to play various audio formats, you can change settings such as your default playlist directory.

And for the ultimate in low-resource MP3 playback, here is the latest version of mpg123.
mpg123 claims to be the most efficient MP3 decoder. On my Pentium2-350 it uses 6% CPU, which is noticeably better than madplay's 11% CPU usage for the same audio file.
The source code is from http://www.mpg123.de/
This is the configuration I used: To use mpg123 with xhippo, open /usr/local/etc/xhippo.config in Geany and change "type:mp3:madplay" to "type:mp3:mpg123".

If you need to play Ogg Vorbis audio files Puppy 4.1.x already contains libogg and libvorbis, but is missing the ogg123 executable. I now attach it. xhippo-3.3-gtk2 is pre-configured to use it.

Here's a screen shot.

Thanks a lot tempestuous,
This is great. I reworked your xhippo-lamip.pet a little for ChoicePup including ogg123, a new defaultmediaplayer and MIME-types for wav, mp4 and flac. I also noticed that your symlinks in /usr/lib were broken. I fixed them in ch-xhippo-lamip.pet but you might want to have a look at yours. I also set the autostart option to "yes" and put xhippo on the right-click OpenWith menu.

I have tested it on mp3, mp4, ogg, flac, wma and wav files. It works beautifully. It will become the new default in ChoicePup.

Thanks again, J

Oops, I keep forgetting that emelFM2 fails to copy symlinks correctly. The error will affect only AAC and FLAC playback.

So I just fixed xhippo-lamip.pet and uploaded again.
Anyone who downloaded this package before now (May 17 2009) please download the fixed version.

Nice minimalism, tempestuous

I tested xhippo, ogg123 and mpg123 on the eBox-2300 (running upup-473 from a USB stick).

xhippo + madplay used ~26% cpu
xhippo + mpg123 used ~21% cpu
xhippo + ogg123 used ~24% cpu

Very nice results on that low-powered machine (200 MHz Vortex86 CPU)

jrb wrote:I have tested it on mp3, mp4, ogg, flac, wma and wav files.

jrb, how did you get xhippo to play wma ? Almost all of my music is in wma format. This is because my music players unfortunately only support mp3 or wma and I can squeeze in nearly twice as many wma files in these devices at roughly the same quality.

Hi pakt, hope you're well.

pakt wrote:jrb, how did you get xhippo to play wma ?

This version of lamip definitely includes WMA input support, but the problem is there are 2 variants of the most recent WMA codec: WMA9 and WMA9-pro. See attached image from the official M$ Windows Media Encoder application.

I just tested lamip now. It plays WMA9 audio files, but not WMA9-pro.

I understand that lamip's WMA support is based on ffmpeg code. And even though this lamip package is almost 3 years old it seems that a recent ffmpeg still doesn't play WMA9-pro, because I just tried this in Puppy 4.1.2 - Again, WMA9 audio files were OK, but not WMA9-pro.

I also tried gxine, it also wouldn't play WMA9-pro.

The only way I know to play WMA9-pro audio files in Linux is with MPlayer and the (Windows) extra-codecs pack - specifically this involves the Windows file wma9dmod.dll.

Hi tempestuous, you're as active as ever

Unfortunately, my chronic fatigue and resulting lack of concentration keep me from working as much with Puppy as I'd like

Thanks for the info regarding WMA9-pro, but the wma files I tested xhippo with were just ordinary cbr wma files. They play with gxine but not xhippo in Puppy 4.12.

If I try to play the wma, located in the root directory, with xhippo in a terminal like this: I get many lines of errors - variations of: Playing an ogg file the same way works fine.

Running the wma file in a terminal using ffmpeg also works. I've attached a screenshot showing that it plays.

Hi pakt,
I must say that I have never before launched xhippo by specifying an individual music file from the commandline! It seems somewhat counter-intuitive to the concept of having a gui interface.

But I tried it just now with a WMA file, and it worked just fine. Well actually, the WMA file didn't play immediately, it simply loaded into the xhippo window ready to play. Then when I clicked on the song it played.

pakt wrote:

Code: Select all

[Invalid UTF-8] Couldn't find ..

Whoa. Could that be a locale/character set issue? Is your Puppy set for Swedish locale?

Of course, with my package xhippo is just a gui for lamip. Can you play the file directly with lamip? Try this -

tempestuous wrote:I must say that I have never before launched xhippo by specifying an individual music file from the commandline! It seems somewhat counter-intuitive to the concept of having a gui interface.

lol, running in a terminal was just to get any error messages

When I drop the wma in the xhippo gui then click on the file, it just displays 'Stopped'.

tempestuous wrote:

pakt wrote:

Code: Select all

[Invalid UTF-8] Couldn't find ..

Whoa. Could that be a locale/character set issue? Is your Puppy set for Swedish locale?

I haven't changed the locale from default I have, however, set the keyboard layout to Swedish, but should that make any difference?

tempestuous wrote:Of course, with my package xhippo is just a gui for lamip. Can you play the file directly with lamip? Try this -

Code: Select all

lamip -n -o oss VeryLastDay.wma

Umm, that command doesn't work for me. I checked the contents of xhippo-3.3-gtk2.pet and it doesn't contain 'lamip' Am I missing a package?

pakt wrote:I checked the contents of xhippo-3.3-gtk2.pet and it doesn't contain 'lamip' Am I missing a package?

Yes, you need xhippo-lamip.pet

xhippo-3.3-gtk2.pet is the gui only, configured to used whatever commandline applications are already in Puppy. But of course, there's no commandline application in Puppy to play AAC/MP4's.

Ah, I missed that package at the top of the thread - didn't look close enough and thought it was an earlier package

Ok, I installed xhippo-lamip.pet and the wma plays as it should

Only negative thing is that I now have two xhippo entries in the Multimedia menu. Could that be due to installing the packages in the wrong order?

Those two dotpet packages each had their own *.desktop file, so I suggest you first delete /usr/share/applications/xhippo-3.3-gtk2.desktop.

JWM's configuration file has already been updated with 2 xhippo entries, so I suggest you next modify /root/.jwmrc in Geany to delete one of the entries.
Restart X and you should be good.

Ok, tempestuous, all is good now Thanks

BTW, I'm running big_bass' SlaxerPup-4.12 (2.6.27.7 SMP kernel) at the moment and xhippo runs fine in it.

Hmm, I wonder if xhippo runs with a lower CPU load in this puplet compared to Barry's stock 4.12?

Well, running on my 2.66GHz Core2Duo box, top reports 0% CPU for lamip when running either aac, ogg or wma files! I should check on the eBox-2300 instead. I'll check and report back...

UPDATE June 2012:
Both xhippo dotpet packages now updated to version 3.5; the gui+lampi backend package in the 1st post, and the gui-only package in the 5th post.
The main difference, apparently, is improved ID3 tag reading.
And the location of the configuration file has changed - /usr/local/etc/xhippo.config

I also updated the mpg123 dotpet to version 1.14.2.

Here are two 48x48 desktop icons that you could consider using for xhippo.