Announce: Squeeze Display for Android

[erland]

The free Squeeze Display app is now available for download from Google Play (Android Market):
https://play.google.com/store/apps/d...squeezedisplay

It's an application primarily for people who have an android tablet available which they want to use as a Now Playing screen for their Squeezebox. The unique feature is that it shows continuously switching artist images from LastFM, which IMHO is a lot more interesting than showing the same album art every time a specific track/album is played.

The only available settings is to select which player to show and possibility to specify a remote server if it can't be automatically discovered.

The current version does not support mysqueezebox.com and does not support password protected Squeezebox Server/Logitech Media Server setups, but this is something I might consider adding if there is an interest.

It works in both landscape and portrait orientation but my experience so far is that portrait looks best as the artist images tends to be a bit small in landscape.

I did this app primarily because I wanted to learn some Android development and wanted to have some use for Android tablet when I'm not holding it in my hand.

It's intentionally limited to just show what's playing and doesn't offer any control or browse functionality. If you try it and want to have some simple control functionality let me know what you would like and why you would like it.

[mherger]

Nice, Erland! It picked the right player right away - magic! Now I need a stand for my Acer Iconia...

Hey, we've warned you! Here are my requests ;-)

- use images by recency, showing latest uploades first
- grab all/more images from last.fm. It seems to start all over too soon for eg. Sting
- show the album art every now and then

[erland]

Nice, Erland! It picked the right player right away - magic! Now I need a stand for my Acer Iconia...

It picks the first player it finds, if you want to be sure it always picks the right one, if you have multiple servers running, it might be a good idea to go into the settings page and specify exactly which one you want.

- use images by recency, showing latest uploades first

There are two sorting options available in the LastFM api, by popularity and by date added, currently I'm just using the default which is "by popularity". I haven't tried how it would look like with date added, I guess it will create more variation but possibly images with a bit less quality.

- grab all/more images from last.fm. It seems to start all over too soon for eg. Sting

Currently it picks the default list length which is 50 images and removes any low resolution images from the list, the removal logic is dependent on the size of the image on the tablet display, so it will be different in horizontal and vertical mode and it will be different depending on the resolution of the tablet. So different devices will show different amount of images.

When I tested it myself I first included all images but I realized that low resolution images doesn't look that good on a 1280x800 screen, so I decided to skip images which have less than a quarter of the resolution that will be used to show the image on the screen. So if the image will be 1280x600 on the screen it means that it will only include images which on LastFM have at least a resolution of either 320 pixels horizontally or 150 pixels vertically.

Do you have any idea approximately how many images it showed for Sting on your device ?

I've also thought about showing the images in random order, currently they are showed in exactly the same order as returned from LastFM but it's random which image it starts with when a new artist is shown.

show the album art every now and then

Would it be enough to always show it immediately after track change or would you also like it to be showed now and then during the track is played ?

[mherger]

>> - use images by recency, showing latest uploades first
>>
> There are two sorting options available in the LastFM api, by
> popularity and by date added, currently I'm just using the default
> which is "by popularity". I haven't tried how it would look like with
> date added, I guess it will create more variation but possibly images
> with a bit less quality.

Less quality as in "less pixels" or "not that interesting image"? In the
case of Sting I'd rather think that older pictures got more votes over
time, thus rank higher in popularity. But most of them are rather old,
dating back from the 90s & even 80s.

> Currently it picks the default list length which is 50 images and
> removes any low resolution images from the list, the removal logic is
> dependent on the size of the image on the tablet display, so it will be
> different in horizontal and vertical mode and it will be different
> depending on the resolution of the tablet. So different devices will
> show different amount of images.

Ok, that makes sense.

> Do you have any idea approximately how many images it showed for Sting
> on your device ?

From browsing through the pictures on last.fm I would have said less than
two of those pages - which would be less than 50. Which in turn is
confirmed by you stating you grabbed 50 items. I think it should be ok to
grab more than this, as you don't do repeated requests, do you?

> I've also thought about showing the images in random order, currently
> they are showed in exactly the same order as returned from LastFM but
> it's random which image it starts with when a new artist is shown.

But I'd only shuffle once, at the beginning of the cycle. Good idea.

>> show the album art every now and then
>>
> Would it be enough to always show it immediately after track change or
> would you also like it to be showed now and then during the track is
> played ?

I'd prefer it like every 10th image. But that's me.

BTW: this morning I had one of those "clean up your tags" images while
listening to some radio station. Do you have any means to track the images
in order to build up a black list of URLs? I know that sometimes last.fm
would return 1x1 pixel images too. Over time I've started to create a list
of images I want to ignore in my plugin. Not very efficient, obviously.
But it's improving over time. Let me know if you'd be interested in
sharing this list.

--

Michael

[mherger]

> BTW: this morning I had one of those "clean up your tags" images while
> listening to some radio station.

http://www.lastfm.de/music/Gym+Class...Levine/+images

The track information was:
Title: STEREO HEARTS
Artist: GYM CLASS HEROES FEAT. ADAM LEVINE

I'm applying a regex to filter out some of those:

/(?:www\.7digital\.com|keep.?stats?.?clean|lastfmclean)/i

--

Michael

[mrfantasy]

I can't seem to get it to work entering a "remote server" either name or IP address when I'm at work. Things like SqueezePlayer and SqueezeCommander work fine so it's not a connectivity problem.

[mherger]

> I can't seem to get it to work entering a "remote server" either name or
> IP address when I'm at work. Things like SqueezePlayer and
> SqueezeCommander work fine so it's not a connectivity problem.

You need to enter addressort, eg. "192.168.1.1:9000"

--

Michael

[JorgenG.]

First of all funny little app, but yet very functional if one want it simple.

My request:
1: on picture area swipe forward = next track or backward = previous track
2: swipe up/down = volume level adjust

Best regards
Jørgen Glering

[Mark Miksis]

Cool. Two comments:
- Any plans to add support for internet radio artwork?
- It might be interesting to combine this with some sort of screensaver dock mode. In other words, I put my tablet on it's dock and instead of switching to just a floating clock, it autodims but displays both a clock and the artwork.

[erland]

I've now released a 1.1.0 version, should appear in a few hours or so, the changes are:
- Ignore dummy images that tells you to clean tags.
- Automatically adding 9000 as port for remote server if port isn't specified in field.
- Images are shuffled each time a new list of artist images is retrieved to create some variation.
- Standard album cover is now shown initially when a new album is played.
- Added possibility to get either 100 most popular images or 100 newest images, 100 newest images is now default.
- Corrected crash that occurred when no images had been loaded yet.