K5 Buck, fully-fledged music player for Kindle w/ ID3 tag support

[apricorn]

I have an old Kindle Touch stored in my attic, and one of the biggest features I miss about it is its media player. It's archaic, but it was like sounds were coming out of paper!

I have been planning to build a music player for it with album art and everything, and here it is!! I'm proud to present Buck, a music player with ID3 (and thus album art) support along with album based sorting

===== QUICK NOTE =====
It should theoretically work with any e-ink device since I only call FBink and a pre-built mplayer binary, but I can't test it since I don't have other devices. If you have other devices, I'd love to hear how it goes!
===================

INTRODUCTION

E-ink devices have traditionally been only for reading... well no more!

Buck is a fully-fledged music player for e-ink devices.

Features:
- Using the generated Table of Contents, pick the song you wanna play



- Afterwards, in the search bar, there are two commands you can do
;b - to open up the GUI
;b <track number> - to play up the track of your choice



- Here's what the GUI looks like
Tap near the top to control volume and the bottom right to close the UI!



** Playlist support is not planned at the moment! I'm not exactly sure how it would work, and I don't personally use playlists

INSTALLATION

Requirements
- USBnet
- KUAL

In the root directory of the GitHub repository is a folder named `buck`. That's everything you'll need.

1. Move the buck folder to your /mnt/us/ folder
Folder structure:
- /mnt/us/buck/buck
- /mnt/us/buck/buck-cli
- /mnt/us/buck/buck-cli.sh
- /mnt/us/buck/kual_buck
- /mnt/us/buck/assets
- /mnt/us/buck/bin
- /mnt/us/buck/lib

2. The KUAL extension
- The /mnt/us/buck/kual_buck folder is the KUAL extension, move it to /mnt/us/extensions

3. The Search Commands

1. SSH into your Kindle (you'll need USBnet)
2. mntroot rw
3. vi /usr/share/webkit-1.0/pillow/debug_cmds.json
4. Add ";b": "/mnt/us/buck/buck-cli.sh" at the bottom
5. reboot

And that's it! You can launch it by typing ;b or ;b <track number> in the Kindle search bar

In KUAL, you'll also have an option to restart Buck. This is if you add new songs and don't want to reboot.

A Note About Volume:
100% IS PROBABLY NOT THE BEST VOLUME!
The Kindle Touch is very quiet, and so there is software volume boosting going on.
By default 100% is actually 150%. Although it works for some songs, I recommend
sticking to about 90% (although if you know a song works with 100, go for it!)
It gives the best balance between loudness and compatibility with
pretty much all songs. K, have fun listening!


GITHUB: https://github.com/Bill13579/buck

CREDITS

First off, the amazing FBInk by NiLuJe bundled with USBnet!

The built-in `aplayer` is terrible for advanced control of media playback, and so here I use the great `mplayer` binary built for the Kindle by the user `Smarter`

Link: https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sh...ghlight=winamp

WMCtrl and the UI disabling scripts are the product of twobob's awesome work here! It allowed the UI to not conflict with the Kindle's own interface
https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sh...d.php?t=194270

Icons:
https://online.rapidresizer.com/phot...to-pattern.php
https://pixabay.com/vectors/note-sou...concert-24074/
https://pixabay.com/photos/reindeer-...tlers-5635891/

[NiLuJe]

That looks mighty cool, kudos .

[apricorn]

Originally Posted by NiLuJe

That looks mighty cool, kudos .

Thanks! One thing bugging me is definitely the Kindle Touch's storage limit
Mine's full already! (I do admit I have 40 albums on it)

I'll most definitely try to port it to one of the Kobo devices with bigger storage

(Hopefully mplayer works with the new BT feature??)