YouAmp (Maemo)
YouAmp is my music player project. It started out of pure interest, but after I got me a N800 which lacks a decent build-in music player I started porting it to Maemo.
It is meant as an alternative to the spiffy UI centric players like UKMP or Canola and thus it concentrates on the playback capabilities.
Currently the startup time is a bit high and on first startup it will scan your SD cards for music files, which might take a while.
If the music title is displayed in red it means that no ReplayGain Information could be found and the default of -10db is being used.
Features
- Music browser
- Cover Art Display
- last.fm submission
- Searchable database
- Replaygain Support
- smart Replaygain mode selection
- mp3, ogg, wma, m4a playback
- controllable with RPC
Download
YouAmp is now in the Maemo extras repository, so you can easily install it using the package manager. Alternativley you can use the one click install link below
Install YouAmpLike YouAmp?
If you like YouAmp it would be nice if you could show this with a small donation. After all I am just a poor student 
Please note that if the amount is smaller than 0.30€, I will not see any money, as everything will be consumed by PayPal.
Notes for Using
At the first start YouAmp will scan your SD cards for music files and add them to its music library. This will take some time, depending on how many music files you have. Dont worry subsequent starts will be much faster, since it only looks for changes then.
YouAmp does not automatically download cover art – instead it looks for an image in the same folder as the current musc file. So if you want it to display the cover, you have to manually put it in the album folder.
While playing the music YouAmp might display the song info in red; this indicates that the song does not contain any replaygain information, which are needed in order to normailize the volume. You can add replaygain information to your files using replaygain and vorbisgain on Linux or foobar2000 on Windows.
By default replaygain scanners normalize the volume to 89db – if you would like to change this to another value, use the Replaygain Preamp Slider in the preferences. Non normalized files are mostly around 100db, therefore YouAmp applies by default a -10db amp to them – if you would like to change that use the No Replaygain Amp Slider in the preferences.
Timed +/- Buttons
as the D-Pad is not accessible without the keyboard on the N810, the volume buttons(+/-) have a second functionality. If you press and hold them longer than 1s they will switch songs instead.
Playing OGG-Vorbis Files
to play OGG-Vorbis files you have to make sure that the gstreamer0.10-plugins-ivorbis package is installed.
RPC API
if you want to control the player with the console, you can use the following D-Bus calls:
- net.rojtberg.youamp.toggle
- net.rojtberg.youamp.prev
- net.rojtberg.youamp.next
Planned Features
- Playlists
Code
The player is written in Python using pygtk and pygst. You can find the more information at launchpad.net. Any contributions are welcome.
May 23rd, 2008 at 4:09 pm
Great media player. Every time a new version of Canola, Kagu and so forth come out I always try them for a while. Then I get frustrated with their lack of basic music managing/browsing/playing capabilities or simply their load time and return to YouAmp. I can simply start YouAmp and press play to start the music I had loaded last – I can’t do that in Canola. I can locate any song I want to hear easily in YouAmp without blowing away my whole playlist – I can’t do that in Kagu. Canola I use to demo the Enlightenment Foundation Libraries, YouAmp I use to listen to music. The only things I would like to see is support for maemoscrobbler and the ability to create/manage playlists.
July 19th, 2008 at 1:38 pm
First impression is very favourable. YouAmp seems to offer the functionality I want without the bloat of some of the other players. It seems to scan for new files much quicker than the standard media-player’s backend, which is a bonus. As long as it doesn’t wipe out my battery when I leave it loaded but not running (something Canola and most other players seem to do) it’s going to become my standard music player.
One small enhancement I’d find useful would be to have a way to restrict where it scans for files. That way I could have other audio files on my device for other things that wouldn’t appear on the playlist. But this is a very minor thing…
August 6th, 2008 at 11:08 pm
I like this fast player but for me it is a problem that only sd-cards as media are supported.
I have a huge number of mp3s that are available on my samba server (I can access the file system from my n800
without problems) and I also want to play music from my usb hard disk from time to time which also can be accessed via n800. But I did not find any player on n800 with database support that shows these “folders” in their setup menus.
It would be great if the available media-sources could be configured in this program.
August 27th, 2008 at 4:34 pm
deleted all bugreport & feature request comments, since they don’t really belong here.
September 16th, 2008 at 10:56 pm
i downloaded 2 days ago you amp but still didn’t understand how works the ‘last.fm’ feature. i inserted the login name and password but it’s always disconnected. please let me know
September 17th, 2008 at 5:03 pm
try starting it from the console – maybe you entered the wrong account information. Next version will tell you that info from the preferences menu.
October 2nd, 2008 at 10:05 pm
Thanks for creating this app. Much more responsive than the built-in media player. Simple and easy to use UI, just like it should be.
You actually make my life difficult because part of what I’m supposed to be doing is testing the built-in media player, but I really prefer to use YouAmp. 
My only big request would be for playlists, but I see you already have that on your ToDo list. The ability to sort by “title” (when doing all artists/all songs) would also be very nice to help me find a single song, but I can live without that. Oh, being able to not show the Album column (or being able to pick what columns are shown) would be really nice. Hopefully the suggestions are useful to you.
Kevin
October 15th, 2008 at 2:11 am
Love this app. I have downloaded and used on the fancy applications (e.g.; Kagu and Canola). But I keep returning to YouAmp because it loads quickly, is solid and I can quickly get to the music I want.
HELP: This past week I can’t seem to get YouAmp to run any longer. I tried to re-download an Install from your page ( ‘Click to Install’ link above) however it reports Failed Catalogs (Anderende Repository and Linuxvision Package repository). I get a 404 when it is looking for files at these two locations. Is there an alternate location?
I am using a N800 running OS2008 Ver 2.2007.50-2
Thanks
November 6th, 2008 at 6:45 pm
Great soft! Thank you very much. Could you please fix cyrillic? And it would be very nice to be able to just browse and load files like old xamp does.
Not all mp3 have right tags so it is very unconvinient to search and play them.
December 27th, 2008 at 9:19 am
is there any chance for youamp to get streaming support, like say from shoutcast or icecast?
December 27th, 2008 at 9:19 am
oh and maybe develop a desktop version?
December 27th, 2008 at 3:55 pm
once I get the playlist support done, streaming will be no problem. But currently I am busy refactoring the code.
But there already is a desktop version you can try in my PPA.
December 29th, 2008 at 1:45 am
Maybe FLAC support? It will be great. And switch off & block screen when playing function.
March 9th, 2009 at 8:34 am
Can YouAmp remember the position of the clip it was playing when leaving the app? It will be very useful when listening lengthy clips (e.g. audiobooks, talks, podcasts).
April 9th, 2009 at 10:12 am
I change sources and now youamp play via a2dp.
Will be nice add this code to official sources.
Also need to add ogg support.
June 19th, 2009 at 12:56 pm
I saw someone that wished the app. could mount a samba server automatically. That would be great, but nearly as great would be if youamp had firefly/daapd support as did Rhythmbox. Or does it have it already? If not, was there any particular reason why it was omitted? Thanks.
September 6th, 2009 at 10:30 pm
hi -how is the playlist coming on-great player-the best of the bunch
September 6th, 2009 at 10:44 pm
it already works in the desktop version – basically it is just a matter of backporting in to maemo
September 8th, 2009 at 12:22 am
hi pavel
how hard would that be to do-i do not have much programning experience but use youamp everyday and playlists would save me a lot of time arranging my music
September 8th, 2009 at 11:36 pm
well it depends on how to merge the codebases. The problem is that the codebase for desktop/ frementale is quite different then for diablo. The best thing would be if I could just develop for Mer, but thats not ready jet. But I have some spare time now, so I can work on it
September 9th, 2009 at 12:26 pm
that would be great-everyone seems to be abandoning the n810 apps which is a pity because the n900 is useless with its small screen
October 20th, 2009 at 11:24 pm
Hello!
It’s pretty player and I want to request you to make some VERY important improvement, especially for nokia n810 users: because n810 doesn’t have a lot of buttons (i don’t mean a hidden qwerty).
So we have to use a Volume (Zoom) buttons:
Short press – louder(+) or quieter(-). (as it is right now)
A long press (longer than a second) the volume button “+” rewind the song forward (if you press when you play), or play (if the player was in pause mode)
A long press (longer than a second) to press the volume “-” switch to pause mode (if you click on playback), the second long press – plays song from the beginning
Pressing the volume keys “-” or “+” longer than 2 seconds – switch to previous song or next song.
I sorry for my English.
I hope you will make this for n810 users, bacause it’s tooooo difficult to switch the song just by hand in your pocket, you have to look on the screen each time you want to switch the song…
October 20th, 2009 at 11:27 pm
thanks for the suggestion. That should be an easy to do change. I will try to integrate it in the next release
October 22nd, 2009 at 11:18 pm
Thanks a lot! I am glad that you support the project and listen to users, it’s great!
Looking forward to next release.
October 28th, 2009 at 7:28 am
Love your program Pavel. Any chance of an N900 version? Please.
October 28th, 2009 at 11:30 am
depends on whether I get a N900 – I applied for PUSH, lets see…
October 29th, 2009 at 3:10 am
Well, here’s hoping you get one.
October 29th, 2009 at 8:44 am
hi pavel -how is the playlists coming on-any idea of next release
cheers ed
October 29th, 2009 at 2:33 pm
playlists still need some UI adaptation so they work on the Maemo. ETA is hard to say – depends on how bored I am. A christmas present maybe? Maybe earlier…
November 3rd, 2009 at 10:59 am
that would be nice-i tried quasar out -nice ui but too many buttons and gadgets-keep it simple is my motto-
November 17th, 2009 at 10:27 pm
hi pavel
received a update on my n810 yesterday -any idea as to what it was or does
ed
November 17th, 2009 at 10:35 pm
it contains the first batch of changes necessary for playlists together with the feature requested by dimitry above. You can now use the +/- buttons for switching songs
November 23rd, 2009 at 9:22 pm
Hey, YouAmp became much better with advanced volume buttons! Can you make FullScreen button like play/pause? I really don’t think somebody use FullScreen mode of YouAmp. Anyway, you can make a “virtual” FS button instead hardware button.
Thanks a lot!
November 29th, 2009 at 10:26 am
hi pavel just received the 2nd update and youamp shows loading but does not open-is this part of the plan
ed
November 29th, 2009 at 12:18 pm
not really – you should not have extras-devel enabled all the time. The second update is broken. But just to be sure it is a known bug: could you open it from the console and look for the last error message?
December 1st, 2009 at 8:59 pm
hi no luck tried disable ex devil -the update is 1.6.0~beta1-1 but when i install it nothing happens ed
December 2nd, 2009 at 2:02 am
hi flashed my n810 and now youamp does not install at all-any ideas ed
December 3rd, 2009 at 1:12 am
I can’t get Youamp to launch on my N800
~ $ youamp-player
Traceback (most recent call last):
File “/usr/bin/youamp-player”, line 3, in
import youamp.controller
File “debian/youamp/usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/youamp/controller.py”, line 7, in
ImportError: No module named dbus
~ $
I’ve tried reflashing the device and reformating the SD cards.
December 3rd, 2009 at 9:16 pm
~ $ youamp-player
Traceback (most recent call last):
File “/usr/bin/youamp-player”, line 3, in
import youamp.controller
File “debian/youamp/usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/youamp/__init__.py”, line 39, in
OSError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory: ‘/media/mmc1/.media-art’
~ $
December 6th, 2009 at 9:03 am
guys, do not enable extras-devel. There is a reason I did not promote the package yet. For recovery:
this will get you back to version 0.5.91. Current in extras-devel is 0.6.0~beta1, which is buggy.
December 9th, 2009 at 11:22 pm
Somebody shared this buggy 0.6.0~beta1 to over repos, so i accidentally installed it.
I don’t know what repos consist it (Extras-Devel disabled), but what i did: i launched Youamp from the Terminal (like root). And after it it started work correctly from the Personal Launcher or from menu.
Sorry for my English.
December 13th, 2009 at 9:01 am
youamp is looking good-got the new updates-album covers and playlist-what more could a man want -well done for delivering the goods
December 22nd, 2009 at 8:21 pm
Hi, Pavel!
Do you know about the Headphone daemon which stops playing music if headphones pulled out? It works like in iPod.
This program works with build-in player, but not with YouAmp.
Can you add this future to YouAmp?
Best regards,
Dimitriy
February 10th, 2010 at 1:17 pm
I use youamp 0.5.6. on maemo diablo.
I modified it to user a2dp.
youamp was controlled via dbus
I upgraded youamp to 0.6.0~beta4-1
Now get error:
dbus-send –print-reply –dest=net.rojtberg.youamp /net/rojtberg/youamp net.rojtberg.youamp.toggle
Error net.rojtberg.youamp.error.toggle: There are some exceptions in callback.
Can you comment?