I wrote a Palm application to create playlists for the Empeg on the fly. This app is in alpha right now, and I will release it tomorrow or Wednesday depending on when I have time to get back on the board and write up some install instructions. For now, some screenshots will have to do (I'm tired and going to bed).

What this does:

1. Syncs your playlist from your PC to your PalmPilot via a .pdb file. The .pdb file is created from a .csv file outputted from Jemplode, and converted from .csv to .pdb by a Java app I wrote. Todo: integrate .pdb creation into Jemplode, shouldn't be too hard. My .pdb file with 6002 songs is 465k, so people with very large music collections should have enough space with an 8mb Palm.

2. Lets you view your music collection on the Palmpilot. There are 4 screens, Artist, Album, Track and Playlist. You have to kind of "drill down" through the screens to select songs on the Track screen. It should be intuitive to most people. Todo: provide way to sort playlist after track selection.

3. Beam your ad-hoc playlist to the Empeg via IR. I have a small version of Empire running on the Empeg that will recognize OBEX objects coming from Palantir. Tonight for the first time I selected a list of songs and beamed them from my palm to my empeg and the songs were inserted into the current playlist. GOAL!

Now for the screenshots.

Very, very slick....Thanks for the work.

Good work! Looks like it would be brilliant for in the car when people want to choose music but can't cope with the remote
What's Palantir stand for/mean BTW?

- Trevor

excelent app, can't wait to try it

Comes from Tolkien's Lord of the Rings.. Means 'The seeing stone'.. I had to google for the meaning, but I remember cushman talking about it before.

Yup, what Yang said.

As a bonus, it has (Pal)m and (Ir)da contained within the word.

I'm packaiging up an alpha version of this software now.. out in a few.

Ahh. It did sound familar but I wasn't sure if it was because I'd read it here or somewhere else.

I was trying to work out how Palm, IR, Empeg, Ad-Hoc, Playlist and Creator together could make up Palantir

- Trevor

Hey, as an applicaiton author, maybe you could help me out with this. I attempted (for a short amount of time) to get empire to fork() then return so that it could be run via Hijack's EXEC_ONCE command, and be up and listening all the time. Currently it has to be started via the shell or EXEC_ONCE'd with a &, which is a bad thing(tm).

I'm sure it's simple to get the app to fork and stay in the background, do you see anything obvious that I was doing wrong?

I will be working on integrating the .pdb creator code into Jemplode first (to get that out of the way) and then I will start working on the empire server after that, but if you could point me in the right direction with the forking, it would save me some time.

Thanks!!

Well, can you show us what you were doing, so we can tell you how you got it wrong?

Use "daemon(0, 0);" to make it fork and do all the necessary bits to become a daemon. There are quite a few steps to do like closing stdin/out/err but daemon() does it all for you.

- Trevor

*laughs* sorry, I am getting my threads mixed up. I put an alpha version of the code out attached to this post. The relevant code is in empire.c in the main() function.

Wow, that was easy! Thanks, Trevor! I'll post an update in the referred to thread.

Wow! Looks very awesome, now just to find my palm pilot. Question? would it be possible to get the csv file from the empeg without having to sync it to the palm? I'm not sure if its possible, but to install empire on all my friends empegs, then when i go into their car, just load up the app on the palm, and it could get the empeg database via ir? that would be an awesome feature.

Sorry, that probably won't happen! As it is, my 480k database takes about 10 minutes to transfer over serial to the Palmpilot, and that is at the maximum serial speed. The max IrDA speed is probably well under that, and you would probably have line of sight issues, too. When Palantir beams the ad-hoc playlist to the Empeg, all that it is beaming is the FID's of the songs, all in a row, 8 bytes per song. A relatively large playlist would only take a few seconds to beam, but the whole database would take many minutes.

The reason that the .pdb file needs to be loaded from Jemplode is because there will need to be some tweaking of the data beforehand also. It's a good idea, but probably won't get implemented.

My only thought is to have a thin-client controlled by the Empeg over IrDA. There's no need to tansfer all of the information to the palm, only what's to be displayed to the user right? Might make it harder to use though, as it would have to stay in line-of-sight all the time..

I just wanted to say WOW! This is one of those things that slipped under my radar but thanks to RioCar.org I'm getting caught up!

Could we add some common remote commands to this too? (Next Track, Previous Track, Info Mode, etc) ?

Thank you for making this available to us!

I was toying with the idea of making a "Remote Screen" that would look similar to the Empeg remote, but that is low on my list of priorities right now. I want to work on new features before I duplicate things that exist already with the remote. On a side note, I took my Empeg and Palm on a longish trip this weekend (climbing at the Red) and Palantir performed _very_ well as is, but there are still a few things that I want to improve on:

*Being able to re-sort the playlist after you have selected songs
*Creating a popup notification on the Empeg that will display how many songs were beamed to the Empeg (like the "Found matching artist" popups)
*Getting .pdb creation put into Jemplode when the new version of Jemplode comes out
*Track details on the Palm

i just dug my palm 3 out of a deep hidden box. Then i had to find the cradle. How fun that was. I'm now trying to get everything setup so i can test out palantir, so i started off copying the palantir app to my palm, then i ran the PDBExporter, on your test.csv file. And uploaded that PDB to my palm.

When i try and start palantir on my palm, i get a fatal exception. I checked the version i'm running on my palm 3, and its 3.3. Any ideas?

Yup, it's a function that I used that is not available until version 3.5. Let me see if I can work around it and upload a new version sometime tonight. I am using TblGetItemPtr, and in the documentation for that function there is a workaround that I may be able to use.

In the meantime, you could upgrade your OS to 3.5 and it would work for ya, but I will try to fix it.

i was looking around on palm's support website, and i could only find 3.5 for the palm 5 series. do you have a link to the update for the palm 3 series? Every link for 3.5 i could find on palms site went here

The upgrade is not available to buy or download from Palm anymore, although you could probably find it on some P2P network. Palm wants you to upgrade to version 4.1 which they sell for $30. Give me a bit and I'll have a new version out that will work for OS 3.0 and greater.

Could you please test this version of the software on your Palm? I tested it using the Palm Emulator (I do not have a Palm III) and I am seeing strange behavior when scrolling, but it probably works correctly on the device itself. What I see when scrolling in the Emulator is that it is not erasing the line before re-drawing the new line on top of it, so you get artifacts. Let me know if you see this.

This is cool. "Lost your RioCar remote? Buy a Palm Pilot cheap and use it as a backlit remote with extra features!"

I just checked and mine is running 4.0 so I guess I'm set.

Until the remote feature is added this works quite well.

Hrm.. I had thought that consumer IR wouldn't be that hard to implement in the Palm, but it looks like it is. All the API functions that Palm supplies you with only give you access to SIR, which is used on laptops and PDA's and phones, not devices like the empeg remote. I'll look into this further, but OmniRemote probably uses some kind of hack to get access to the IR device directly.

sweet, yup the program works, along with your test csv file. Now to get everything setup on my empeg

Thanks!

yup, thats the exact problem i'm seeing on my palm 3, so it looks like your emulator is pretty good

Another thing i've noticed, is after i beam the first playlist, and i select some more songs, and beam again. nothing happens. i see on the com port IrLAP, no activity on link! everytime i click beam on the palm.

Another thing i would like to see is being able to toggle if your beaming playlist should be inserted/qued/replaced/etc...

And the last thing, which i've already asked for before i even tested the app. Is have hijack output the correct database structure on the fly, maybe in XML format, and beam it to the palm when palantir starts up first. This would really be an awesome feature My head hurts from going through 1500 songs and fixing the tags in excel . But anyways to streamline getting the database from the empeg to the palm, and up-to-date format without any/much user input should be the final goal I think.

He did mention getting Jemplode to export in the correct format shouldn't be too hard..

Once this gets going, this ap is worth the price of a cheap Palm itself!

yup, thats the exact problem i'm seeing on my palm 3, so it looks like your emulator is pretty good

Ok, so you do see the fragmented titles, etc, when you scroll? I'll try to fix this.

Another thing i've noticed, is after i beam the first playlist, and i select some more songs, and beam again. nothing happens. i see on the com port IrLAP, no activity on link! everytime i click beam on the palm.

Did you set up the script to start up empire AFTER the player app has started? The player app will seriously interfere with IrDA communications. If you installed the shell script that is included, it should wait for 10 seconds before starting Empire, and you should see Empire start up after the player app in your serial output. If it starts up before the player, you will need to increase the time before Empire starts to say 11 or 12 seconds. Hopefully we can get a patch in Hijack that will exec programs after the player.

Another thing i would like to see is being able to toggle if your beaming playlist should be inserted/qued/replaced/etc...

Planned for this.

And the last thing, which i've already asked for before i even tested the app. Is have hijack output the correct database structure on the fly, maybe in XML format, and beam it to the palm when palantir starts up first. This would really be an awesome feature My head hurts from going through 1500 songs and fixing the tags in excel . But anyways to streamline getting the database from the empeg to the palm, and up-to-date format without any/much user input should be the final goal I think.

It would take way, way too much time to beam the song database to the Palm. The best way to do this (I've said this before) is to generate the .pdb file from Jemplode. This is why I wrote the conversion code in Java in the first place. XML is also no good to store on the Palm, because of all the redundant tags, storage space is very expensive on the Palm, especially if you only have 4MB of memory. The database now is all packed together, and my app finds things by byte offsets.

Why do you need to fix your tags in Excel? I just have to order, sort, and then convert, no manual fixing of tags. If your MP3 library is not tagged correctly in the first place, I don't think that Palantir will work well for you anyway, it depends on having all the tags present to work correctly.

Okay, try this version of the app. I think I've fixed the problem, but you never know for sure until you can test it on an actual device. This version should work on all Palm devices version 3.0 and greater.

If exporting to csv displays the ID3 tag info and not the empeg database info, then we'll have to remind the empeg team of the "Feature Request" to have emplode update the id3 tags.