Amarok Blog

Thursday, August 7. 2008

GSoC weekly report - issue 10

Posted by William Viana Soares in liw at 19:54 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Monday, August 4. 2008

Rokers on speed?

whatever happened to the rock and roll?

Originally uploaded by johnnyalive.

Paul always does sweet little graphs to show interesting stuff. Since everyone in the Amarok team felt that development really sped up in the last weeks/months I wanted some proof of that mainly to show it off and to find out where it came from. So I asked Paul to help me with that by doing what he does best. And only a few hours later he presented the results. If you haven’t read it yet you should do it now before reading the rest of my post.

Impressive, right?

So now that Paul did his part I should probably do my job and explain why this is happening

There are several “sources of developers”:

Google Summer of Code: With 6 of our 7 students (Alejandro, Casey, Daniel, Daniel, William, Peter) doing an excellent job they really help getting things done. You rock!

Season of KDE: Teo is working on his SoC project (mass tagging) without sponsorship from Google. He is doing a great job. Two others are starting to work on another project right now. You rock!

KDE BugSquad: Edward started triaging bugs for us during the Amarok bugday and is now starting to help with development. He already made a very impressive start. You rock!

Oldtimers: Our core developers are doing a lot more lately. On the one hand they help new developers getting used to Amarok development and give them a hand when they have trouble with stuff like the buildsystem. On the other hand they seem to be a lot more motivated to get Amarok 2 ready for release now that we have the alpha releases out of the door and things are starting to fall into place. You rock! (But you know that right? )

Other contributors: A few new people showed up in the last few days and already presented promising results. I hope you all stick around. You rock!

So the next question is: Why are more people interested in Amarok 2 now than they were say 2 months ago. The reasons I can see are:

With the release of KDE 4.1 it became easier to start developing on Amarok because the hurdle of compiling KDE from trunk was gone.

With Neon a lot more people could give Amarok 2 a try without compiling it from SVN. (Which also helped non-dev team members a lot.)

The release of alpha 1 and 2 made it a lot easier to try Amarok 2 with distro packages and gave the signal “We have something we think is worth testing now”.

A lot of very positive reviews in the press.

People actually start to understand our vision for Amarok 2 and want to help making it reality.

Last but not least: Developers are motivated by:

Very positive reception of the alphas in the press and among users.

A lot of bug reports that show that users are caring about what we do and want to help us improve as much as possible until the release of the final 2.0 version. Among those bug reports are a lot of junior jobs which makes it easy to get started with a small task and get used to everything.

Actually switching to Amarok 2 as their main player without big problems.

Development being in a very exciting phase, i.e. we left the really hard start behind us where we literally had no new blood at all for a very long time (for reasons see above) and are not yet in boring maintenance mode.

The frameworks actually start to pay off.

It is pretty interesting to see how most of this, if not all, can also be applied to KDE 4.1. Let’s see if we can get some nice stuff put together at Akademy to prove this

Exiting times and more of them ahead of us! Now is the right time to join KDE development (and any other non-dev part of KDE of course).

Posted by Lydia Pintscher in Nightrose at 18:31 | Comments (6) | Trackbacks (0)

Friday, August 1. 2008

GSoC weekly report issue 9

Posted by William Viana Soares in liw at 12:42 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Thursday, July 31. 2008

A breath of fresh air for Konsole

Oxygen thingy of the day: Konsole Color Scheme

I'd still like to get some feedback on the color composition so give it a try. Currently only Nightrose (aka Lydia) tested it, and usually her display's colors are way off

.
Lydia also states that it rocks with irssi, but who uses that thing anyway?

Grab it today and get your Konsole a breath of fresh air.

BTW: apparently it takes some time to get used to it, but once you did, it is quite awesome to work with this color scheme

Posted by Harald Sitter in apachelogger at 19:12 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

A breath of fresh air for Konsole

.
Lydia also states that it rocks with irssi, but who uses that thing anyway?

Grab it today and get your Konsole a breath of fresh air.

BTW: apparently it takes some time to get used to it, but once you did, it is quite awesome to work with this color scheme

Posted by Harald Sitter in apachelogger at 18:20 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Le KDE sprechen ?????

Kubuntu users now also can get a localized KDE

Just install you language's package, e.g. kde-l10n-de for german, then do the following:

Kickoff -> System Settings -> Regional & Language
there you can select Country/Region which should auto-adjust a couple of stuff to your local preferences (for example the date formatting) in addition to that it should also select the installed language. If this fails for whatever reason, use the "Add Language" drop-down menu instead.

Beside l10n, we also uploaded a couple of extragear packages like KTorrent, Skanlite and KFax.

Pimp my Konqueror
Installing konqueror-plugin-searchbar-kde4 will add the world famous google searchbar to your konqueror again

Also checkout the other konqueror-plugin-* packages, maybe you want to install some of them.

Posted by Harald Sitter in apachelogger at 08:08 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Wednesday, July 30. 2008

I?m Leaving on a Jet Plane?

The ball has been dropped by me - dropped hard - during the past several weeks. First, I was stumped for a week and a half by the glib+qt fiasco, then my development machine’s hard drive shuffled off the mortal coil. Replacing it took a solid week, and when it finally arrived I installed Gentoo. Two days later, the finally install completes as I’m frantically throwing my life’s possessions into a car:

clothes

2 laptops

1 Target desk (retail $50)

assorted books

1 blow-up air mattress

Fast forward through seven hours of me hurtling down the interstate at not-so-safe velocities, and here I am, pardoning my recent idleness as my flight to Paris boards at gate D32. Not accomplishing much over the past several weeks suddenly doesn’t seem so bad: I’m going to Europe! There is a week long hack-a-thon at Akademy; I’ll catch up then.

A bientôt!

Posted by Casey Link in ramblurr at 18:14 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Tuesday, July 29. 2008

KDE 4.1.0 + Kubuntu Ninjas

Finally KDE 4.1.0 got released *hoooray*.

... since I am sure there are going to be plenty blog posts about the beauty of and awesomeness of 4.1 I want to move the spotlight a bit (as if I ever had it put right

The Kubuntu Ninjas
While I was doing the rc1 packages on my own I noticed that this is just too much work for one mind to deal with and it is impossible to prepare the Hardy backports (which are more important on a short-term base) as well, within the given amount of time. As a result of this some guy stated on ubuntuforums.org that apparently Kubuntu's QA is pretty bad. Reasonable assumption considering we didn't get KDEPim built in time and thus caused some problems for early upgraders.
As a result of this we know have certified Package Ninjas(tm) for KDE releases. Using super nifty infrastructure we managed to provide a pretty flawless transition to KDE 4.1.0 on Hardy and almost the very same for Intrepid. Note the word 'pretty' in that sentence

. There were some minor quirks which have to be worked out in future release preparation, but I am confident we are on the right way.

So who are these guys providing Kubuntu users with the awesomest KDE 4 packages ever?

JontheEchidna (aka Jonathan Thomas) likes to play XBoing and is best in forgetting to exchange files necessary to build on Hardy
vorian (aka Steve Stalcup) is the one leading us to World Domination or at least helps us take over #amarok to throw one awesome party, meanwhile he tries to archive karma by packaging all of extragear and preventing kdebase-runtime from building
smarter (aka Guillaume Martres) is the Blue Knight who is pretty much ready to become a MOTU (Master of the Universe = the guys who keep the majority of Ubuntu packages in shape) but does not know how to become one (maybe someone can help? I really don't know how I became MOTU either...
Arby (aka Richard Birnie) seems to be our personal merge (debian+ubuntu packaging = new ubuntu packaging) monkey and does backports in the shortest amount of time I ever measured
Riddell (aka jr or Jonathan Riddell), the almighty Kubuntu robot, who's sponsoring the Intrepid uploads ... he also can transform into an oracle if someone might have unanswerable questions
and me, myself and I, sitting in my deckchair, sipping Captain Morgan with Coke and partying until 5:30 in the morning

So join some strange IRC channels on Freenode, apparently they hang out in #kubuntu-devel and #kubuntu-kde4, and give them some cookies or similar.

And now... for the spotlight... KDE 4.1.0 is so awesome, I just love folderview, Plasma is the most beautiful piece of software I have ever seen.

Posted by Harald Sitter in apachelogger at 13:22 | Comments (2) | Trackbacks (0)

KDE 4.1.0 + Kubuntu Ninjas

Finally KDE 4.1.0 got released *hoooray*.

... since I am sure there are going to be plenty blog posts about the beauty of and awesomeness of 4.1 I want to move the spotlight a bit (as if I ever had it put right

JontheEchidna (aka Jonathan Thomas) likes to play XBoing and is best in forgetting to exchange files necessary to build on Hardy
vorian (aka Steve Stalcup) is the one leading us to World Domination or at least helps us take over #amarok to throw one awesome party, meanwhile he tries to archive karma by packaging all of extragear and preventing kdebase-runtime from building
smarter (aka Guillaume Martres) is the Blue Knight who is pretty much ready to become a MOTU (Master of the Universe = the guys who keep the majority of Ubuntu packages in shape) but does not know how to become one (maybe someone can help? I really don't know how I became MOTU either...
Arby (aka Richard Birnie) seems to be our personal merge (debian+ubuntu packaging = new ubuntu packaging) monkey and does backports in the shortest amount of time I ever measured
Riddell (aka jr or Jonathan Riddell), the almighty Kubuntu robot, who's sponsoring the Intrepid uploads ... he also can transform into an oracle if someone might have unanswerable questions
and me, myself and I, sitting in my deckchair, sipping Captain Morgan with Coke and partying until 5:30 in the morning

Posted by Harald Sitter in apachelogger at 12:12 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

KDE 4.1.0 + Kubuntu Ninjas

Finally KDE 4.1.0 got released *hoooray*.

... since I am sure there are going to be plenty blog posts about the beauty of and awesomeness of 4.1 I want to move the spotlight a bit (as if I ever had it put right

The Kubuntu Ninjas While I was doing the rc1 packages on my own I noticed that this is just too much work for one mind to deal with and it is impossible to prepare the Hardy backports (which are more important on a short-term base) as well, within the given amount of time. As a result of this some guy stated on ubuntuforums.org that apparently Kubuntu's QA is pretty bad. Reasonable assumption considering we didn't get KDEPim built in time and thus caused some problems for early upgraders.
As a result of this we know have certified Package Ninjas(tm) for KDE releases. Using super nifty infrastructure we managed to provide a pretty flawless transition to KDE 4.1.0 on Hardy and almost the very same for Intrepid. Note the word 'pretty' in that sentence

JontheEchidna (aka Jonathan Thomas) likes to play XBoing and is best in forgetting to exchange files necessary to build on Hardy
vorian (aka Steve Stalcup) is the one leading us to World Domination or at least helps us take over #amarok to throw one awesome party, meanwhile he tries to archive karma by packaging all of extragear and preventing kdebase-runtime from building
smarter (aka Guillaume Martres) is the Blue Knight who is pretty much ready to become a MOTU (Master of the Universe = the guys who keep the majority of Ubuntu packages in shape) but does not know how to become one (maybe someone can help? I really don't know how I became MOTU either...
Arby (aka Richard Birnie) seems to be our personal merge (debian+ubuntu packaging = new ubuntu packaging) monkey and does backports in the shortest amount of time I ever measured
Riddell (aka jr or Jonathan Riddell), the almighty Kubuntu robot, who's sponsoring the Intrepid uploads ... he also can transform into an oracle if someone might have unanswerable questions
and me, myself and I, sitting in my deckchair, sipping Captain Morgan with Coke and partying until 5:30 in the morning

Posted by Harald Sitter in apachelogger at 10:55 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Sunday, July 27. 2008

MTP File Management and iPod Covers

So MTP file management (copying/deleting) has gotten implemented, and works well on all 3 devices I tested on. Still a lot of polishing left to do as far as interface goes, and some threading to not stall Amarok at key points, and it should be good to go. One thing I'm having issues with is copying files directly from an MTP to an iPod and vice versa, but will investigate this later as this is a bit more advanced.

So, I had a bit of an epic struggle with a few things over the last day or so. See, libgpod can only retrieve covers in the form of GdkPixbuf structs, but so as to not force the GdkPixbuf dependency on people, they return it as a gpointer which you can then choose to cast if you want to use GdkPixbuf. Sounds great, right? No problem...

... except for having CMake pull in the dependency. So as it turns out, there's no built-in module for gdk-pixbuf library. So, I decided to create my own as I did with libgpod, except when I pulled it in, a certain function wasn't present. Odd... hm. Well as it turns out, this function is only present in the gdk-pixbuf library that resides in gtk. Great! There's a CMake module for GTK, all should be fine this time, yes? No. The GTK module in CMake pulls in GTK1, and gdk-pixbuf is in GTK2. So I end up modifying the gdk-pixbuf module I made before, learning lots about CMake along the way, and finally get it compiling.

Long story short for the next part, the README in libgpod didn't really work for me for setting up SysInfo for my iPod, and I accidentally tripped on a feature from the old Amarok which set it up right, after I modified some permissions. Wonderful, yeah?

Wrong! Turns out that iTunes and libgpod handle covers in two different ways, and so I have to cater to both of them. This turned out to be a bit of a pain, but at last, I finally got a size-distorted but correct solution:

The m-flo cover was set by me using libgpod via Amarok, and the Maná cover was set by iTunes. I'm going to fine-tune the sizes later, and all should be peaches and cream.

That's all for now. One note though about the interface, which right now is either non-existent or bad: likely going to be making an applet which does all the fun stuff that A1 did for media devices, including: connect/disconnect, % free space, possibly a queue, and if supported, even % battery level! That however, is a ways away from coming true, but do stay tuned.

Posted by Alejandro Wainzinger in xevix at 12:32 | Comment (1) | Trackbacks (0)

KWin and the capseo thingy

Since some people already asked what to do with the mysterious .cps files:

KWin in KDE 4 offers the possibility to record one's desktop. The resulting files have a .cps suffix (cps = capseo = video codec created by the same developer as the underlying library [called captury] of the recording feature). I actually know no player which supports native playback of capseo, which is why you most likely want to convert it.
Here comes the trick part, the website moved from captury, to captury, to captury (yes this is just for giving google some context

On the most current location of the website you can find:

cpsrecode -i screen-capture.cps -o - \
| mencoder - -o screen-capture.avi -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=xvid:autoaspect=1

This binary is on Kubuntu part of the capseo package, and probably something similar on other distributions.

Have fun.

Posted by Harald Sitter in apachelogger at 11:20 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Yep, I'll be at FrOSCon

Following Danimo, I'm announcing that I (as well as many other Amarokers) will be at FrOSCon too

(Note that my image is cuter than Danimo's)

While I'm at it, I would also like to present my new homepage www.mark-kretschmann.de.

(Note that it's debatable whether I'm cuter than Danimo)

Posted by Mark Kretschmann in markey at 07:43 | Comments (5) | Trackbacks (0)

Saturday, July 26. 2008

GSoC Update

It's been a pretty laid back week or two for me. Google paid up, and I bought myself a microKorg (to compliment my circuit-bent Casio Sk-1), and I don't have buy my potatoes on credit anymore, which feels good, but a little un-American.

I spent most of these couple weeks just wandering the code, putting an end to bugs that stumbled across my path, but there are couple noteworthy items.

First, I have saving playlists more or less working. Which was something I was putting off writing, because it was a hassle, and not the kind of hassle I find very interesting.

The other good news is that the solver is about to become much much faster. I switched from hash table sets (QSet) to bit array sets, which are much better suited for the obscene number of intersect and subtract operations I have to do. The result is the solver should be nearly instantaneous. No more 20 second waits when you put in a bunch of biases.

I have a pretty expansive todo list, but I'm eager to implement some new types of biases to see what the solver can really do. I've gotten some good suggestions for biases that hadn't occurred to me. Let me know if you have an idea for one, and I may write it up.

Posted by Daniel Jones in kopophex at 05:32 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Friday, July 25. 2008

MTP Support Arrives

Caption: 2 MTP devices connected, and songs playing from iPod

This is a bit overdue, but initial support for MTP devices has arrived. To use it, you require limbtp >= 0.3.0 installed on the system, and a device supported by libmtp of course.

Part of the reason this took so long is that I'm starting to notice a lot of potentially reusable code, and will probably soon refactor to reflect this. MTP devices are strange beasts, because their filesystem can't be directly accessed. As a result, Amarok 1 and Windows Media Player et al can only do file management of tracks on these devices, not actually play directly off of them. I'm going to be working on an idea that allows playing off of them to be possible, because let's face it, A2 is an audio player, not just a file manager.

Thanks again to everyone who donated MTP devices to the Amarok group. You're the ones who make this possible. Support is still pretty basic, so please don't file bugs on this yet, but be ready to at some point in the semi-near future.

Edit: Snapshot of 3 Mentioned Devices