Amarok Blog

Monday, February 28. 2005

amaroK LiveCD

Well, after 35 iso images, amaroK LiveCD version 1.2.1 looks done. I am doing some final testing but I should be able to get it distributed tomorrow. This has been quite an interesting project for me, mostly because it is the first contribution other than bug reporting and documentation I have made to an OSS project. I am not a coder, so the most I can usually contribute is bug testing, money and encouragement (complaints). I learned a lot, made some friends and had a lot of fun.

Thanks to Mark, Max and Chris for making this such an easy thing to contribute, to Kobsession and Tightcode for your assistance with artwork (why do graphic artists never use their real names), to all the people that tested this, to Texstar for making PCLinuxOS so easy to work with and packaging so many things upon request, to Tom Kelly for maintaining the mklivecd scripts and to everyone else that I annoyed over the last three weeks.

Things I learned:

- How to remove too many packages from a linux installation and end up with an unbootable system
- How to make a syslinux bootscreen with gif2lss
- How to make a bootsplash theme
- Why the Creative Commons licenses are really cool
- How to use cd-rw's instead of cdr's when working on a Live CD project
- How to use scp (never heard of it, but it is cool)
- How to make a torrent and get a tracker running

and I got a much better understanding of how ALSA works.

Check it out at http://amarok.kde.org/wiki/index.php/AmaroK_Live

Now, what do I do with all these iso images?

Posted by Greg Meyer in oggb4mp3 at 23:47 | Comments (7) | Trackback (1)

Ruuuuuuuush

We currently are in one. A rush, I mean. Just checkout the ChangeLog between 1.2 and 1.2.1. No wait! Of course I already did that for you.

+ 32 Lines.

See what I mean? 1.2.1 was released exactly 2 weeks eq. 14 days after 1.2.
Which then means: More than 2 new ChangeLog entries per day. Amazing!

Right now we are already in a 1.2.2 mood, planning various little fixes and new features. The ContextBrowser will offer a fresh new Home tab and a Statistics tab/page will be introduced. Ideas? We would love to hear about them. Comment here or visit our forum! 1.2.2 will be (prolly) released in another two weeks. Afterwards the 1.2 branch will close and we will head on to 1.3 development. So you better hurry up!

Have fun,
muesli

Posted by muesli in muesli at 19:09 | Comments (5) | Trackbacks (0)

Sunday, February 27. 2005

on Equalizer's

I went to a Barnes and Noble (a large book store with comfy chairs) yesterday and to my present surprise they had the Qt book from Trolltech. I read most of chapter 8, the one on QCanvas. It was quite an exciting read (really!). Got me thinking about amaroK's equalizer. Personally I find it cumbersome to use, it seems like it (and pretty much all computer equalizers) limit themself to being an analogy to the real world equalizer. However last year on my computer, aRTs had this really nifty equalizer that worked kind of like a line graph. You could define points on the line and drag them around, it was really the first equalizer that I found worth using. It came in handy when I DJed for a dance. Since then, I really don't know what happened to this aRTs plugin, I can't find the source for it anywhere.

So after wrestling with the KDevelop C++ template last night (it doesn't work with unsermake for some reason) I have successfully drawn a line across a qcanvas. I plan on developing it as a separate app and putting it into amaroK somehow when it is done. I'm not sure how it should integrate itself into amaroK, since the current equalizer has the advantage of being very simple to figure out.

We've missed you mxcl!

Posted by eean in eean at 15:55 | Comment (1) | Trackbacks (0)

on Equalizer's

Posted by Ian Monroe in eean at 15:55

Backtrace Frenzy

I was away for 9 days and I return to an amazing amount of decent commits for 1.2.1, and 500 backtraces (700 before I deleted all the ones for beta4, which I can't afford the time to read).

Gah!

I'll prioritise those for 1.2.1-CVS as those ones have better subjects (new code). It's impossible to say what percentage of users this 700 emails represents.. Still I better crack on, 100% stability is a nice goal..

1.2.1 is out today, we've done good work once more I think

The toolbar was rearranged due to asiego's comment (I assume). It does make sense to have the play buttons on the left, so we'll give him that

Still I disagree that the play button is the most used button. For some people perhaps this is true, but I think most people will press it once per session or maybe never (double-clicking instead). If you have resume-playback activated you may even have sessions when you never click it at all.

In fact, that's a good point. The play button in the playlist should activate the listview's current-item. Currently it restarts the currently-playing track. Funny how nobody has ever bug-reported us on that one. This is actually tricky to fix, I know markey is rather keen on the restart-track behaviour.

Posted by Max Howell in mxcl at 14:04 | Comment (1) | Trackbacks (0)

Monday, February 21. 2005

Introduction

As first post to another new blog, I will describe what kind of posting you will find here:

90% amaroK related postings, 10% KDE related postings. Small references to personal stuff may be inserted for context, but frankly I find it hard to care about what happens in my personal life and I'm sure you all feel the same!

I hope you choose to subscribe

Posted by Max Howell in mxcl at 19:40 | Comments (0) | Trackback (1)

amaroK 1.2 - It Crashes Somewhat Less

I'm really pleased with amaroK 1.2. We all worked our socks off the last few weeks, fixing crashes, fixing bugs, tweaking and polishing.

Our new crash-handler really helped to get the crash-count down. Now when amaroK crashes it gets KDE to show a mail-composition window (with whichever e-mail client KDE is configured to use). The email text apologises for the crash and then lists various versions (CC, TagLib, KDElibs, etc.) and requests that the user describe what they did immediately before the crash. We then attach a gdb backtrace and some other details.

This really works because:

The user is familiar with the k-mail (evo, etc.) interface
All the user has to do is click "send", 1-click is hard to beat
E-mail is open, there is no hidden information being transmitted

For 1.2-beta4 we were getting 50 backtrace emails a-day. Which was hard to manage. Now we are getting less (I've been away for 6 days, before I left it was much less, and may still be now), and what we are getting appear to mostly be crashes in widget-styles or other libraries, which means it isn't (hopefully) amaroK's fault. Although I follow them through to be sure we don't pass a null-pointer or something obvious.

I think perhaps we will disable the crash-handler for the early 1.3-betas as it is a lot of work sifting through the reports. At least how the system stands currently.

I spent a lot of time polishing amaroK in various places, and for 1.2.1/2 I'd like to do a lot more of that. More help tips, more feedback for clicking slow-things, more aesthetic tweaking. More listening to users to figure out what parts of amaroK aren't intuitive or need more work.

Suggestions are welcome

Posted by Max Howell in mxcl at 19:17 | Comments (0) | Trackback (1)

Friday, February 18. 2005

being logical

Markey assures me I can blog about anything, not just amaroK stuff. So I'll take advantage of this and get this new blog thing rolling with one of those boring entries blogs are famous for.

To make a not-so-long story short, I've taken a year off my Computer Science degree at Truman (was getting burned out), failed to find a job in anything IT related, so I'm working in a textbook warehouse. Today I was assigned to 'corner', my first thought being "WTF is that?". It is the person who shuffles all the books as they come down on the conveyor belt into one of three lines, depending on which floor of the warehouse the books will end up.

So, I was doing this. Having a good time, its one of the few jobs where you get to sit down. But I was sucking at it pretty bad. Despite being very simple (book marked three, put on the belt for line 3) I was having a hard time at it. Partly I was thinking about amaroK. In adding .ram file support yesterday, its apparent that amaroK deals with playlists in too simple a matter, making the decision solely on file extension. So BBC World Service plays fine, but not the stuff at real.com. This is what I was thinking about. So whole quantities of 3 were going into 2. So then I decided that I could pretend to be the one logic operations that gives ==, > and < results as 0, 1, and -1 respectively. Comparing with '2', line 2 became line 0, line 3 became line 1 and line 1 became line -1. For some reason this increased my accuracy quite a bit, I'm guessing because it forced me to pause an extra 100 milliseconds. Later I assigned the lines based on their cubes. I guess the moral of the story is simple doesn't always means easiest. Or that I get distracted too easily.

But now, I need to get to bed (I'm at -6 UTC). I'm debating whether to watch the Daily Show that I just finished downloading.

This blog is brought to you by Konqueror's spell check.

Posted by eean in eean at 04:35 | Comment (1) | Trackback (1)

being logical

Posted by Ian Monroe in eean at 04:35

Wednesday, February 16. 2005

A Famous Quote

"If people had understood how patents would be granted when most of today's ideas were invented and had taken out patents, the industry would be at a complete standstill today...A future start-up with no patents of its own will be forced to pay whatever price the giants choose to impose."

Now guess who said that originally?

Linus Torvalds? Wrong.

Richard Stallman? Wrong.

Muesli? No-ho.

Bill Gates? Just kidding. Oh no, wait. He did. He really did.

Maybe he was developing an opensource OS named Billux back then? Just guessing, though.

...muesli

Posted by in muesli at 04:44 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Thursday, February 3. 2005

amaroK Desktop Script

Just stumbled over the amaroK Desktop Script on kde-apps.org. Nicely done, cool script

If you're curious: since I didn't have the pyqt/pykde stuff installed on my Debian desktop yet, I had to run "su -c apt-get install pyqt-tools python-kde3 python2.3-kde3" to get this stuff installed. Easy job.

So, now there's always a cool blended coverart of the currently playing album on my desktop. Sweet

...muesli

Posted by in muesli at 01:13 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

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