Amarok Blog

A few friends and I made the 1.5 hour drive down to Columbia, MO. We live in Kirksville (pop. <20000) so Columbia (pop. ~85000-100000) is quite a contrast. So we lived it up in the "big city" - did a little (unsuccessful) bicycle shopping, had lunch, saw Good Night, and Good Luck (a great movie), went to the mall (I read a manga cover-to-cover) and had some yummy sushi at Osaka before preceding to the evening concert.

I've been listening to Matisyahu for a little while now so I knew the songs and such, but I still didn't really expect the concert to be as awesome as it was. There was virtuoso guitar, drum and some great beatboxing. The only downside was how smoky it was, Kade agreed.

Obviously its really hard to get pictures in the middle of a concert, but Ben was able to get a few I was able to touch up in showfoto. Showfoto really is a gem of a KDE app (and it doesn't even have a proper webpage), it does its one thing quite well (now the blog is KDE-related ).

A few friends and I made the 1.5 hour drive down to Columbia, MO. We live in Kirksville (pop. <20000) so Columbia (pop. ~85000-100000) is quite a contrast. So we lived it up in the "big city" - did a little (unsuccessful) bicycle shopping, had lunch, saw Good Night, and Good Luck (a great movie), went to the mall (I read a manga cover-to-cover) and had some yummy sushi at Osaka before preceding to the evening concert.

I've been listening to Matisyahu for a little while now so I knew the songs and such, but I still didn't really expect the concert to be as awesome as it was. There was virtuoso guitar, drum and some great beatboxing. The only downside was how smoky it was, Kade agreed.

Obviously its really hard to get pictures in the middle of a concert, but Ben was able to get a few I was able to touch up in showfoto. Showfoto really is a gem of a KDE app (and it doesn't even have a proper webpage), it does its one thing quite well (now the blog is KDE-related ).

amaroK development has been busy, like usual though perhaps more so since the start of amaroK 1.4 development.
Most of the new features and changes are really just polish on the existing feature set. I expect this will remain the case for 1.4 - we are looking forward to porting to Qt 4.0 and releasing amaroK 2.0. But that doesn't make the features going in now any less valuable:

• Reduced memory usage for large playlists
• amaroK now uses libgpod instead of our custom code for iPod support This should resolve a number of issues.
• The statistics tool replaces the Home tab reducing the number of tabs in the context browser down to a manageable 3.
• The much user-requested support for WMA and MP4/ACC tags has been added using Taglib plugins.
• I've been continuing to work on usability improvements for the dynamic mode. Basically trying to make its features more obvious.
• Today we got a cool patch, now the flat-mode of the collection browser uses standard column headers.

To try out the latest developments in amaroK SVN, your best option is still using a script such as Get-amarok-svn.sh, so that you have the power to configure some of those nifty features (iPod, MP4) that I listed above.

Now there is a new option to try out an amaroK from SVN with a pretty minimal sets of dependencies. I installed a Sarge chroot yesterday and have started creating amaroK 1.4-SVN Sarge Debian packages. Using these, Kurt Pfeifle was able to script around the KDE-plugins relocatable problem and create a klik.
To install with this method, simply run:

wget klik.atekon.de/client/install -O -|sh

and follow the directions, if you don't have klik installed already. Then simply browser to
klik://amarok-svn-nightly:

konqueror klik://amarok-svn-nightly

You have to enter my email address ian(a)monroe.nu (replacing (a) with @) as its still a pending package.
They should be updated by about 11:00 UTC almost every day.

amaroK development has been busy, like usual though perhaps more so since the start of amaroK 1.4 development.
Most of the new features and changes are really just polish on the existing feature set. I expect this will remain the case for 1.4 - we are looking forward to porting to Qt 4.0 and releasing amaroK 2.0. But that doesn't make the features going in now any less valuable:

• Reduced memory usage for large playlists
• amaroK now uses libgpod instead of our custom code for iPod support This should resolve a number of issues.
• The statistics tool replaces the Home tab reducing the number of tabs in the context browser down to a manageable 3.
• The much user-requested support for WMA and MP4/ACC tags has been added using Taglib plugins.
• I've been continuing to work on usability improvements for the dynamic mode. Basically trying to make its features more obvious.
• Today we got a cool patch, now the flat-mode of the collection browser uses standard column headers.

To try out the latest developments in amaroK SVN, your best option is still using a script such as Get-amarok-svn.sh, so that you have the power to configure some of those nifty features (iPod, MP4) that I listed above.

Now there is a new option to try out an amaroK from SVN with a pretty minimal sets of dependencies. I installed a Sarge chroot yesterday and have started creating amaroK 1.4-SVN Sarge Debian packages. Using these, Kurt Pfeifle was able to script around the KDE-plugins relocatable problem and create a klik.
To install with this method, simply run:

wget klik.atekon.de/client/install -O -|sh

and follow the directions, if you don't have klik installed already. Then simply browser to
klik://amarok-svn-nightly:

konqueror klik://amarok-svn-nightly

You have to enter my email address ian(a)monroe.nu (replacing (a) with @) as its still a pending package.
They should be updated by about 11:00 UTC almost every day.