Amarok Blog

Why is it so hard to get artists involved in OSS projects?

I'm not the first one to ask. Lugradio (a Linux podcast show) discussed this issue in one of their recent episodes. Several solutions were suggested, some realistic, others less so. I thought this one sounded rather feasible: "You identify an artist, go to his/her door, knock, and then talk him into joining your project! If need be, drag him out by the hair." (last sentence added by myself)

Dear artists, it doesn't have to come to this, you see. You can still join the amaroK project voluntarily, before we come knocking. In fact, I think you might rather enjoy working in our project, for we have many interesting tasks:

Artwork for custom widgets used in the application
Images for the website
Icons (we have lots of crappy ones at this point)
Graphics for the upcoming 1.4 Live-CD

Here at amaroK, we emphasize teamwork a lot. We have a dev squad, our "roKymotion" promotion team, a Live-CD team and so on. Teamwork is fun, and it makes us more productive. A natural step would be to have a team of graphics artists as a part of the project. Contact us on IRC or our mailing list if you are interested.

Today I'm gonna talk about Podcasts! I suppose most of you have heard about Podcasts by now. But perhaps you feel a bit like me when I discovered this new buzzword: Flicked randomly through some Podcast channels, and frankly, most of them are crap. Some guy in his basement talking about U.F.O. sightings, or the color of his socks. Wooo, awesome.

We amaroK developers naturally get to listen to a lot of Podcasts, and as time went by we definitely discovered some awesome shows. Here's a list of shows that you really shouldn't miss:


1) AUDIOCRUSH
Audiocrush is easily the best podcast ever. Audiocrush is weightless.

If you have never listened to a Podcast, and don't know where to start: This is the show you should check out. If you're into Podcasts and still haven't listened to Audiocrush: Dude, check this show out! It's awesome.

Audiocrush is made by Gabe, Maclaine, Aidan and Will, from Boston. Gabe is the guy behind grouphug.us, a popular website where people can make confessions anonymously. Audiocrush takes the confession concept further: people can confess via phone call, and the Audiocrush guys play some of the confessions on their show. And they play music, drink a lot and generally have a lot of fun. It's hilarious, weightless, and intelligent.

I'm totally into Audiocrush.

http://audiocrush.us


2) THE RICKY GERVAIS SHOW

Some of you have probably heard of Ricky Gervais. British comedian, creator of "The Office" and "Extras". For this show Ricky has teamed up with Steve Merchant and Karl Pilkington. It's crazy, it's funny, and it's very British. Karl has a lot to say about monkeys, the meaning of life, and weird theories. Ricky and Steve laugh a lot, about Karl. That's about it, and it's a ton of fun.

http://www.rickygervais.com


3) UP THE TREE

Up the tree is a show from New York City. I only discovered it recently, through a post on the Audiocrush forums (that's how you discover great Podcasts really, word by mouth). Up The Tree is about music. In each show the hosts present a number of Indy music tracks that they discovered on the Net. And they have a lot of fun in between the music. A good show.

http://www.upthetree.com/


4) DIGGNATION

Diggnation is the Podcast by digg.com. This show isn't so funny, but interesting nonetheless. Basically, they're discussing selected stories from the digg.com website, mostly technology oriented stuff, mixed in with some more weird stories. Good stuff.

http://digg.com/



Do you know any great Podcast shows? Let me know.

Here's an update on the stuff I'm currently hacking on. I figured it'd be nice to document the progress we're making with amaroK 1.4, which is approaching a first beta release ("Technology Preview") quickly.

In amaroK we have had automatic lyrics fetching support for quite a while. So far we had this lyrics feature hardcoded in C++, as part of the application. Our code would access lyric.com.ar, fetch the html code and transform it to make it suitable for the lyrics tab. While this worked fairly well for a while, two problems with this approach eventually surfaced:

1) It was not possible to select another lyrics site than the one we had chosen. While Lyrc is a good lyrics provider overall, many of our users wished to see their personal favorite lyrics website supported.

2) As most lyrics site (including Lyrc) do not offer a XML based interface, we had to use a screen-scraping technique. This means, amaroK parsed the html code of the site, extracting the desired information from the html code. This has the disadvantage that a simple change in the website's layout may break the parser. And that's what happened: Shortly after the release of 1.3.7, Lyrc changed their html code a bit, and amaroK wasn't abled to fetch lyrics any longer. This had to be fixed in the subsequent 1.3.8 release.

Sooooo, what to do? Scripts to the rescue! What I did is, ripped the hardcoded Lyrc code out. Ported the C++ code to Ruby. Then added a couple of DCOP calls and script notifications for the communication Script <--> amaroK. Added a slice of XML, and you get your spicy new Scriptable Lyrics Feature, mmh.

What's this techno mumbo jumbo mean for the user?
You will be able to:

- Write/download lyrics scripts for practically any lyrics site
- Upgrade the script in case something breaks
- And it means amaroK now depends on Ruby.


I like it.