Amarok Blog

    ATF stuff has taken a backseat for a bit while I rewrite the VFAT device plugin. Originally I had ported the code over from the ifp media device plugin...the problem is that to deal with the differences between the two kinds of devices the code quickly became full of hacks. Changing one thing meant five other things broke...a bad situation. I've known for a while I would need to redo it, but I was procrastinating because I hated working on it so much, but now that we have a planned release date for 1.4 final, well, I figured it was time to get it over with.

    The good news is that this time, I'm not hating it as much. This is mainly because I've started with a much more hierarchial design that makes tasks that were complex and error-prone in the old device code much more simple and reliable. The end result should be a device plugin that is much more stable and doesn't have as many weird quirks -- with any continuing quirks fixed quickly, of course!

    Today I got done with enough code to display the filesystem and allow for expanding directories. This may not sound like much, but it's actually a good sign, as these functions seem to work well and stably, and these basic functions being completed means that all the under-the-hood code is working (which was the majority of the rewrite), so the rest of the functions will be easy to implement. And the best news of all is that unlike the old code, I'm very confident in this new code!

    Yesterday I commited some code to the Collection Browser that allows it to accept URLs with the audiocd:/ protocol.  If your machine supports this (the audiocd:/ kioslave is probably in the kdemultimedia package), you can rip by doing the following;

1. Open KControl.  Go to Sound and Multimedia->Audio CDs.  Configure your ripping preferences.
2. Open Konqueror. Go to audiocd:/
3. Go into whatever folder you want your tracks encoded as, i.e. Ogg Vorbis will contain Vorbis "files" that you can select.
4. Drag these tracks to amaroK's Collection Browser.