Wednesday, June 28. 2006
Hooray, last.fm stream support in Amarok!
I'm very happy to break this news to you, as I think it's an incredibly cool feature: Amarok now has full support for last.fm streams. This includes advanced features known from the last.fm player, like skip/love/ban, cover images and metadata. Have a look:
In true Amarok fashion, we have developed this feature with intense teamwork. The planning and first code was started at our K3M multimedia meeting. Seb Ruiz did the initial port of Muesli's original last.fm player code (Qt4) to Amarok. Then Ian Monroe improved the framework and added a proxy server, which was needed to make our engines understand the lastfm:// protocol. Soon we realized that an in-process server would not work; here my previous experience with server programming and Ruby kicked in: I ported the proxy to a tiny external Ruby script, with very low overhead. Now we were able to listen to a last.fm stream with Amarok for the first time, which rocked.
Soon we noticed that the server script was bit too simplistic; it would not work with the Helix engine. To the rescue came our Helix expert Paul Cifarelli, who had never before programmed in Ruby. In a matter of hours he managed to improve the script, so that it now works with all engines. Then we added support for cover images from last.fm - they are shown automatically for each track the stream is playing. And our graphics artist Vadim Petrunin made some funky icons for the skip/love/ban buttons.
Sounds complicated? It was
But it was a damn good hack, and we've enjoyed it immensely. You guys can lean back and enjoy your favourite music from last.fm in Amarok 1.4.1.
Have fun
In true Amarok fashion, we have developed this feature with intense teamwork. The planning and first code was started at our K3M multimedia meeting. Seb Ruiz did the initial port of Muesli's original last.fm player code (Qt4) to Amarok. Then Ian Monroe improved the framework and added a proxy server, which was needed to make our engines understand the lastfm:// protocol. Soon we realized that an in-process server would not work; here my previous experience with server programming and Ruby kicked in: I ported the proxy to a tiny external Ruby script, with very low overhead. Now we were able to listen to a last.fm stream with Amarok for the first time, which rocked.
Soon we noticed that the server script was bit too simplistic; it would not work with the Helix engine. To the rescue came our Helix expert Paul Cifarelli, who had never before programmed in Ruby. In a matter of hours he managed to improve the script, so that it now works with all engines. Then we added support for cover images from last.fm - they are shown automatically for each track the stream is playing. And our graphics artist Vadim Petrunin made some funky icons for the skip/love/ban buttons.
Sounds complicated? It was
But it was a damn good hack, and we've enjoyed it immensely. You guys can lean back and enjoy your favourite music from last.fm in Amarok 1.4.1.Have fun
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