Amarok Blog

Amarok recently received support for the music sharing protocol known as DAAP, as part of our Google Summer of Code entry, thanks to developer Ian Monroe. Every week or two my sister and I prod each other about what new music we have managed to stumble across, but previewing it, and then copying it to our machines can be a small chore. Sharing our collections over the local network allows us to manage our own collections independently of each other. It’s as simple as connecting to the share and browsing the collection.

Since we like a fair amount of the same genres of music, it can be difficult to locate tracks which I don’t have in my collection already. I decided that it would be cool if Amarok would show me only the files which I did not have already in my local library, and it has become really quite useful.

Notice how many of the albums I already have are filtered out by the daap client. Neat! Whilst it isn’t working to my complete satisfaction (it does an exact match on tags in the database, and can be a little slow for large daap shares), I think it’s a cool feature that will be really neat to have. The next feature will be a “Copy to collection” option.

The other thing I really like about DAAP is that it isn’t limited to the local network. I can connect to a server on the other side of the world and stream music like it were a pick-your-own radio station.

For Amarok 2.0, one of the issues which came up at the multimedia meeting, was the abstraction of database backends to a proper object oriented architecture. This also included the possibility of using plugins, or using the inbuilt Qt SQL classes. I’ve noticed that they support a wide range of databases, which would be handy.

When this discussion came up originally, some concerns were voiced about the efficiency and flexibility of the classes, but primarily for the 3.3 release - that they were inefficient and difficult to work with.

Since we need to optimise our database queries, because they can be quite database intensive, it would be interesting to know if anybody has had any sort of experience with these classes in the reworked Qt4. Is the convenience of generic Qt sql classes outweighed by the flexibility and robustness?

A little while ago I wrote a small post explaining why Amarok was not going to be ported to windows for the time being.

At the Amarok HQ, we like to increase publicity by submitting our stories to digg and other news sites. Keeping track of the comments shows that there is plenty of discussion as to why we should or should not release a Windows port of the application.

Since writing that post over 12 months ago, the situation has become a little clearer and we understand the direction which will be taken. It has been discussed at length, both at our meeting and on IRC, that there should be a windows release at some point in the future. Amarok 2.0 will be based on Trolltech’s Qt4 framework, which provides the required GPL license under windows (which was previously unavailable). If a working kde-libs port exists, the release should nearly write itself.

In the case that kde-libs is not available under windows, it is also feasible to produce a Qt only version of the application, but would require a lot of work and risk our currently excellent status within the KDE community.

The only remaining factor would be a developer to do the job. Although the transition should be rather transparent, since Qt4 is platform independant, everybody knows that this is hardly ever the case. We don’t see this as too large a hurdle because there is plenty of support in the community and a high demand to get the job completed.

Estimated time of arrival? This is a question we cannot answer just yet, because 2.0 development has not yet started in full swing. We all hope that it can be released concurrently with Amarok for linux.

The reality of life is, that some of us do need to use Windows, and it would be great to be able to rock out with Amarok on that exotic, unknown platform.

For a number of weeks now we have strived to settle down the ever excitable codebase around Amarok. The result: a spectacular release, which is stable and will allow you to continue rediscovering your music.

The major highlights of this release include:

- Rendezvous support for locating DAAP shares automatically

- Amarok File Tracking

- Speed improvements

We hope you all enjoy this release and will support us by digging our story!

This evening I read an article about using an appealing car as bait in order to catch criminals carjacking. The report quotes that there is nearly 100% success rate in convicting the theif because there is live footage from within the car. I noticed that this type of strategy was very familiar to the honeypot, a term in computer security which describes a setup to entrap a would be attacker. I know how the media likes to exaggerate on tech issues, but is this really such a cutting edge breakthrough? It would surprise me if it was, because these concepts have been around for a long time.

Furthermore, we know that there are security concepts which are modelled from real life, such as Intrusion Detection Systems, analogous to a house alarm, but what other adaptations have been taken from the computing world? Perhaps there are still even more methods which haven’t been used by the police and other authorities to catch criminals, but are common practice within the IT community.