Amarok Blog

I thought it was time to make a little noise again, so here is part whatever ( I think it is 3 actually ) of my "What have I been doing this week" updates.

The reason for the irregularity is quite simple that some weeks I end up doing mostly Magnatune stuff. And while this is cool in itself, and I am also working on some features that will have an impact on Amarok, it is not really something I can blog a whole lot about just yet.

Anyways, here goes.

This week I have been putting some more work into the new playlist. I added some new features ( more on that a little later ) but these turned out to really stress some of the sore points of the playlist with regards to performance. So a big part of this week has been spent making sure that the playlist holds up under load. For now, I have tested it with 3000+ tracks in groups of up to about 500 tracks. The 3000+ track part now runs really well, and as long as groups are not above about a 100 tracks each, these do not pose a problem either. For very large groups, performance does suffer a bit,but since the groups are meant to contain single albums, I am not really sure how much of an issue this is. In general, it already seems to run better with a large amounts of tracks added than the playlist in the 1.4 series. Also, remember that our focus is not, and have never been, on adding the entire collection to the playlist, but instead on using smart and dynamic playlists to provide the same functionality in a much more convenient way ( Dynamic playlist walkthrough ).

The new features I mentioned earlier is support for collapsible album groups. The implementation is basically done, but how it will be used ( whether automatic some how or purely manual ) is undecided, so for now, I made it a button that the user can press to expand or collapse an album, along with some very simple logic to make sure, that if we start playing a track from within a collapsed group, it is automatically expanded. I also brewed up some example graphics for how such a collapsed album could be visualized. Here is a screenshot:





Following the last few posts about the new playlist, we got a lot of very positive feedback in the form of mockups and ideas for how to improve the graphics. As I am no great artist, we really appreciate this and would welcome new ideas. However, if you wish to do mockups or try out some new ideas, please base it on this file as that will make actually trying it out in Amarok much simpler. It should be possible to figure out what each element is used for based on the group names in the file, but basically, an album group consists of a head item, a number of body items (one for each track - 2 ) and a tail item, with some alternate backgrounds rendered for every other item.


Over the last few weeks, I have also been keeping a little pet project. By showing this off now, I run the risk of being called a "sellout to the vocal minority" but such is life. Since the new playlist is based ( sort of ) on the model/view framework of Qt4, I wondered how difficult it would be to make an alternate playlist view that retains much of the look and feel of the 1.4.x series. Doing a small, but very limited, prototype of this turned out to be very simple, and it is now possible to alternate between the two views by pressing the little star button at the bottom right corner. Switching the view and ( just for fun ) minimizing the context view ( which is already possible just by resizing the 3 panes ), gives us something that looks like this:


That does look strangely familiar I think...

Now, heres the kicker ( and why I don't think I deserve the label of "sellout" ). I don't have time to bring this alternate playlist view to a usable state. And I am not even sure it is needed, seeing how the new playlist is really coming along very nicely. But the ground work has been put in place, so if anyone feels strongly enough about this feature making it into Amarok2 ( Some people has certainly been very vocal about not liking the new playlist ), now is the time to step up and implement it! Do note, that there is no guarantee that it will be possible to hide the context view in the future as this currently being discussed.

Last but not least, do remember our Roktoberfest We are 75% of the way, but the things are slowing down a lot, so we really need these last donations to reach our goal and keep the Amarok team hacking for another year!