Amarok Blog

Heres something new and something old all rolled into one!

I have been dropping hints about the possibility of a scriptable service for a while. I even showed off a very crude prototype in a lightning talk at aKademy last year. Since then, architectural changes to Amarok and task that were more important ( and a lot simple ) pushed this work to the bottom of my long term TODO list. It newer quite left my mind though. I think that the potential benefits of allowing people to quickly and easily integrate their own content into Amarok, without having to mess around with building the entire app are huge. It will allow people to add and distribute services for content that, while interesting, does not have a broad enough appeal to warrant inclusion in the Amarok core, and it will allow people to integrate content and services that we simply have not thought about.

So, when sitting in a small cabin in the woods, with no internet and plenty of time on my hands, because my Girlfriend is busy studying for an exam, it did not really take long to decide what I really wanted to work on.

And now I am back... So, without further delay, I give you the new, improved, and actually working scriptable service framework!

I decided to completely rethink both the DBus API and the way Scriptable services interacted with the rest of Amarok. The entire API now consists of 3 DBus functions and 2 callback commands that the script must respond to. Also, everything is completely dynamic, meaning that the service will not use the script to populate any items before they are needed.

Here is a few screenshots of a scripted service in action.

First of all, the scriptable service framework now integrates in a simmilar way to all other Amarok scripts, making it possible to start, stop and manage them from the "Script Manager" dialog:



When running, it ill appear in the service browser along with any other loaded services:



And when activated, it will appear just like any other service, complete with optional html info for each item ( supplied by the script of course ):



The "Cool Streams" script is my first attempt at a usable script. It basically just implements the list of cool streams from Amarok 1.4 as a service. The entire script is about 80 lines of ruby code, and half of this is taken up by the array of stations to add. About half of the remaining code is comments. So setting up a simple new service really does not take much code, and as there are only 3 DBus functions needed, it is really quite simple do do.

So, despite what I have been telling people lately, Amarok 2.0 will ship with the possibility of adding new services using scripts. I am really exited about this feature, as the general scripting support in Amarok has yielded and incredible amount of interesting features that none of the regular developers had ever though of. In the same way, I hope that the scriptable service support will inspire people to add interesting new content to Amarok.

Its been little while since I wrote a nice long update about the state of Amarok 2, and we have been getting a few complaints that there is not enough ews being posted, so I will try to remedy that here. And I have a nice pile of screenshots ready for you!

First up though, we have decided to put a feature freeze in effect starting at the end of this month. This is the first small step towards an eventual release of Amarok 2.0, and hopefully it will help us get it ready sooner rather than later. This also means that we are at the point where bug reports actually start to become useful. More on this in the coming weeks I am sure!

So, whats new in the land of Amarok 2. Lots actually. First of all, I have tried my hand at some small but quite visible modifications to our svg theme, and I personally thinks the results are very prommising. I just need to figure out what do do about the volume slider...



And of course, the theme still adjusts itself to the system color theme:



At Magnatune.com, we have been adding free ogg streams along side the existing mp3 streams. Of course Amarok should also benefit from this, so I finally got around to implementing a stream selection GUI. This also allows people with slow or unstable internet connections to select the lofi mp3 streams:



I think I can reveal, that as an added bonus, people who decide to purchase one of Magnatune.com's upcoming memberships will be able to enjoy ogg streams in a really nice quality

A lot of work has gone into the last.fm service and integration. The bulk of the Amarok 2 last.fm service was originally done by Shane King, but this week there has almost been a competition about who could do the most cool things with the last.fm service. This however also led to a slight case of "interface wars" as we currently cannot decide between buttons and tree views for the different streams, but I am sure we will figure something out eventually Right now the last.fm service looks ( I am warning you, it is not pretty... ) like this:



A really nice feature that was implemented by Dan Meltzer ( aka. Hydrogen ) is the ability to right click any artist in your local collection and add a last.fm stream of simmilar artists directly to the playlist:



I have spent some time adding capabilities that will allow any track or stream with special actions that only makes sense when that track or stream is playing to make these actions available throughout the interface. Most notably, when listening to a last.fm stream it adds the "love", "skip" and "ban" actions to a small sub toolbar next to the play controls:



This small toolbar and the background is completely invisible when playing tracks that do not have any special "now playing" actions. The same actions are also added to the tray menu ( and when right clicking the currently playing track in the playlist ):



Last.fm is becoming really well integrated, but the great thing about the way it is done is that there is almost no last.fm specific code anywhere but in the last.fm plugin, which can be completely disabled. This means that any other service can use the same interface elements to achieve simmilar results. Last.fm is simply the first one to use these capabilities. It also means that Amarok 2 is in no way dependent on last.fm being available. I think that this independence is very important. It allows us to work with many different services and companies without anyone getting control over the core of Amarok.

And this is personally what I see as the main strong point of Amarok 2. We are positioning ourselves to be able to work with and integrate content and services from a multitude of sources without the fear of what happens if one of these services stops existing, turns horrendously evil, or tries to assert undue influence over the direction of Amarok. And with reports coming in from our crew at Cebit about the huge interest in Amarok, it looks to be a really interesting future.

Now, if we can just get this 2.0 out the door soon....