Tuesday, April 29. 2008
In the beginning, the benevolent Ceiling Cat saw that Amarok 2 required tagging abilities, and He saw that it was sorely lacking in both quality and scope. And lo! a solution was presented, in the form of our very own Summer of KDE student Teo, who will be joining the Amarok squad and create the tagging solutions for Amarok 2!
My name is Teo Mrnjavac and I study computer science at the University of Trieste, Italy. My initial proposal was to implement mass tagging in Amarok 2, but givent the current state of things I will have to do a bit of porting to implement basic tagging support as well. While keeping as much as possible of Amarok's existing interface intact, the goal is to implement an unobtrusive and simple, yet powerful interface with the underlying algorithms to mass process the tags and file names consistently on top of the collection browser and to download track information from a remote database.
The key to simplifying the usually clunky rename-from-tags or extract-tags-from-filenames functionality would be a visual layout bar with movable items representing the elements of the filename's syntax. Ultimately, every user, regardless of his tech savvy, should be able to have a consistently and cleanly tagged collection with only a few clicks.
Greetings
Teo
In short, Teo: Welcome! 
This is something as rare as a non-technical blog post from me, but I though this was worth posting!
yesterday Magnatune and Amarok decided that it was time Amarok received its first payout of the money earned as commission by selling Magnatune albums through Amarok. This came out to $1155.70 which is 10% of the $11,557 (!!) in sales that Amarok has generated so far. That is actually really good I think! This money will be used to cover hosting and conference costs of the Amarok project and thus will help further improve Amarok.
Besides giving Amarok a 10% commission, Magnatune also employs me, and allow me to spend about half my time Hacking on Amarok, so they truly are a very big supporters of Amarok, and we are delighted to be working with someone who really "gets" free software and free culture.
With the greatly improved Magnatune integration in the upcomming Amarok 2, and the eventual release of Amarok 2 on Windows and Mac, it will be really interesting to see how far we can take this in the future. For now, I hope that the Amarok users will continue to buy music through Amarok, as it is a great way of supporting Amarok development, at the same time as supporting independent artists, who get a full 50% of the purchase price.
John Buckman ( the founder of Magnatune) blogged about this here
Monday, April 28. 2008
Didn’t get a chance to blog about day 2 of the OTST2008 meeting yesterday since everything has been so hectic. Day 2 was similar in order to Saturday, hearing lots of excellent talks about open hardware and software. I found the talks on Freifunk.net and Open Street Map particularly exciting and look forward to seeing how the future plays out.
Later in the afternoon Pradeepto spoke about the kde-edu project, and Ian and I spoke about Amarok 2. It was a little unfortunate that the number of attendees waned towards the end of the day but I still think the event was more than fantastic. Ellis and the folk from Asus treated us all to a wonderful Taiwanese dinner by the seafront in the waterfront town of Danshui. It was great fun . Here’s most of the team in a group photo:
Summing up, I had a great time. The summit was definitely a great endeavour and hopefully has brought on the right change and the first step to have free software and hardware promoted throughout Taiwan and the Asian world.
Introducing Alejandro Wainzinger (xevix on IRC), who is going to be working on media device support in Amarok for SoC 2008:
My name is Alejandro Wainzinger, and I'm going for a Computer Science B.S. at the University of California Santa Cruz, USA. This summer, I'll be bringing back media device support to Amarok for Apple iPods, MTP and generic devices, and making them fly. I chose this project because I own an iPod, and got frustrated with the speed of loading an iPod with a large database, sync'ing of songs/playlists and album art, unlogged crashes after trying to put a 10,000 song queue onto the iPod, and slightly unreliable iPod model detection. That said, I loved having iPod capability in Amarok, and I couldn't see Amarok 2 without media device support.
Alejandro is going to work on getting normal functionality for all three types of devices, and then really taking the iPod plugin to town.
Rumor has it he's then going to attempt making collections out of the devices...
Continue reading "Amarok SoC: Media Devices + Awesome iPod support"
Sunday, April 27. 2008
I'd like to welcome Peter Zhou (peterzl on IRC), one of the Amarok SoC students for 2008. I'll let his words introduce him:
Hi my name is Peter Zhou, I am a Mainland China student pursuing bachelor degree in Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.
I am glad that I can now witness the growth of Amarok by involving the core development team. I will redo the scripting interface and rewrite some GUI functions in order to enable the external access to the whole Amarok GUI interface. Then the wolf would have a even more powerful inside.^_^
Good to work with all of you! This is indeed so exciting! Looking forward to seeing you guys in Akademy!
Dear Tristan, I like further developed ideas, mostly, and I also like to develop ideas further. ...I just read such a further developed idea and since I like it a lot, I am goint to develop it further (normal process for me). Tomorrow Amarok, Linux market leader in the Music Application segment, will announce something revolutionary. We came to the decision that others know better and therefore we will sync our release schedule to Ubuntu, Linux market leader in the Home User Operating System segment. Our current model of partly time-based and partly feature-based release planing is apparently creating enormous inefficiency in the development of our high-quality software. Mainly because of this we will do 2 releases per year, each 2 days before Ubuntu releases a new version, so that the build servers have enough time to build the packages. In order to join this with our very fast and feature rich development we will provide at least 25% new or changed code in a time-frame of one year (2 releases), we hope that by setting this minimal growth rate we are able to increase our userbase by 213% per year. To support these alternations quality assurance will be reduced to a minimum as it can cause scaling issues in combination with this new concept. This is however only the first step. In a long-term view we aim to breakup the underlying project of Amarok and become a 100% part of the Ubuntu project to share resources and create a strong leader in thew newly created market of Music Home User Appliaction Operating Systems. We also want to prevent our users from wasting half their life with compilation, so we will stop releaseing source tarballs but instead only offer Ubuntu DEB-files. We will also suggest KDE and all the distributions, we have intensive collaboration with, to start a strong binding to the Ubuntu project as well, and possibly become part of it. Watch out for the announcement and the moving of our structures from KDE/Amarok ones to Ubuntu/Launchpad. A nice day wishes your soon-not-to-be-anymore-project-manager.
Saturday, April 26. 2008
I'd like to welcome William Soares (Liw- on IRC), one of the Amarok SoC students for 2008. I'll let his words introduce him:
My name is William Viana Soares, I live in Spain although I am from
Brazil and this is my 4th year as a Computer Science Engineering
student. My goal during this summer will be to make Amarok Context
View more usable. I will focus on the the use of libplasma
capabilities to create a nice zooming user interface where all the
context information will lay. I will also be working on Amarok's
Plasma packaging system and in the development of new applets with
contextual information.
I'm really excited that my application was accepted and I'm looking
forward to start coding and see my improvements done for the sake of
Amarok and my own since I'm an Amarok user 
We are very glad to have someone working on the Context View again this summer, and i personally can't wait to see all the exciting things that he comes up with.
Reporting from the luxuries of free Internet at our hostel in Taipei, Ian and I have been going over the talk that we’ll be giving on Amarok tomorrow at the Open Tech Summit here in Taiwan. The entire day today has been spent at the (very nice) Asus corporate headquarters - about 20 minutes on the metro ride outside of Taipei. The metro itself is a nice analogy to the Taiwanese people. Exceptionally efficient, very friendly and hospitable, immaculately clean and well thought out. Kudos to you, Taiwanese government. So friendly have the Taiwanese people been that I’ve been escorted up 10 flights of stairs, around train stations and through chaotic traffic - just to lend a hand. The Asus headquarters are totally awesome, if simply for this rendition of the Mona Lisa created entirely out of motherboard parts.
The aim of OTST is to promote open software and hardware to the Taiwanese, who are quite backward in their thinking of FOSS culture. We’re here on a religious missionary crusade to try and convince them to pick up free software! There were a number of interesting talks today, such as an introductions to OHI and OpenPattern, ultra cool speech recognition software for the EeePC and a general EeePC hacking howto. There were a few talks in Chinese, but I still found it easy to understand how cool it was to see compositing support on the EeePC.
In the early evening we had a light dinner party (which was quite heavy as we’d been fed all day), with two performances by local creative-commons artists. It’s heart-warming to see that Asus is putting a lot of effort into hosting this event and really trying to push the FOSS movement in Taiwan.
Getting There
Yesterday I arrived in Taipei after about 22 hours of airplanes and airports. At least for a Missouri guy like me, it seems sparling and huge. Fellow Amarok dev and Sydney resident Seb Ruiz isn't so impressed. I didn't get lost on my way to the hostel until the very last block. I walked into a bakery probably looking quite lost (I had been walking around a single block for about 10 minutes) and one of the workers asked me "do you need help?" in English. I showed her the address and phone number of the hostel, she whipped out her mobile and called it, got directions and walked me to the entrance (about 20 meters away actually). So the Taiwanese are very friendly, Seb had a similar experience of someone actually taking him up the elevator directly to the hostel.
The hostel itself (the "Camel's Oasis"), is very homey. I found Seb chatting with a Québécoise about her 6-month world tour (you always find such lucky people at cheap hostels). I did follow Seb's advice and avoided sleeping much on the flight over here (only about 3 hours), but my biological clock still objected to the 11 hour timeshift; I had some pretty spotty sleep last night.
OpenTech Conference
Now we're at Asus for the OpenTech Summit. This morning is being devoted to Asus. Ellis, the product manager for the Asus EeePC (IIRC), presented on how Asus intends to work with the community. A Xandros developer, Brian, went over SDK for the Asus EeePC, which is basically Xandros distributed with Eclipse and Vmplayer. The main development environment they are supporting is Qt 4.2; he did a "Hello World" using Eclipse's Qt Designer integration. Both Ellis and Brian talked about the method for ISVs to release software for the Eee PC; this interests me since it would be really nice to have a way to release the newest Amarok's directly to the EeePC Ass/Remove Programs system. The next version of the EeePC OS is apparently going to make it easy to install .deb's or an EeePC-specific tarball which contains a bunch of .deb files.
Friday, April 25. 2008
Some people might be aware of one of our competitors attempts at making something which looks all swish with all those high quality CD covers that people have for the albums in their collections. Now, we long ago decided that while eyecandy is all good and stuff, we really don't want eyecandy without a reason behind it. So when people started asking repeatedly "Hai, I can has coverflow?" on #amarok, we started thinking how something like that could be kicked into some form of usefulness.
And, so, when Summer of Code came around, we decided that it would make good sense to throw up an idea on the page for exactly that - our thoughts on what might make a useful bling. Many came forward with proposals for taking up this idea, but unfortunately, though in fact several of them were really good, in the end we had to not accept them as there were some that were more important for Amarok 2's release. However, luckily, one student came forward with a refined proposal for the CD Stack after the accepted projects had been presented. In stead of talking more here, i will let nottheones tell it himself:
My name is Nicholas Lovell, and I study computer engineering at the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, IN. This summer I will be providing a new collection view. My idea is to provide a 3D list of albums that can be browsed much like a physical CD collection. Think of it as how CoverFlow should have originally been implemented. Rather than simply allowing selection of an album (or simply displaying the album currently playing), it will also allow selection of individual tracks from a selected album. Selecting a CD from the stack will display the front of the CD and the tracks from the album underneath it.
So, ladies, gentlemen and everybody else - forget the CoverBling widget from early Amarok 2 code - real niftiness is coming up!
Hi All!
I'm really happy to say that I'm a new artist for the Amarok project. You might remember me as a programmer, but now we Amarok programmers also create artwork for the project.
Please check out my first contribution, a new logo:
Isn't that awesome? I've always had a talent for drawing, and I think this really shows.
Ooooooook, I realize that it's maybe not a really good idea if programmers also do artwork. But we have no choice. While we really can't complain about lack of coders in the project, we have about 0 artists left, so someone's gotta do the job.
If you are a talented SVG artist and if you like Amarok (or if you know such a person), please contact us and help making Amarok 2 a beautiful application!
Sincerely,
Mark Kretschmann, Amarok Founder (and artist from hell).
Update: Since I've gotten a few relatively profane comments (which I've elected not to post) about blah blah pissing contest blah blah cant we all work together blah blah you are a stupid moron blah blah, please note that nowhere in this post did I mention Qt. This was not a "my widget set is better than your widget set" post. This was a "WTF, why can't I resize this box properly, and why does it end up moving up into the toolbar, how silly of it" post. If it's broken, it's broken, and since I found this to be broken in an amusing way, I thought I'd share it with others. Everyone likes to laugh, after all. So essentially: chill out.
Continue reading "Go Go GTK!"
 It's that time of April again, Ubuntu/Kubuntu released the all new shiny versions of their distributions. This time the releaes is called Hardy Heron *woohooo* So, what do we do when a new version is out? Right, party! Join the Halligalli Hummel Party(tm) in #kubuntu-devel and celebrate the latest Kubuntu release with us on 24-04-2008 @ 16UTC. Of course as party guest you should use the official party wallpaper -> this svg or pngMake sure not to miss the grand party kickoff! We also have our own bar and a radio show, sponsored by Amarok, (maybe  ) In case you just want to have some information about the release, head over to kubuntu.orgFinally: spread the word by bloging, twittering, talking, giving calls etc GO GO GO!
In this years Google Summer of Code, I will be mentoring Casey Links project "Amarok: MP3Tunes Service Enhancements". I asked Casey to write a small introduction about himself and his project:
Hey everyone! My name is Casey Link and I am an undergraduate Computer
Science and Philosophy major at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, VA. As a
part of Google Summer of Code I will be tightly integrating the
MP3Tunes service with Amarok 2 as well as implementing a generic
synchronization framework between Collections. In Amarok 2, collections
have been abstracted, allowing Amarok to treat a local SQL collection the
same as an online Web Service based collection. Why is this awesome?
With the addition of the service architecture (thanks to Nikolaj) it is now
possible to plug in remote, local, and soon portable collections without
having to differentiate between their interfaces.
Not convinced yet? Here is a real example of just how cool this is.
Enter MP3Tunes. MP3Tunes provides an "online music space" for its
users to store their entire music collection so they can listen to
their music anywhere. Using their API and client libraries,
applications can be developed for just about any device, so you can
literally listen to your music anywhere! This summer I will implement
full MP3Tunes functionality into Amarok so you can seamlessly
synchronize your local music collection with your MP3Tunes Locker. Not
only will you be able to upload your local music collection, but if
you add music to your MP3Tunes Locker via other methods - such as
buying music from an online store - the new tracks will be added to
your collection. This is just the beginning. Technology is seeing a
trend towards ubiquitous connectivity and information storage in 'the
Cloud'. It won't be long before "local" and "remote" are terms of the
past as you are able to seamlessly access your information everywhere.
Amarok and MP3Tunes will be on the forefront of this technological
shift. I hope you'll be there with us.
I am really exited about this project, as this is one of the initial ideas I had when creating the MP3Tunes service, but unfortunately never had time to implement ( Anyone knows where I can get 10 clones made cheaply? ). I also think that some of the less visible framework stuff that this project will complete will be really usefull for other cool things, such as downloading an album from Magnatune or Jamendo straight to a media device or online locker without storing it in your local collection. So lets give Casey a warm welcome and hope this project turns out as great as I think it has potential to.
On a related note, you might be aware that MP3Tunes is currently engaged in a lawsuit with EMI over the legality of storing your own, legally acquired music online. Their CEO has published a letter about this, describing why he sees this as an attack on the concept of digital ownership. I think this battle is worth following as it is not about piracy or file sharing, but really about what you can do with your own music. And here I thought that EMI was at least starting to come around...
Thursday, April 24. 2008
I think it is time to introduce my SoC student to Planet KDE 
I blogged about dynamic playlists some time ago. Thanks to Google Summer of Code Daniel is going to do some magic work on dynamic playlists in Amarok 2 this summer and make them even more nifty. But let’s hear what he has to say:
My name is Daniel Jones. I study math and computer science at Western Washington University in Bellingham, WA. This summer I will be working on expanding the idea of dynamic playlists in Amarok to allow any number or weights or biases to be applied. This will allow you to set up a random playlist that prefers tracks you haven’t heard in a while, or prefers certain bands or genres. For parties you can set up more complicated biases to get exactly the right mix of fast songs, slow songs, novelty rap, obnoxious dance remixes, and, just to avoid offending him, a couple of tracks from your coworkers awful death metal band.
And from his proposal:
An example of this would be the condition the track is longer than 3 minutes with a weight of 0.6. Such a constraint would enforce that there is a 0.6 (60%) probability that a given track in the list is longer that 3 minutes.
As far as we know Amarok 2 will be the first player with a feature like this. Rock Daniel!
Everyone please welcome Daniel to our community. I want to see KDE-hugs! 
I am also very happy about Moncef, Tobias, Nicholas and Teo who applied for SoC, could not be chosen due to the limited number of slots and who want to work on their projects as part of Season of KDE now. You guys rock! But more about that later.
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