leinir

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!

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!