Amarok Blog

Well, this is just another blog from a GSoCer. As official start of this years Summer of Code is on Monday I finally installed this blog to tell other SoCers and everyone else who could be interested about my experiences, problems (eh mean achievements) and ideas over the next months. Yes I know, it is locking boring it is the WordPress default theme. I am not really a design guy.

I will implement Nepomuk (Semantic Desktop) features into the upcoming version 2 of Amarok the great KDE music player . So this brings together the exciting Nepomuk project, Amarok and music. Sounds like fun, doesn’t it?

You probably know Amarok but didn’t hear about Nepomuk yet. For the moment I will just refer to the website of the Nepomuk Project and the website of it’s KDE implementation.

What will it look like in Amarok?

• If you are using Strigi (with your music in index) together with Nepomuk you will be able to just  start Amarok and instantly have your music collection in it without any extra scanning


• Your ratings, playcounts and so on will all be stored central in Nepomuk. That making it accessible for every other application (for example to change your ratings from Dolphin)


• The new folder view plasmoid together with the Nepomuk search-kioslave will make it possible to have a folder view on your desktop with your highest scored music, your least played songs, all songs you played last week and so on. I think you get the idea.


• Nepomuks tagging features will bring back labels to Amarok 2 (although I am not yet sure how this will get integrated into the Amarok GUI)

For those of you, who are now being afraid because you don’t want to use Strigi and Nepomuk: Thanks to the new flexible collection framework in Amarok 2 this will be fully optional. Just another collection in Amarok. So you don’t have to use it at all without any loss.

What have I done so far? To be honest, not very much:

• get Strigi and Nepomuk running on my system (thanks to my mentor Sebastian Trüg for help). That sounds quite easy but it seems that my laptop doesn’t like Nepomuk


• getting in touch with the great kde/amarok community


• take some first looks into the Amarok code base and got my ssh key for svn updated (forgot my pass phrase again :-/)

That is it for know. I try to write at least once in a week a short update about it.