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Entries from Friday, April 3. 2009

Friday, April 3. 2009

A-Team at OpenExpo 2009, Berne ... Posted by Mark Kretschmann in markey at 15:52

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A-Team at OpenExpo 2009, Berne (Switzerland)

(Image kindly provided by Nick Schenker)

On April 1st and 2nd (no joke there) a delegation from Amarok visited OpenExpo in Berne (Switzerland), together with our FOSS homies from KDE and Kubuntu. The photo above shows me (left) and Sven Krohlas in action, that is, drinking beer and having cake.

Apart from that we also had the chance to talk to many Amarok users, and demonstrated a preview of the upcoming 2.1 release, on Sven's 20 years old laptop - the thing operates on love and glue strip mostly. (hint: wanna help our project a bit? Donate a new lappy to Sven!)

Many users expressed their sincere happiness about Amarok and about meetings its devs, which of course made us very happy. It's always a rewarding feeling to see that one's work is appreciated. Others offered mostly fair and balanced criticism, which we took seriously and promised to remedy in upcoming releases (2.1 is going to fix a lot of those already).

Other highlights included:

Alexandra Leisse making good on her promise to wear a skirt on the second day.

The Free Beer (a beer with FOSS recipe) which I'm drinking in the above pic.

Catering is always decent at OpenExpo, although they've been a bit skimpy with the yummy Asian stuff this year.

What didn't sit so well with me:

KDE people (Myriam in this case) having to give out GNOME Ubuntu CDs, as Canonical again managed to forget about the Kubuntu CDs. Next time I might use them as frisbees or so. GNOME fails to show up at many expos these days, but through the backdoor (Ubuntu) they spread their software anyway. Not OK in my book.

All in all, the event was decent and we had a lot of fun (as always my patience was stretched thin, but people are used to that by now;) Thanks to everyone who participated, thanks to our users and friends, and especially to Nick, with whom I had a good conversation afterward.

PS:

In 2003, a crack developer squad was sent to prison by a military court for a hack they didn't commit. They promptly escaped from a maximum security stockade to the Amarok Underground HQ. Today, still wanted by the government, they survive as coders of fortune.

If you have a problem, if no-one else can help, and if you can find them, maybe you can hire the AMAROK-TEAM!

Friday, April 3. 2009

Building Amarok SVN in $HOME - An Update Posted by Mark Kretschmann in markey at 14:01

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Building Amarok SVN in $HOME - An Update

(Image copyright by Wade Olson)

Ahoy maties,

in an earlier blog article I had explained how to install Amarok from SVN in your HOME directory. This guide was overall quite successful, but recently David Faure pointed out an error in setting $KDEDIR (thanks David!).

The old article recommended setting $KDEDIR in .bashrc, which could lead to odd side effects, like Amarok not finding its plugins, or crashing on exit. So I have now updated the article with a better method, which fixes these issues.

Additionally, Amarok 2.1-SVN now has some new build dependencies (like taglib-extras), which are detailed in our current README, but not in the old article. Fortunately Stephan Jau wrote this HOWTO article, which also describes these new additions. It's mostly aimed at Kubuntu users, but it should also be helpful for users of other distributions.

PS:
Yes, the image above is the new splash screen in 2.1. Hooray for Wade, his artwork is killer!

PPS:
Stay tuned for 2.1-beta1 really soon now - the ChangeLog approaches epic proportions

Friday, April 3. 2009

Amarok 2.1: Mini Update Posted by Seb Ruiz in sebr at 07:53

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Amarok 2.1: Mini Update

A few weeks ago I started working on improving a few little niggling problems that I’ve been having with Amarok recently. Here’s a brief overview of what I’ve done.

Prettier Collection Browser

A image is really the best way to show this:

Collection browser improvements

You can see that each collection uses more space to make it easier to find and select/expand, a descriptive icon and the number of tracks in each collection.

Better Compilation Support

Various artist handling has been poor through Amarok 2, but we’re looking at remedies. Thanks to Michael Quinn, we have a patch that already vastly improves the detection of compilations during a collections can. You can see these albums in the screenshot above, too.

Improved iPodding

This mainly involves artwork support - writing and reading artwork to and from an iPod works nicely now. So, if you use your iPod as your main collection, you’ll be able to see your artwork now. There’s still no way to do a batch artwork update, but that’s certainly on the cards.

I don’t like to tease too much — so to save you asking, Amarok 2.1 beta 1 should be available for widespread testing within a fortnight. Lap it up when it arrives!

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