Sunday, June 21. 2009MySQL Server Support -- Promised and Delivered
Well...you were wrong. It may be a bit later than planned -- we wanted to have it in time for 2.1, but it didn't happen -- but as of revision 984572, there is now support for storing an Amarok database on a MySQL server instead of the embedded MySQL database. There's no configuration dialog in the GUI yet, but it's pretty simple to set up, as explained below. All you have to do is add a few things into your amarokrc file and make a valid user on the MySQL server instance of your choice -- you don't even need to create the database yourself. (In fact, you shouldn't -- you should let Amarok create the database so we can ensure that the character set and collation are set right.) Here's how to do it.
Sunday, June 21. 2009UTF-8 and Your MusicA heads-up on something new in Amarok SVN (and coming in 2.2 for those of you not living on the bleeding edge): We've had various bug reports over the years relating to character sets and collation, causing issues with matching searches for music or mis-sorted items. Well, hopefully no longer. When you update to 2.2 (recent SVN users, see the note at the end of this post), your Amarok database and tables will be converted to use the 'utf8' character set and 'utf8_unicode_ci' collation as default for any table or column created from this point on. Every single text/varchar field will also be converted through a two-step process to use 'utf8' as the character set (the data inside was always UTF-8, but there was a possible mismatch between what the data was and what the database thought it was, if your mysql wasn't built to use 'utf8' by default). In addition, the character set used when talking to the embedded server (the protocol in the socket) will be 'utf8'. Fixing this mismatch between what the server might have been using for character set/collation and the data we're putting in there should hopefully ensure that sorting and tags work very well for our users with some files wth non-Latin1 tags (probably just about everybody these days).
* Recent SVN users: if your build date is earlier than this post I'd recommend wiping your mysqle directory (not just a full rescan), as the initial commit of the updating code contained a bug that could possibly cause trouble down the line with user playlists...but you bleeding edge users should be expecting database wipes every now and then Saturday, June 20. 2009Thursday, June 18. 2009Amarok 2.2 development, one week in
Last Friday, trunk was opened for features and changes intended for Amarok 2.2. In the scope of a few hours more than 250 commits had been made as people were frantically committing their local git repos.
Today, less than one week later, I though it was worth posting a little update and a video showing how all of this new stuff fits within Amarok. While most of the stuff that is shown in this video has already been blogged about before its kind of interesting to see it all in Amarok at once after having only been able to run them separately for a while. The features shown in the video are (roughly in order of appearance) - New browser navigation interface - Wikipedia applet mkII. - Videoclip applet showing matches for current track and playing a youtube video. - Videoclip applet playing a video podcast. - Dockable interface elements Direct link Since so much stuff in trunk has changed in such a short time, there are plenty of small bugs and visual issues present in the video, but there is plenty of time to work on these before even getting close to a 2.2 release. Considering just how many changes have been made, I am surprised that trunk is currently working as well as it does  Also there are many features currently being worked on that are still not in any state to show of. Wednesday, June 17. 2009OceaniaWhile the Amarok team has been working on a lot of cool new stuff for 2.2 we havn’t forgotten about 2.1. It’s time for 2.1.1, the first (and likely last) maintenance release of the 2.1 series. Enjoy!
Blue Starfish, originally uploaded by Kanaka’s Paradise Life. Saturday, June 13. 2009UPnP DevSprint in Paris Hi from Paris, where together with [ade], dev, erwan, philn and lightyear I'm at the Coherence/KDE developer sprint focused on UPnP. Yesterday, after struggling with QtDBUS (specifically the under-documented qdbusxml2cpp) I managed to the signals from Coherence and call functions. So now I can discover the devices on the network. The signals are connected to a UPnPCollectionFactory that should create a new collection for each mediaserver (containing music) on the network. Next step will be to really talk to the devices themselves. That will require some XML parsing, which can get a bit complicated. With any luck I'll find a Qt based DIDL-lite parsing library. Consider that a lazyweb questions .A bientôt, Bart  Saturday, June 13. 2009UPnP support in KDE and Amarok
During FOSDEM [ade] and I met with Frank Scholz, the lead developer of Coherence. We discussed DLNA/UPnP and how Coherence can be used in KDE and Amarok. The conclusion of this meeting was that we should use Coherence as our base for supporting UPnP services in KDE. The first implementation will be a KIO slave for browsing media stored on remote devices.
UPnP is a network technology using a combination of SSDP, XML and SOAP, with some GENA thrown in for eventing. A group of UPnP services called the UPnP A/V Architecture has been picked up by an industry organization called the Digital Living Network Alliance. DLNA specifies device classes which have to implement specific services and support a minimal set of filetypes and codecs. Coherence is a framework, written in Python but it exposes a DBUS API, that allows an application to participate in the "Digital Home Network". For the moment this means mainly UPnP, but support for Ampache is available and Apple's DAAP is also considered. It's published under the MIT license and is multiplatform. In Amarok we have been planning to integrate UPnP for a long while. But except for a failed Google Summer of Code project last year not a lot of effort has been spend. Thanks to Coherence this will quickly change: in relative short term (read 2.2) we will introduce a UPnP Collection that will list and enable playback of music stored on a DLNA Digital Media Server.  We could even consider publishing the content in the local Collection, basically making Amarok a DMS. Amarok can then track plays on remote devices and use it in the scoring algorithm. Even more advanced functionality would be to control one or more Digital Media Renderes, such as the Philips Streamium, from Amarok. A few mails have been going back and forth between interested developers about discovery of network services in general. In order to simplify using technologies as UPnP, zeroconf, Samba, etc I'm wondering if we can integrate this in Solid. Only the discovery part obviously, using the services would be the task of separate frameworks, such as Coherence. With this functionality in Solid it should be trivial to show a kind of "Network Map" to the user with all the services per device. As you can tell, plenty of cool things to keep a few people busy for a year or 3. Bart  Saturday, June 13. 2009Amarok Junior Job: Auto-download new podcasts
A recent comment by progmanos on the post of the 2.0.1.1 release reminded that I still have to implement Podcast episode auto-downloading. In the hurry to get 2.0 released I did add the config option, but forgot to add the actual code to make it work.
 In Amarok 2 Podcasts are implemented in classes derived from PodcastProvider. There can be mutliple providers, which allows for instance podcast syncing between Amarok and an iPod. The default provider is SqlPodcastProvider. This is where the auto-download function should get implemented. This is a nicelly contained and not to steep introduction to Amarok development. So it's an excelent Junior Job. If progmanos or anyone else would like to have a go at it, contact me on #amarok on irc.freenode.net. My nickname is Stecchino.  Saturday, June 13. 2009Amarok podcasting 2.0 and post-2.0 plans
Hey fellow developers and users,
In Juli 2007, at Akademy Glasgow I started implementing podcasting support in Amarok2. Since then I was sidetracked a little, as you may be aware. The little time I did manage to spend designing and implementing was short and far from focused. So a lot of features are not finished or just plainly missing. The framework I created underneath suffered from the same lack of focus and is need of a good review. I'm aware there is probably some overdesign and some parts might be to complex. If you feel you can help in that area I suggest you take a look at extragear/multimedia/amarok/src/podcasts . Send questions, comments and suggestions to amarok-devel@kde.org . The 3rd beta from Amarok 2.0 is already out the door and podcasting support is still not finished. In order to make it I had to reduce some goals I had set for myself during those rainy summer days in Scotland. Here's the plan: Amarok 2.0: The focus ATM is on finishing the SqlPodcastProvider, Podcastmodel and PodcastCategory (GUI). SqlPodcastProvider uses tables in the standard SQL database, adds and updates the feeds using PodcastReader and downloads to disk using the regular KIO-jobs. To make the podcasting fully functional though we'll need to reintroduce:
.The GUI currently shows all episodes ever read from the feed, which obviously needs to be addressed. The GUI for 2.0 should be very similar, if not identical to Amarok 1.4, probably minus folder tree grouping support since that is better handled generically for all Playlists (which PodcastChannel is in our class diagram). If anyone has a bit of Qt Model/View experience and would like to see podcasting in Amarok 2.0 I suggest you send a mail to amarok-devel@kde.org or ping me on irc (Stecchino on #amarok). Without help we might have to drop it's from 2.0 completely because it's a bit much for me alone to complete and stabilize. Amarok > 2.0: I do have a plan for a complete GUI overhaul post-2.0. I'll get some art and usability advice in another blog post when the time comes. The 2.x releases should see more advanced features being introduced that the framework is already designed to support: For the SqlPodcastProvider specifically:
 Friday, June 12. 2009It will eat your kittens!<public service announcement> Heya folks I will open Amarok trunk for 2.2 development in a few hours (not yet!). As people have a lot of awesome stuff to merge that they have been working on, trunk will be (semi-)broken for a few days and might eat your kittens. So if you compile from trunk you might want to wait a few days unless you want to help us stabilize things, which would of course be greatly appreciated. Let the breakage begin! </public service announcement>
Tuesday, June 9. 2009Akademy 09: Accomodation Needed So I have tickets to Akademy 2009. I’m flying Sydney - Hong Kong - London - Madrid - Las Palmas, and I’ll try not to whinge about it. But typically, more things gone wrong: the GCDS “travel agent” decided to lose my booking and now I don’t have anywhere to sleep. Anybody about that also needs somewhere to sleep or would like to thrown in an extra mattress into their room? (I’ve got a wonderful sense of humour if that makes the deal sweeter) Thursday, June 4. 2009Amarok 2.1 ReleasedJust 5 months since we released 2.0 and today we can present you Amarok 2.1 “Let There Be Light” with lots of improvements and new features. For videos of Amarok 2.1’s features check AmarokStudios. (Thanks to Abby for the videos.)
Wednesday, June 3. 2009From the Post 2.1.0 Git Vaults, Part 4: No more vertical tabs, revisited
In a previous blog post I showed an experimental prototype that aimed to do away with the vertical tab bar along the left edge of Amarok. The many replies to this post was about 50/50 for and against this idea. In the post, I mentioned that I wanted to add some kind of "breadcrumb" navigation bar to make navigation easier and also to always show the user where he "is", something that the tabs, admittedly, quite nicely accomplished, at least for the lowest level (which browser is active).
Since I had some time off last week, I decided to see how I could improve the original idea and add the breadcrumb interface. I quickly realized that the big vertical, kickoff style, back button was not very pretty, so as you will see, the latest version does away with that completely. It also turned out that when you have a nice breadcrumb bar, having each "category" show its own name, as all the services have been doing so far, really does not make much sense, so this is something that I could remove as well. Finally, this new interface finally gave me the chance to display some extended info about each category, before selecting it, something I have been planning to do for a long time for the services and which now makes sense for all categories. The info that is currently shown is just a placeholder until we figure out the real text/image for each item, so don't place too much importance on the actual info just yet! I guess you think that I have been writing enough and you want to see the video already, so here it is: Video on youtube (note that this vid is available in HD) I think that overall this works much better than the initial version I blogged about (even though I already liked that a lot) and I am confident enough that I can work out the final issues, that I am going to commit this to trunk as soon as 2.2 opens up for development. |
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