Wednesday, May 28. 2008A Cool little hack! ( Free, public domain, audio books in Amarok 2 )
A little while back, Amarok's very own Lydia Pintscher, aka. Nightrose, blogged about a session on free culture at FOSSCamp. Among the comments to that blog entry was a suggestion to integrate free, public domain audio books from Librivox.org into Amarok 2. This spurred a bit of a discussion which resulted in someone coming up with a link to a nice XML api for searching their catalog.
Now, regular readers of my blog will well know what happens when I see a nice API for searching free content....  So, after about an hour and a half of hacking, I give you the brand new Librivox.org service script:  As it is implemented as a ruby script, and not as a native C++ service, it is quite limited in its functionality, but it works great for searching for and streaming audio books. The scriptable service framework is turning out to be quite useful. It allows for very rapid prototyping of new services, that are very usable, even if some of them would benefit from being ported to native services. I also think that having a few good scripted services ship with Amarok 2.0 will inspire other people to write new interesting services, and provide examples on how to do so. Trackbacks
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I am a big user of the Libravox service, and now it is incorporated into my favorite audio player. How cool is that?!
What is next? Nikolaj coming to my bedroom to sing me lullabies until I sleep?
He's in fact currently learning to play the guitar, so that we hope to send him out for lullabies soon. (For a small fee of three Hallelujahs for Amarok.)
Well, my guitar playing is getting there, its the singing that will either keep you awake, frantically trying to cover your ears, or give you severe nightmares...
very nice! unfortunately librivox has not much german content.. so worthless for me
 kde rox
then why not record one for them?
All audio books on Librivox.org are read by volunteers. So if you think they need German or (insert language of choice) content, you can help them out!
He didn't say it was worthless in general, but worthless for him. There is a difference. I guess he is just not into non-German audiobooks, for whatever reason.
That his comment will be worthless for most readers of this blog posting is again another matter .
well i found somethin in german: http://librivox.org/der-struwwelpeter-von-heinrich-hoffman/
unfortunately with a heavy us-american accent.. lol how about support for http://www.vorleser.net? here an example: http://www.phoneticsgroup.de/audio/tucholsky/tucholsky_deutschfueramerikaner.mp3 @André maybe this one is more worth, as a big number of kde users/devs are german speaking..
I am very impressed. I made the comment just a week ago on Lydia's blog and ... bang, here it is. Thank you for implementing this feature
@nice: Do you know any resources for German audio books?
Awesomeness
I just tried it - just works! Entering poe as search term was not a good idea... it's contained in poem and poetry (takes for ever to load).Keep up the great work!
That's great. But what I'm really waiting for is: 'Hey there is a beta for window-systems.'
Am I allowed to hope, now that kde 4.1 beta is out for testing?
Well we need more helpers to fix remaining issues in the Windows version. Most of our devs work on Linux only.
Where can you find the XML API for searching the Librivox catalog?
can anyone help? i want to know a small little website that i can hack and i cant find one.
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