Amarok October Updates

Amarok 2 is really gearing up to become a great piece of software. We are all are frantically trying to find any time we can steal from our busy schedules of work, study, and good-times to put some of that extra special attention to detail and polish on the application.

This week I finalised the third revision of an importer tool to recover your beloved statistics, scores, ratings, lyrics and album art from an Amarok 1.4 installation. After a rather draining and involved process starting off with Ruby, moving to QtScript (javascript) I finally cut my losses and have implemented an extendible framework directly in the application with c++. You’ll be able to retrieve your stats from any of sqlite, mysql or psql database backends. Throw in a wizard, some multi-threaded goodness and an output logger, and we’ve got a snazzy new tool for your convenience.

I put a bit of extra effort in on the side to make sure that the tool won’t go to the land of bit heaven after the release of Amarok 2.0, and incorporated a pretty nifty infrastructure to allow implementations of arbitrary importers. I’m thinking iTunes, Rhythmbox, Banshee, WMP, Winamp et al. If you’re looking for easy entry into KDE development ask me how to write an importer.

There have also been a plethora of other significant updates to Amarok, such as:

• Totally reworked play list subsystems which respects groupings, dragging, extended selections, viewport updates, styles.


• The status bar, it works!


• Locale aware sorting in the collection browser. No more unintuitive placement of your Åwesome ?usic ?itles.


• More reliable lyrics retrievals.


• Snazzy new icons.

Stay tuned for Amarok 2 beta 3 which we’ll have out in the wild very shortly.