Entries by Mike Diehl

Development of 1.4 has started and some interesting ideas are going around. One of the things I'm working on is a feature to help you organize your collection files. Currently my collection consists of two directories /mnt/music and /home/mike/music_temp. In /mnt/music I have all the music I plan on keeping in my collection, and in /home/mike/music_temp I put music I just want to try out.

So now I've listened to these new tracks and want to put them in a nice tidy spot on /mnt/music. Now with a quick drag and drop from konqueror I can move them there. But this leaves us with a small problem. The tracks I liked so much now have clean stats .

This is where Organize files steps in. I go to the Collection browser to find my new favorite tracks. Looking at all the artists it seems it could take a while to sort through and find all these tracks. Let's not forget where we have the files saved, /home/mike/music_temp, google like search to the rescue. In the search bar I type "Directory: /home/" I'm left with just the temporary files I want to organize.




I select what I want to organize and from the right click menu choose Manage > Organize Files... A dialog appears allowing me to choose the collection folder as the destination. I also have options like grouping all artists alphabetically such as "A/Artist/Album" and using the cached amazon artwork as the icons for each albums folder.



Click Ok and amaroK goes to work moving the files to /mnt/music/T/The Prodigy/Experience Expanded. Each track is moved here and renamed by it's tags, and the folder icon is set to the album cover. All this time, the stats are saved and the filesystem is orderly for when you use a file browser.



The feature still needs polish and has a few minor bugs but seems to be working good so far. Keep your eyes on the blog for more exciting features to come to your latest amaroK svn.

For those who keep track of the mailing list you know there has been a lot of talk about video in amaroK. The idea has been tossed around before, and the nmm engine even does video, at least I think it still does. Anyway I spent some time thinking about the idea and some of the possible problems.

First would be that tagging of videos really doesn't exist. This is a big problem, without tags you lose most of the features that make amaroK what it is. If the media is not in the collection you are left with pretty much just a playlist, something easily implemented in existing video players. Currently to get media into the collection you need tags, this problem is well known to those who try to add wma's to there collection. So where does this leave us? Do we adjust the db to suit the needs of video, or should someone write plugins for taglib 1.4 to support video?

Second, where do we put the interface for accessing videos? Using the file browser would not be very good, and would be inconsistent with normal media handling in amaroK. Generally media is accessed with the collection browser or some other part that requires the collection, such as the context browser. This brings us back to problem one.

Another issue is bloat. Many have said keep it simple, but what is simple. Is it open a little window that shows the video and that's it? If this is what it means, I'm still at a loss to find any advantage to playing video in amaroK. There are plenty of minimalistic video players, one of which is by our very own (gone missing) mxcl, and it does the job nicely.

And if video support is added, does it stop there. Should we go so far as to integrate K3B for burning, there is already a wish item to add a K3B part into amaroK. And what about the bit torrent client, maybe it should be next. I don't think the idea of an amaroK Media Desktop Environment is that great, as too many features can confuse and scare away new users, and just hiding them makes for poor usability.

Maybe people can share there ideas and solutions as just throwing in a feature like this would be bad, and careful planning is needed to keep from ending up with an interface that's bloated and a pain to use.

One of the things I find interesting about amaroK is the amount of control and information that is available using DCOP. An often asked question is "How do I know the number of tracks in my collection?". Using DCOP we can find this out.

dcop amarok collection query "SELECT COUNT( url ) FROM tags;"

Maybe you would rather know how many albums.

dcop amarok collection query "SELECT COUNT( id ) FROM album;"

It could be that you just want the cached lyrics of the track you're listening to now. With DCOP this is as simple as

dcop amarok player lyrics

It doesn't stop there, I counted almost 80 DCOP calls in the current SVN of amaroK, with the newest being setLyricsByPath. This call combined with the script manager should allow script writers to choose there favorite site for downloading lyrics. We even have a DCOP call to add custom items into the playlist context menu for scripts that work on selected tracks only.

So the next time you wish you could have more control of amaroK from your multimedia keyboard, look into what DCOP has to offer. The handbook that shipped with your amaroK lists them all, or you can use kdcop if you would like a nice interface for trying them out.

The amaroK script manager now offers more dynamic control over scripts in current svn. You can now run scripts against any selected track(s) in the playlist via the context menu. We have new DCOP calls to add and remove new playlist context items that can be used to control scripts using our existing script notification system. Keep an eye on http://amarok.kde.org/wiki/index.php/Script-Writing_HowTo#Notifications as we stabilize the feature.

Basically the way this works is we use a DCOP call to add items to a submenu, both of which are specified in the DCOP call. Now that the submenu and it's items are created, we can select items in the playlist and click one of the new items added to context menu. This makes amaroK send out a notification that includes the submenu and item titles (so we don't confuse other listening scripts) and the URLs of the selected playlist items.

This is good news for script writers as now there scripts will feel more like they are built-in features of amaroK. Scripts for transcoding tracks, uploading tracks, black listing tracks, and countless others will be better integrated into amaroK, allowing more control and looking good at the same time. So grab svn and your favorite editor and let's see what kind of scripts everybody can come up with.

I'd also like to thank eean for his help in making this new scripting interface system more featureful and functional. Thanks eean!