Amarok Blog

Berlin, we?ll meet again

nospam@example.com (Lydia Pintscher) — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 11:26:27 -0400

As others on PlanetKDE already wrote we had a really great time in Berlin last week. The KDE/Kubuntu/Amarok booth was well staffed with my favorite gearheads and new KDE people now to be added to the former group It was nice to meet you folks! One of the best things about this year’s Linuxtag: We finally managed to get our booths (KDE, Kubuntu, Amarok, QtSoftware and KDAB) together as close as possible No more running from one side of the exhibition to the other like in previous years \o/

Thursday was probably the busiest day for me. Ingo interviewed me about Amarok for RadioTux. (Excellent job as always, Ingo! ) The recording of it is available at RadioTux. Shortly after that I had to rush off to join Alexandra in giving an introduction to community management in free software projects in our “Community Management 101″ workshop that was well received.

The other days were filled with meetings and lots of talking to visitors and other projects. It is nice to see the shift in attitude towards KDE 4 compared to Linuxtag last year. A lot of people came to our booth to let us know they use and like KDE 4 now. This really rocks! Those who were not happy with KDE 4 yet mostly had very minor problems which we fixed in a few minutes; like showing them how to add applets to their taskbar or what the places bar in Dolphin is capable of. Oh and I was surprised how many people first didn’t believe I was running a stock KDE 4.2.4 on Kubuntu on my 7′ EeePC. So once again: The tiny thing does indeed run KDE 4 Special thanks for that to the Plasma and KWin team. Plasma and KWin on the EeePC are quite an eye catcher at events like Linuxtag.

Kreuzberg surprised a small group of us on Saturday with CSD. Definitely not what I would have expected for that evening but it was awesome! And let me tell you: Marge’s outfit was great but it wasn’t the best one by far. That one goes to someone dressed as Hellboy shouting “KDE! Awesome!” after seeing Frederik’s KDE shirt. This was my second time in Kreuzberg and the second time there was a party on the streets. Rock! (Way less police than on May 1st though )

Sunday and Monday Frank, Cornelius, Thorsten, Danimo, Dominik, Milian and I met at the QtSoftware office to talk about the future of KDE’s wikis. It was quite productive and results will be visible soon.

Thanks go to KDE e.V. and Amarok for funding and of course the Linuxtag team for another great event.

Oh and btw: I of course signed the FLA as well. (I think I got number 10 - nice round number.)

Everyone going to Gran Canaria: Have a nice time and lots of fun and make sure to blog/dent/tweet a lot for those left behind at home. I want to see lots of photos

MySQL Server Support -- Promised and Delivered

nospam@example.com (Jeff Mitchell) — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 05:54:00 -0400

We told you it was coming. Sure, that was a while back, so you probably thought we forgot about it. Or maybe you thought we were simply playing politics, tossing empty promises to our users.

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.

Update to at least r984572 (of course, updating to the latest revision is probably your best bet).

Wipe your build dir clean and rebuild. Not necessarily necessary, but as 47 files were changed in that commit, it's not a bad idea.

After install, run kbuildsycoca4 --noincremental, just in case.

On your MySQL server, run a command like: "GRANT ALL ON amarokdb.* TO 'amarokuser'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'mypassword'; FLUSH PRIVILEGES;" Be sure to substitute for "amarokdb", "amarokuser", "localhost", and "mypassword" as appropriate.

Open up your amarokrc file, usually in ~/.kde4/share/config/amarokrc. Add a [MySQL] section:
[MySQL]
UseServer=true
Database=amarokdb
Host=localhost
Password=mypassword
User=amarokuser

Close the file and start Amarok. It should create the database and start a scan of your files. If you want to switch back to the embedded collection, simply set "UseServer" to false.

Pretty easy! Be sure to let me know if you have problems -- file a bug and assign it to "mitchell" at a domain of "kde" plus a dot plus "org".

UTF-8 and Your Music

nospam@example.com (Jeff Mitchell) — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 05:32:00 -0400

A 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

AFT Embedded Tagging: now on FLAC, Ogg/Vorbis, Ogg/FLAC, and Ogg/Speex!

nospam@example.com (Jeff Mitchell) — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 18:57:58 -0400

I've blogged about Amarok File Tracking before and there's a lot of information about it on the wiki. For those that haven't heard about the goodness of embedded file tracking, check out those links. There are a couple pieces of good news, and one piece of bad news.

The good news: in current SVN (and thus 2.2) the amarok_afttagger executable will also now handle FLAC and various Ogg-contained formats. Another piece of good news - the amarok_afttagger executable is now contained in the amarok-utilities package, and thus can be run on headless machines without X! And lastly -- AFT now works with user playlists, so you can move your files around (keep in mind the caveats if you're not using embedded AFT tags) and your playlists will always stay current, in addition to statistics and The Playlist.

The bad news? Something is currently a bit broken somewhere deep inside with Observers which means that The Playlist will only update with the correct new URL once (the metadata observers seem to die after that). This doesn't seem to be AFT specific but rather seems like a bug that AFT is exposing. Closing Amarok and reopening it will cause the proper new URLs to be in the playlist. I'm working on trying to fix that.

(Important note: it writes into the FLAC Xiph comment. This is the only metadata type actually required by the FLAC spec, and thus is the proper place to put it, but a lot of FLAC files incorrectly only have ID3v2 tags, so depending on the tagger you're using you may only see one or the other.)

Amarok 2.2 development, one week in

nospam@example.com (Nikolaj Hald Nielsen) — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 09:36:51 -0400

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.

Oceania

nospam@example.com (Lydia Pintscher) — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 12:44:38 -0400

While 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!

We will also be at Linuxtag next week in Berlin with the rest of KDE and the Kubuntu crowd. If you are around say hello. We have a few free tickets left.

Blue Starfish, originally uploaded by Kanaka’s Paradise Life.

UPnP DevSprint in Paris

nospam@example.com (Bart Cerneels) — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 07:32:02 -0400

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

UPnP support in KDE and Amarok

nospam@example.com (Bart Cerneels) — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 07:32:02 -0400

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

Amarok Junior Job: Auto-download new podcasts

nospam@example.com (Bart Cerneels) — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 07:32:02 -0400

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.

Amarok podcasting 2.0 and post-2.0 plans

nospam@example.com (Bart Cerneels) — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 07:32:02 -0400

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:

Autoscan the feed for updates
Download when available
Episode purging (delete downloaded episodes automatically)

The settings dialog for this exists, next up is using them .
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:

Renaming and sorting individual episodes (popular request)
Purging based on episode age and/or total size on disk
Labeling of PodcastChannels (perhaps to replace traditional folder tree grouping)

More general

Mediadevice Podcast support: iPod being the most advanced implementation but also generic usb devices, music phones and Canola2, I'm sure the INdT guys could help us with that.
OPML import and export
Podcast Directory personal subscription list.
BashpodderProvider: to use bashpodder and Amarok in parallel with synchronized download status
...

On to hacking.

It will eat your kittens!

nospam@example.com (Lydia Pintscher) — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 04:37:56 -0400

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! (in a few hours)

Cheers

Lydia

</public service announcement>

Akademy 09: Accomodation Needed

nospam@example.com (Seb Ruiz) — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 08:45:45 -0400

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)

Amarok 2.1 Released

nospam@example.com (Lydia Pintscher) — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 20:12:17 -0400

Just 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.

Read the release notes, download it and rediscover music!

For videos of Amarok 2.1’s features check AmarokStudios. (Thanks to Abby for the videos.)

From the Post 2.1.0 Git Vaults, Part 4: No more vertical tabs, revisited

nospam@example.com (Nikolaj Hald Nielsen) — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 03:24:25 -0400

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.

Amarok on Windows: Get Your Nightly Builds

nospam@example.com (Mark Kretschmann) — Tue, 26 May 2009 13:59:42 -0400

Many users have been asking us lately for updated builds of Amarok 2.1 for Windows. Here's some good news for you folks!

Thanks to our tireless KDE-Windows crew (Patrick Spendrin and others) you can now get nightly builds for Windows right here:

http://mafia-server.net/amarok-nightly

Apparently these builds are pretty solid. Quoting a user from our forum:

"Wow the nightly build version is way different. After using it for some days I can say that it seems to be much more stable than 2.0.1. Good job."

So, give it a try