Amarok Blog - Nightrose

GSoC: biased dynamic playlists in Amarok 2 = love

nospam@example.com (Lydia Pintscher) — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 13:26:24 -0400

I think it is time to introduce my SoC student to Planet KDE

I blogged about dynamic playlists some time ago. Thanks to Google Summer of Code Daniel is going to do some magic work on dynamic playlists in Amarok 2 this summer and make them even more nifty. But let’s hear what he has to say:

My name is Daniel Jones. I study math and computer science at Western Washington University in Bellingham, WA. This summer I will be working on expanding the idea of dynamic playlists in Amarok to allow any number or weights or biases to be applied. This will allow you to set up a random playlist that prefers tracks you haven’t heard in a while, or prefers certain bands or genres. For parties you can set up more complicated biases to get exactly the right mix of fast songs, slow songs, novelty rap, obnoxious dance remixes, and, just to avoid offending him, a couple of tracks from your coworkers awful death metal band.

And from his proposal:

An example of this would be the condition the track is longer than 3 minutes with a weight of 0.6. Such a constraint would enforce that there is a 0.6 (60%) probability that a given track in the list is longer that 3 minutes.

As far as we know Amarok 2 will be the first player with a feature like this. Rock Daniel!

Everyone please welcome Daniel to our community. I want to see KDE-hugs!

I am also very happy about Moncef, Tobias, Nicholas and Teo who applied for SoC, could not be chosen due to the limited number of slots and who want to work on their projects as part of Season of KDE now. You guys rock! But more about that later.

Gimme your events!

nospam@example.com (Lydia Pintscher) — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 14:33:23 -0400

A few of you might have noticed it already. We now have events served by eventy on the dot thanks to some scripting by danimo \o/

We revived events.kde.org a little during the last few days and started by bringing the calendar back to life (which was 2 years out of date ) and integrating it into the dot. This calendar should list all events where KDE will be present be it with a booth, talk or something else.

We already added a few events but of course we cannot know about them all. So please ping me, Claudia or Danimo with name, date, a short description and a link for the KDE related events you will be at.

If you think you should have edit rights on this calendar please ping me as well and I can give them to you.

Let’s make it easier for everyone who wants to get in touch with our community in real life.

And now all together: Thank you, danimo!

While we are on the topic of events:

I will be having a busy May. You can find me and other gearheads at FOSSCamp, Ladyfest, OpenSourceExpo and Linuxtag (I’ll be giving talks at some of them). If you are at one of these events say hello and we can have a cup of coffee.

(hug the bugs) * 2

nospam@example.com (Lydia Pintscher) — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 18:54:16 -0400

Originally uploaded by Hamed Saber.

Harald, I and a few others ~~killed~~ hugged a lot of Amarok bugs in Kubuntu today, in preperation for Hardy Heron, while having a lot of fun discussing the bugs on IRC, Mumble and Skype. Thanks everyone for participating.

And since this was so much fun we will be doing the same for bugs.kde.org on Saturday.

You can help us find the bugs in Bugzilla that need to be fixed before we can release Amarok 1.4.9. This will be the next stable release, so only bugfixes and no new features will be added.

Join us on Saturday (March 15th) in #amarok.meeting on freenode. We will be there to discuss and give free hugs

impressions from Cebit

nospam@example.com (Lydia Pintscher) — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 14:14:29 -0400

I am back at home and have time and internet access again so I can finally blog about Cebit \o/ (Nothing beats coming home after a week with barely any internet access to a modem with an LED indicating no connection.)

We had a lot of fun at Cebit and it is always great to meet your favorite KDE people. But boy, the fairground is huge! And now you get to guess how much I saw of it during the week I have been there. Not much, right. I guess about 200m in each direction from the KDE and Amarok booth and a trip to the Novell and Microsoft booth which was in another building quite far away. Yea that’s about all I have seen I think. But who cares. I had fun and was able to show Amarok and KDE to a lot of people. I stopped counting how many times I answered the question “When will Amarok 2 be released?”. I think we will have to release something soon

I was particularly impressed by a very clever girl (maybe 13 or 14 years old) who was at the Amarok booth asking questions. Nice to meet the next generation of geek girls.

It was a little sad to see how alien the concept of free software is to a lot of people at an event like this. (”And how do you make money with it?”). Well now they know what it is and why we do it. In the end I think it was a great success though since we were able to show a lot of visitors KDE 4 and Amarok 1.4 and 2, introduce new contributors to the team and got a few offerings that look very promising. Be prepared for some nifty new things in and around Amarok (assuming it all works out).

And of course some photos:

When we arrived and gave back our rented car my guys forced me to take a picture of another car at the car rental. Ladies and gentlemen, I present you the uber geeky car:

Eckhart, me and Franz at one of the booth parties:

Harald and me at the Novell and Microsoft party (with free hugs *g*):

btw: Having internet access at the Amarok booth next time would rock Showing Amarok without it is a pain sometimes and takes away a lot of the wow effect.

distro mailinglist at freedesktop.org and Cebit

nospam@example.com (Lydia Pintscher) — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 09:07:14 -0500

A few weeks back I requested a mailinglist at freedesktop.org for cross distro collaboration. (The original purpose was having a list to discuss with other distros how they handle the whole ~/.kde vs. ~/.kde4 thing.) Unfortunately I never got a response and just stumbled upon the now created list at http://lists.freedesktop.org by chance.

It didn´t really get any promo so not a lot of distro people are subscribed yet. Please change that now and make good use of the list!

If you are involved in a distro please ask the appropriate people to subscribe.

http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/admin/distributions

(@ fd.o people: I am still interested in helping to take care of the list if needed as I think it is important.)

Next week is Cebit time. Say hello to your favorite Amarok and KDE people at their booths or check out some of the talks

what I learned at FOSDEM

nospam@example.com (Lydia Pintscher) — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 06:37:24 -0500

After getting back from FOSDEM and sleeping for 10 hours I am finally back in the land of the living

FOSDEM was great, I had a lot of fun and was able to connect some more IRC nicks to their real life faces.

So what did I learn this weekend?

When traveling with Nikolaj always be prepared for something involving a bomb.

Mike looks/is awesome.

There was an awful lot of ambulances in Brussels compared to every other city I have ever been to.

Kriek tastes delicious.

Statistics on KDE commits can tell you a lot about its community. Thanks to Paul for showing me some of his work. It was insightful and will be very useful for me for Amarok.

I need to get started again on packaging for Kubuntu.

KDE people rock! (Ok right. I knew that one long before )

Thanks to the KDE people for letting Amarok have a good share of the booth. We love you

Sorry I was not able to say goodbye to everyone yesterday. Big KDE-hug to all of you.

PS: Everyone who took pictures please share.

counting the hours?

nospam@example.com (Lydia Pintscher) — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 04:20:43 -0500

Only two days left until Phil, Sven, Sput and I take the train to Brussels for FOSDEM. The Rokers will be at FOSDEM! Right now I am counting 12. So be prepared

Come by the KDE booth and developer room to talk to some of our finest developers and Rokymoters and see all the cool new features of Amarok 2.

Oh and something very funky makes its first public appearance - don´t miss it. (But shhhh - super secret - not allowed to talk about it )

slides for the talks in Stuttgart

nospam@example.com (Lydia Pintscher) — Sat, 19 Jan 2008 15:22:35 -0500

Sven, Sput, Valerie, Jörg and I had a really nice day yesterday with lots of interesting talks at the Linuxday yesterday. It was nice to meet Frederik (I hereby promise to check out Parley ) and others.

The slides for my talk are available now:

Linux Spirit: Rockin´ in the Open Source Community: odp and pdf

KDE 4: odp and pdf

1000 thanks to Inge for providing his slides about KDE 4. (Unfortunately I had to shorten them due to the time I had available for the talk.)

After the talks we had a nice little party and watched Aaron´s keynote in Mountain View. All I have to say: You rocked

Back at home it was time to watch the talk by my fellow Roker Jeff. Again: You rocked and thanks for making Harald, Ian and me internet-famous

As a little sidenote:

Not just since but especially after yesterday I really appreciate a community that does not give me a major headache for being a woman. Big thank you to the KDE community for being the way you are.

@ the guy in the IRC channel (you know who you are): For gods sake check if the person you are talking about is in the channel. Your comments were way off.

KDE 4 Release Event in Stuttgart

nospam@example.com (Lydia Pintscher) — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 11:32:45 -0500

Planet KDE is filled with announcements for KDE Release Events all around the world already so I will add my little announcement as well

Sven, Ingo (Radio Tux) and I will be giving talks at the event at the Hochschule der Medien in Stuttgart on Friday. Check the program and join us for nice talks and a great party.

Our talks:

14:45 Linux Spirit: Open Source Community (Lydia)

15:15 Linux Multimedia: Amarok ? Rediscover your Music (Sven)

16:15 Linux Desktop: KDE4 - Konquering your Desktop (talk by Lydia and demo by Ingo)

Hope to see you there.

Don´t forget: This is the start of something amazing! Be part of something amazing! Be free!

(As always I will make the slides available later for those who cannot attend.)

Dynamic Playlist niftiness

nospam@example.com (Lydia Pintscher) — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 11:59:21 -0500

One of my most loved Amarok features are dynamic playlists. For those who don´t know how they work a little guide is availible.

I use a tweaked random for my dynamic playlist. Amarok is told to play music from a smart playlist which contains all the songs I rated with more than 3 stars or did not rate at all. I don´t want to listen to music I have listened to within the last month. So I exclude that as well. This makes my smart playlist. In Amarok it looks like this:

And now I use that as a seed for a dynamic playlist to make Amarok add and remove songs from my actual playlist and by doing this keeping it tidy, small and going on playing music for weeks if I want it to without me ever having to add or remove songs from the playlist (great for parties btw). If I feel like playing a certain song I can of course always just drag it into the playlist and play it. In Amarok my dynamic playlist looks like this:

And this is the result

I am pretty sure others out there use even cooler and more useful dynamic playlists. Please share. What do you tell Amarok to play for you?

Happy Holidays!

nospam@example.com (Lydia Pintscher) — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 08:34:18 -0500

The whole Amarok team wishes you and your loved ones a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

May your wishes come true and 2008 be a rocking year for you, Amarok and the free desktop

Cheers

Lydia and the Rokers

the love of christmas

(Originally uploaded by SpacePotato)

#amarok.de channel party

nospam@example.com (Lydia Pintscher) — Tue, 11 Dec 2007 18:52:31 -0500

What a weekend :p

Some Amarokers (apachelogger, Mamarok, markey, sven423, basti, Sput and me) came together in Karlsruhe (the Amarok HQ to be ). We had a great time partying, talking and chilling.

Friday evening we started with a visit to the Christmas market including some delicious mulled wine and ended with cheese fondue by Mamarok and dancing to good music.

Saturday started late with driving into the city and having a pizza. A part of us went there earlier to do something I am not supposed to talk about just yet. But you will find out soon in markey´s blog :p Then we had fun at a karaoke bar singing great songs like Moonlight Shadow and Mr. Jones by our favorites Mike Oldfield and Counting Crows. Recordings of this are better kept confidential . The day ended very late in a club (playing music that I did not quite like but wth *g*).

Sunday was our last day and apachelogger had to leave early . When I got back after taking him to the train station we had chilli con carne. Sadly it was time to leave for the rest as well after that.

I miss you guys and girl already . Hope we can do this again next year.

Ubucon recap

nospam@example.com (Lydia Pintscher) — Mon, 22 Oct 2007 14:38:51 -0400

Woohooo, we are back from Ubucon. Was nice to meet you folks once again.

It was a small but nice event and we had a great time.

Our talks went pretty smooth and I think we represented the gearheads pretty well

The slides for the talks:

Amarok: odp (for Kpresenter) and pdf

Kubuntu: odp (for OOo) and pdf

Once again a big thank you to Czessi for filling in for apachelogger as my cospeaker.

And now some nice photos of the Krew by sven423:

awwwwuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuooooooo!!!!

btw: Kpresenter was giving me and a few others quite a headache when I wanted to print the pdfs of the slides. I still can’t get a pdf of the FrOSCon Kubuntu talk only a ps. I would really appreciate hints on why it fails.

Ubucon and end of Roktober ahead!

nospam@example.com (Lydia Pintscher) — Thu, 18 Oct 2007 15:18:13 -0400

Less than 13 hours left until Sven (sven423) and I are taking the train to Krefeld for Ubucon to meet up with Mark (markey), Myriam (Mamarok), and Marcus (czessi) and give two talks.

Our talks will be:

“Kubuntu :: Collaboration To The Core” on Saturday

“Amarok :: Forming the Core 2″ on Sunday

So get out to Krefeld this weekend and join us on the first German Ubuntu conference!

Harald (apachelogger): Sorry you can’t make it to Ubucon. We will miss you there and hope things turn out well.

And since I didn’t post a proper FrOSCon photo yet - here is one of markey, gnux, me, sven423 and apachelogger:

You just have to love this team

And don’t forget to donate to Amarok. It is ROKTOBER, folks! Only 1287 Euro left to reach our goal right now. Please help us make Amarok even more awesome next year (pssst: you can win a Cowon iAudio7). The money will be used to pay for developer meetings, travel costs of the booth staff and server costs.