You may have already noticed, that we have released Amarok 2, beta 2. This is a very exciting release for us as we have put an incredible amount of effort into features and bug fixes. This release pushes most of the significant work which was discussed or achieved during Akademy, such as changes to the Amarok core which will bring significant stability improvements and improved user experience.

We’ve made a rather large change with the removal of SQLite as our database backend, opting instead for the MySQL-embedded platform. As I know that many users might not be able to rationalise this change, allow me to explain. MySQL-embedded provides users with the performance boost of a standalone server without actually needing to run the server and without needing to bother with the rather complex procedures of intialising a database, users and permissions. It was also important for us to only support one database backend as we were constantly plagued with problems across different databases. Using MySQL-embedded will thus make it very easy for us to support standalone MySQL servers (in the future) for those that already have these services running, or may want to share databases over a network.

Notable mentions include improved scripting support, the return of lyric fetching and incremental scanner support. It’s important to remember that Amarok 2.0 will not be at feature parity with 1.4 as most of the code base has been rewritten. Many of the features that are not present have simply not been reimplemented due to lack of developer time, or we are unable to complete due to current technical limitations (such as equalisers, visualisations, replay gain).

We hope you enjoy this release.

A quick service announcement:

The Amarok project has started it’s annual fundraiser campaign Roktober. We’re hoping to raise a staggering €10,000 - for server costs, developer hardware, travel costs, expo and trade show exhibitions, developer meetings.

For every €10 you donate, you’ll go into a draw to win an iaudio7. This year we have two grand prizes and we will also give t-shirts to 4 second chance winners.

Also, please digg it.
digg_url = 'http://digg.com/linux_unix/Support_Amarok_during_Roktober_2008';

I do believe that my recommendations very much match the mainstream of the opinions of the key people in Linux multimedia and desktop audio. Of course I don’t nearly know everyone of the key hackers in Linux multimedia. But I do know most of those who are actively interested in collaboration, whose projects have a lot mindshare and who attend the conferences that matter for Linux desktop audio.

Lennart forgets that Amarok is definitely a contender for the most popular music player on desktop Linux today. It possibly has the most mindshare of any Linux music player project. Remember that a long time ago, Amarok supported aRts, xine, GStreamer and helix. Now we can take advantage of not needing to care about a specific implementation for an audio output device by using Phonon.

Lennart again:

“Use GStreamer! (Unless your focus is only KDE in which cases Phonon might be an alternative.)”

This implies that a developer should only use Phonon if and only if the developer is targeting a KDE application. Frankly, this reasoning is not very well formed and is shameful. Perhaps what Lennart meant to say belongs along the lines of “Developers using the KDE development libraries might want to use Phonon”.

Amarok is a perfect example of an application which uses the KDE development libraries, but is not tied into the KDE plasma workspace. A grand portion of GNOME users pro actively install Amarok on their system because it is their preferred application for listening to music. Time to pick up the slack and get with the times.

It’s taken me the better part of a month to get home, settle in and upload my photos from Akademy to the cloud. Granted, I don’t have many photos since there were enough paparazzi at the event *glares at Bart and Sebas*.

The HDR which I’ve posted here proves that you can indeed create impressive shots only using free software, as long as you have a little perseverance and know how. Maybe Uga’s blogs will get there eventually :).

The rest of the images are on flickr.

I should have blogged much more from Akademy, but having hardware which insisted on frequently overheating made life a little difficult. I’m still in Belgium - in Bruges actually, blogging from my N810 courtesy of Nokia. More on that later.

I’ll start by saying that l think we had very productive week, getting lots of design and development done towards our goals for Amarok 2.0. We focused heavily on critiqueing the user interfaces of the major components in our GUI: the playlist, context view and each of our sidebar browsers. In between hacking hours, Mark, Leo and myself hosted design and release-breaking-issue sessions. These have provided valuable direction and motivation to all of our developers, so you can look forward to some exciting progress as we gear up to an imminent beta (and eventually final) release!

We also brainstormed a number of post 2.0 ideas such as interface adjustments to enhance your application experience, including, but not withstanding, mobile and embedded devices. Yes, that’s right folks, before too long (hopefully) you’ll be able to run Amarok on your favourite (maybe) small form factor device. The main use case would be for remote collections and streaming, but we’re not going to shut out users who like carrying 8GB of music on memory cards.

All this talk of small form factor devices is making me drool over my N810 as I write this. Some observations: all this very slow and awkward typing makes me much more coherent; leeching off random wireless to blog has never been easier; and, the inbuilt GPS has already proven invaluable to the Amarok crew as we used it to find our restaurant when we got lost cycling through the mid-west of Belgium. Note: never cycle 15km immediately after eating a huge meal, and never let Casey on a bicycle.

Finally, a big thanks to all that made Akademy so great: the organisers, the participants, the speakers, the boffers, the paparazzi, and all the people that were responsible for either brewing, frying or coating things in sugar.

Last night I managed to have nearly 100 people sign Lydia’s little black notebook at the Akademy beer-event. It was fun and a perfect example of how beer can give you a reason to do practically anything.

Coming up: Amarok talk. Must write notes.

The world has seen a significant amount of complaining about NVidia cards (the 8600 has had it’s fair share of whippings).

However, I’ve come to a great realisation:

with my exceptionally slow nvidia card I can see absolutely every draw that occurs on the screen. Great for debugging paint events, and no need to export QT_FLUSH_PAINT=1.

All you devs should go out and get one

My last couple of weeks has been spent focusing on getting cover art back up to scratch in Amarok 2. Cover art really adds a lot of spice and colour into the UI of the application, especially now that we are showing the artwork in the collection browser, context view and playlist. For those of you who are supremely organised, the collection scanner will now trawl through directories and try to pick up images it thinks are relevant to the songs which are being scanned. Embedded artwork is not implemented currently but it is certainly on the todo list.

Most of the relevant actions can now be executed for artwork: fetching from amazon, setting a custom image, removal and full size display. Music lovers with non English songs can now rejoice because we’ve also fixed some problems fetching artwork for album/artists that have accented characters, which Amazon seemed to have problems with. Another cool feature that we’ve experimented with is automatic cover fetching if there is an album with no artwork. Keep in mind that this is entirely tentative, as we are not sure that the false-positive rate from Amazon is low enough to justify polluting your database with random covers (although this will improve with our recent fix to non English tags). Maybe we’ll keep it, maybe we won’t, but it certainly is a cool feature which I’m loving at the moment - I am really lazy and hate having to explicitly fetch a cover, even though artwork is great to have.

In other news, I did some more work migrating statistics from Amarok 1.4 databases to the new and improved A2 schema. Here you can see how the play count, score and first/last played date for this track. Migration of lyrics and actual cover art isn’t yet implemented but that, like everything else is also on the cards.

Oh - one more thing:
My tickets are finalised, see you in Belgium in August!