My last blog about Amarok 2 on Windows had been a long while ago, but I'm happy to report that we have some news. Pau Garcia i Quiles committed a number of compile fixes, and it's now possible to build Amarok 2 with MSVC, and to actually run it!

Check this out (click to see full size):




Pau writes:

Yesterday I stayed up until 4:30 AM while trying to fix Amarok to work on Windows, and when I got it to build it was so late I was too tired to test it. So I fired it up this morning and this is the result. I have tested and it plays MP3, WMA, APE and whatever Magnatune streams on. Built with Visual C++ 2008.


I would like to emphasize that this is an ALPHA version. We know it still looks a bit ugly, but this will improve soon.


You can read Pau's original blog here.

I’ve been slacking on the update reports over the past two weeks, because I’m holding out for the exciting post where I say “MP3tunes AutoSync is working! Huzzah!” Sadly, this report isn’t that one.

For the past week I’ve been banging my head against the wall of glib, QtEventLoop, and QThreads. I have quite a headache to say the least, but yesterday thanks to my mentor and Ian, both Amarok developers, my head actually broke through that wall. Literally. GLIB, and Qt are kowtowing at my feet swearing oaths of fealty. They have promised to work together and let me get back to doing fun things, like code new features.

I always loved in grade school when the teacher was too depressed or hung-over to teach the class and just put on a VHS of Raiders of the Lost Ark, or something.

As promised, I made a little demonstration for those not daring enough for the svn or nightly (you can admit it, we won't think less of you).

(thats: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CFg0313x-iU, for the embeded video challenged.)

Sorry about the pixelation, it's hard to make out how ridiculously hip my music collection is.

It's still a little slow for a lot a biases. Expecially on my aging thinkpad, while trying to record video. That's something I will be working on. The algorithm is gradually growing faster and more complicated. I suppose that's how that works sometimes.

For next week, I hope to get saving and loading ironed out, as well as putting more work into the solver. After that I have the much more interesting task of writing news types of biases and making sure they don't take forever to solve. I've already got a lot of interesting suggestions which hadn't occurred to me. It's going to be fun to see what this can really do.

Hey, I have a lot things to demo since we were moving very fast In the past two weeks!

I’ve added a lot of QtScript API functions, including GUI, Playlist, Collection, Music Engine and Scriptable Service.

Here are some small pieces from the whole cake:

one of the engine signals:

function TrackChanged()
{
print( “Dude! Do something! The track changed!” );
}
Engine.trackChanged.connect( TrackChanged );

Track Meta Info:
var TrackInfo = Amarok.Engine.TrackInfo;
StatusBar.shortMessage( “You are listening to album: ” + TrackInfo.Album );

Collection and Playlist Access:
var totalTrack = Amarok.Collection.totalTracks;
Amarok.Playlist.clearPlaylist;

I’ve almost finished the DBus interface by supporting MPRIS standard ( http://wiki.xmms2.xmms.se/wiki/MPRIS ). Now the script manager could handle script errors, write them to log files and correctly start/stop scripts. A simple demo script and a scriptable service QtScript called “Cool Stream” was released with Amarok Alpha 1.

Everyone loves eye candy, the API implementation and bug fixing are mostly behind the scene. So I decided to make some candy for non-latin character users :).
I grabbed the charset detector code from Mozilla, merged them into Amarok. Now, the wolf recognizes non-UTF8 tags:

The summer of code project seems always stuck on some building system stuff. The charset detector didn’t compatible with cmake 2.4.8, and the Qt bindings generator was needed to be ported from qmake to cmake. ( thanks “compiling king” Ian for helping me )

The SoC project will be ended in one month. And we still have some work to do. Ladies and Gentlemen, let’s wait for the finalized script API, and the brand new script manager!

Greetings, I’m the SoC student working on implementing mass tagging in Amarok 2, teo_m in IRC. I omitted the G from GSoC as I’m not sponsored by Google, but I’m working on my project anyway.

So what’s the plan? I intend to build an intuitive and powerful interface, based on drag&drop, to extract tags from filenames; this will be done by arranging tokens that represent the parts of the filename that end up in the metadata of the file. This picture should explain it better:

It’s the new “Filename Schemes” interface that replaces the old one where the user had to write the same thing as %track - %artist - %title instead of just dragging buttons from the list to the layout bar.

So far we have mass tagging without the mass ;-). Two months ago I didn’t know anything about Qt so I first got a good book and messed around with examples. A month or so ago I ripped out the old filename scheme selector and began working on this one. For a beginner, the first challenge was to make drag&drop work and arrange the tokens the right way, that was done less than two weeks ago, and yesterday I finally managed to extract the first tags from filenames.

So now I can say this dialog fully replaces the old one feature-wise, as I see it from here it can only get better.

I am also aware of the fact that the stylesheets of the buttons are really ugly, I’m going to work on that soon.

Everything is in svn, feel free to try it. It shouldn’t crash Amarok or kill your cat but it’s still incomplete and not very robust.

Oh, and

First off, thanks to everyone who has responded to the request for devices so far, and those to come! Sorry if the replies to the e-mails take a bit, but I'm probably working on Amarok ironically enough. Some of the devices offered have already been sent, and soon we'll see the first signs of MTP support on Amarok 2 =D . To get this question out of the way, _yes_, of course we're going with libmtp 0.3, it just makes sense to. Look forward to this MTP users, and thanks again to all donors of devices!

Summary of Ipod News:

- You can now delete files one at a time from the iPod
- You can now "edit" tags, although changes won't save yet (implementing next)



After fighting for a while with how to create a custom "remove" button, users now have access to deleting files on the ipod! ... one at a time, hah, looks like I have to do some more magic before you can do it with multiple files at once. Also, the icon for "remove" doesn't seem to make sense, and I'm fixing this soon too. Why there isn't a built-in capability to remove from a collection when there's built-in support for it in CollectionLocation? Probably nobody got around to it yet. If nobody does it after this summer, I'll implement it so that people don't have to go through this again, haha.

Turns out that because pre-made actions are in the CollectionTreeView, they can do all sorts of magic like... know which items are selected, so that they can work with multiple things at once. I'll have to look into this next.

Anyway, editing ipod tags will no longer crash your Amarok, and they'll even update in the view!... but not in the ipod's database, so a restart of Amarok will clear those changes, don't be fooled! It won't be too hard to port over tags support I'm sure. Er.. wait, I've said "it shouldn't be too hard to..." way too many times already, and I'm always surprised when it turns out to be a pita, haha.

The rest of the stuff I mentioned in previous posts has not yet been dealt with. No need to ask about the progress, it'll get here fairly soon. I've tried to concentrate on core features (tag editing, file management) for now. Yes, album covers and podcasts are wonderful, and they're soon to be here.

About 4 days ago, the Amarok team released the first Alpha of Amarok 2. For an alpha, it actually seems to run very well, but of course it still has crashes, bugs and lots of rough edges.

Since this release, the pace of development has been absolutely astounding. In those 4 days, we have so far had well over 150 commits, including 13 bugs closed. We have not been moving forwards this fast since the very first few days when we started porting Amarok to Qt4 and KDE4, and I am not even sure that sprint quite matched this one.

One of the main causes for this speedup is, in my opinion, the constructive feedback we have received on the alpha release. So I would like to extend a big Thank You to all the people taking the time to test our alpha release and offering feedback and bug reports.

And just to give you something to look at, here is a post alpha screenshot from today. Even though most of the fixes we have done are below the surface, there are still a few visible changes. And yeah, the new applets need to blend with the system colors, which they currently do not at all



As a reminder for those wanting to try out the very latest version, or who are tracking the status of a particular bug, there is always the excellent Project Neon

We're currently transitioning our blog from s9y to Drupal. For the time being people who blog on s9y itself are blogging there still, but the aggregation is already happening on Drupal so its a good time to change.

Add this feed if you want to follow the blogs of Amarok developers:
http://amarok.kde.org/planet.xml

Again too long since my last blog post. For those who are new to my blog: I (DanielW in IRC) am the GSoC student working on bringing Nepomuk into Amarok.

So what has happend the last weeks? Amarok now writes statistics back to Nepomuk (playcount, last played date and so on). With the nepomuk search client and kio slave in playground you can search files for that (list for example all files played more than 10 times).

But what I really want to talk about are “real persistent playlists”:

Thanks to the new Filewatch service (already in svn (trunk and 4.1 branch))  Nepomuk can now track movements of files and update the metadata connected to them. (it uses KDirNotify and can only track file movements done from KDE applications).

I am using this in Amarok to have playlists which still work after renaming/moving files. This means you can:

• create and store a playlist
• close Amarok
• move the files around/rename them
• start Amarok and your playlist still works

Amarok also monitors changes to the data at runtime. I first planed to make a screenshot (without it, it is not real but you can not see it on a screenshot. So I made a screencast. Here it is (download in high quality (6 MB))

(sorry for poor Youtube quality, get the real one)

Now the technical part:

It works by creating and storing a uuid for every track used in Amarok. It then uses this uuid in the URL of the playlists. That works but is no perfect solution. In the long term (after SoC) I will have to create track (and album) resources (which link to the actual files) in Nepomuk. This will solve this without the uuid and bring other possibilities but also a lot of new problems.

You can try it out now (it is in svn of Amarok) but expect bugs and missing features.

And..

see you there

The first alpha of Amarok 2 has been released.
My first time as release gal. Turned out to be a little more complicated than I expected due to broken scripts and lacking documentation. But well. Worked out very well in the end.

Enjoy and please digg: http://digg.com/software/First_alpha_release_of_Amarok_2_0_Malina

After an all-nighter porting over file-related code and some hours trying to make it work with CollectionLocation, we have the first signs of file transfer to ipod support available.

Details:
- AA format not yet supported due to some Audible strangeness
- Copying might seem slow right now (as in, takes 3-5 seconds to copy about 12 tracks), but I will fix this pretty soon as I know the cause

How to copy to iPod?
1.) Have iPod plugged in and mounted
2.) In Amarok, an iPod collection should show
3.) Either right-click an artist/album/track from another collection (e.g. local collection), or drag into the middle area to bring up the PUD. Hover over Copy to Collection, and select your Ipod.
4.) The tracks should then be being added. Expand your ipod collection to confirm that the tracks have been added and are able to be added to the playlist and played.
5.) Confirm that the songs can be played from the iPod itself

Forthcoming but not yet here:
- Album Cover support
- Podcast support
- Tag editing support
- Playlist support
- Pretty interface for file transfers &c.

Also, there's a "hang on exit" bug right now, but don't be afraid to "killall -9 amarok," as it won't affect your iPod. Sorry for the inconvenience, I'm tracking that one down fairly soon too.

Daniel, my GSoC student, has been working on the GUI part of the biased playlists and did some work behind the scenes this week. It is really getting into shape even though it is still trying to fool you a little. Read more about it in his weekly report and don’t forget to check out the screenshot

Oh and of course:

Some non-Summer-of-Code related business popped up over the weekend, to take care of which required a slight road-trip. As such, I haven’t had much time to work on my project, however I’m heading back home today and I plan to get the code I have chilling in my local branch pushed to the main subversion repository.

Surprisingly, bulleted lists seem to be the most concise means to list progress [/sarcasm]

• Still working on Harmony integration.
• Harmony authentication is working (Thanks Lateralus from MP3tunes!).
• The daemon is receiving notification updates.
• Notification processing is what I’m working on now.

While looking at my last couple reports about harmony, I realized that the information is somewhat dry. I think this is because harmony is a highly technical, behind the scenes feature, and, also, often it is difficult to inject excitement into mundane programming updates. The humdrum is slightly symbolic of harmony. You will enable it once and forget about it as it silently keeps your music collection synced.

Related posts: GSoC Report Week 5: Harmonizing Amarok, One small step for Amarok…

Now that dynamic playlists are working, what's missing is a way to actually use them. That's what most of this weeks work went towards.

In Amarok 1, dynamic playlists are one of those great hidden features. They are terrifically powerful and usefull, but a lot casual users don't know about them, or just don't understand how to use them. I had been using Amarok for a while before I discovered them.

One of the problems I've been working on is how to present Amarok 2.0 dynamic playlists in a way in which it's more or less obvious what they do. I want it to be an exhibitionist feature, with the functionality all exposed and out in the open, no dialog boxes or menu hierarchies.

This week I spent some quality time working on the bias editor (and reminding myself why I don't like gui programming). Since every blog post needs a picture, here's the latest version of the bias editor from just a few minutes ago (not even in svn yet). It's a bit rough arround the edges, but comming along nicely. 


That screenshot is slightly faked, but in the next few days the bias editor will start to become functional. I'm pretty excited to see my work actually usable. 

I also did some important work behind the scenes. This sort of playlist generation can't really be done efficiently in general (it's an NP-hard problem). If you give it a really tough set of biases, it won't break down or freeze up, but it may give you playlist that isn't perfect. Making the solver work well is a matter of heuristics, trial and error, and tweaking. I did a little of that this week, but the real testing and tweaking will happen when the bias editor is up and running.

I'll be back here in a week, hopefully demonstrating how to use the new dynamic playlists.

So iPod support should be pretty well set by this next weekend, and the next thing on my list is support for MTP devices.

So, what's an MTP device? MTP = Media Transfer Protocol, a protocol Microsoft came up with for media devices. Examples of devices that use it? Pretty much every Creative Zen, iRiver, Samsung and Sandisk media device you can think of, which is why the support for these devices is so important.

But I'm at an impasse, since I don't actually _have_ any of these devices. The lack of devices is actually a pretty common issue for the Amarok project, which is where we come to you =). If you have access to a media device which you can donate for development , please let the Amarok team know at: amarok-device-donation@emailgoeshere.com. A list of devices that the project is looking for is available here. This will ensure that the people with these devices are happy people when Amarok 2 rolls around. Of particular urgency to the 2.0 release is the need for an MTP device (see list of MTP devices: here) Any of those devices will be a great help.

And, once I have one of those devices in hand and support starts rolling out, I ask anyone who has an MTP device to check out a copy of Amarok 2 from your friendly neighborhood svn server to help me test things out and make support be _good_ (see: here)

Lastly, thanks in advance to all of you!

As a Missourian and a person who thinks Belgium makes some of the best beer in the world, I've been following the story about the possible take over of Anheuser-Busch by Belgium beer-producer InBev with some interest. Personally I kind of want it to go through: it would hopefully mean the end of American beer being judged by its most tasteless examples. There is some good beer produced here. I think people would look at things differently if Bud Light becomes a Belgian beer.

It would also be very ironic and funny, which is mostly why I hope the deal will go through.

The article notes that "The takeover attempt has also run into a political backlash, as Anheuser-Busch, based in St. Louis, is an American icon. Senator Claire McCaskill, Democrat of Missouri, has vowed to stop the deal." Which got me thinking: I would personally find it hilarious if people in Belgium started rallying against this deal due to the damage to their national pride from having their corporations promote products like Bud Light. Any Belgian folks out there feel like writing their MPs?

Project: MP3tunes + Amarok Integration

Total Commits: 106 Weekly Commits: 26

Past 7 Days

I usually aim to post these reports on Monday, but I’m usually wrapping up a final commit or two on Monday night so I wait till Tuesday to post the report. Well now it’s 3:30 on Wednesday morning and I’m just starting. My last commit for “this week” was, oh, about 30 seconds ago.

During the last 7 days I:

• Patched libmp3tunes to support track fetching based off a filekey.
• Used the aforementioned patch in Amarok to enable saving of MP3tunes tracks to playlists.
• Made the MP3tunes Service “Lazy Load” upon Amarok’s start-up.
• Fixed misc non-mp3tunes related Amarok bugs.
• Added libmp3tunes::Harmony to the source tree.
• Created a harmony daemon that runs asynchronously within Amarok.

As usual you can see a list of my most recent commits via my fisheye page.

What the heck is this Harmony nonsense?

Harmony, itself, is a subset of libmp3tunes that provides an api for receiving event notifications from the MP3tunes servers. Essentially, what it boils down to is harmony enables the MP3tunes servers to notify Amarok when a user’s Locker has been changed. This will allow Amarok to assess the changes and perform an appropriate action (e.g., download a new track).

Suppose Jenni buys a song from eClassical and has it loaded directly to her locker. When this happens her Amarok will receive a notification: “Hey Amarok, Jenni just had a track added to her locker.” At which point Amarok will seamlessly download the track to Jenni’s local collection.

Upcoming 7 Days

Pretty cool right? Sure is, there’s just one caveat: it’s not working yet. Getting harmony to play nice with Amarok was a challenge that took a couple days, but as of this morning harmony is running in Amarok.

By this time next week I plan to have harmony fully integrated with Amarok, so the above scenario can actually take place. Even though the feature freeze that was announced for Amarok 2.0 technically doesn’t include me, I will still be taking some time to polish all the work I’ve done since May.

Hands up in the air everyone! Please cheer for Daniel!
Dynamic playlists are back \o/

Daniel, my Summer of Code student, has been working hard to get one of the most loved features of Amarok 1.4 back for Amarok 2 and probably made a lot of people very happy by doing that last week. He implemented a dynamic mode as basis for the biased playlists he will be working on next. First results can be seen now and it is going to be great. It already improved a lot over what we had in Amarok 1.4 because it is easier to discover, configure and use. And I am sure Daniel will continue to improve it and kick ass

You can read more about it in his status report for this week and of course try it yourself with Neon or your own build. Go read it!

/me is proud and so happy she can listen to music again without having to select songs herself all the time