Planet Amarok

Since 2005, summers are slightly more interesting for open-source projects than other seasons, and this year will fortunately be no different. You've guessed right, the reason is Google Summer of Code! I'm super-happy about the students that were accepted to hack on Amarok this year. And yes, I'm one of them. :-)

Tatjana Gornak (melandory), who has already refactored the way how we handle playlist files and implemented support for .asx playlists, will rewrite AudioCD support, making it much more solid and solving bugs that have bothered us for ages. She'll also take a look whether it could work on Windows too and remove a dependency on a deprecated framework within Amarok.

Anmol Ahuja (DarthCodus), who has already submitted and got merged 7 patches to Amarok, will revamp Amarok Scripting Interface, improve its documentation, make it tested and will add bindings for more Amarok components so that you will be able to write even more powerful scripts. He has already started surveying script authors for what they would like to see added on Amarok forum, so be sure speak up.

Konrad Zemek (kzemek), finalist of a prestigious Polish programming competition who has already fixed playlist sorting, will improve importing personal metadata from other players. More specifically he'll refactor Amarok 1.4 and iTunes importers so that they match tracks by tags and allow synchronization (rather than overwriting) of metadata. He'll also add support for synchronizing with Rhythmbox and another Amarok 2.x instance.

Yours truly (strohel) will rework MTP collection support from scratch, making sure it works flawlessly, especially on Android phones (not forgetting other MTP devices of course). Apart from fixing long-standing bugs and porting it out from the deprecated framework, new features like on-the-fly transcoding will be added too.

Given that I've had the luck to review past work of all mentioned students, I'm absolutely confident that all the projects will result in a big success.™ Look ahead to Amarok 2.9! (oh, is that speaking about N+2 while N+1 is not yet out syndrome?) :)

There have been 4 more student proposals (some of them very good) for Amarok that we unfortunately couldn't accept, due to lack of mentoring manpower. You're encouraged to keep submitting patches, an excellent preparation for the next time.

Hi there, while we've been working very hard on the next Amarok feature release, the 2.8, we also haven't forgot the majority of our users using the stable versions.

Welcome Amarok 2.7.1, a very close relative of 2.7.0 with just a couple of very important bug fixes. The 2.7.1 is also an opportunity for Arch Linux to package it correctly. :-)

Don't fear that we've made just 8 commits since 2.7.0. In fact, we've made over 300 by 25 different people! Look forward for better transcoding, ASX playlist and Opus audio format support, improved MusicBrainz tag guessing and improvements of existing features all over the place for Amarok 2.8.0.

… then here are some tips

Show us you are bright… and do your homework:

• Read the documentation

We can’t be there for you 24/7, so don’t expect to be spoon-fed information you can look up in documentation available online. While you will probably never hear a RTFM from us (we are polite), we do expect coders to be able to document themselves. You will be given a lot of links to documentation to read in the welcoming mail, so please do that: read and learn!

• Use your search engines and try to look up things on your own before asking.

In general, not doing some search on your own before asking questions is frowned upon, as it shows lazyness on your behalf.

• Don’t send private mail to potential mentors, use the mailing list

KDE is a community and we work on our projects in a collaborative effort. While there is usually one mentor assigned to an idea, there are co-mentors and we do coordinate our work in the mailing list. If you want to work with us, please do use the right channels for that. It also greatly enhances the probability to get an answer, as there are more eyes to see your mail. Private mails from unknown people can easily get lost in a filter, especially if they are badly formatted and sometimes not even have a subject line… *cough*

• Don’t ping people in IRC, and don’t open Queries without even asking if it is OK

There are some basic rules in IRC, all of which you can find online (search for “IRC Guidelines KDE”), so randomly pinging people you have never met or opening queries without asking beforehand are considered rude and are frowned upon. If you have an urgent matter, use the mailing list, not everybody is online all the time and not necessarily in your timezone. And if you ask a question on IRC, stick around so we can actually answer, don’t just leave after a few minutes. IRC is not for the impatient:

• Be patient!

We are usually very much occupied with our every day work and life and simply can’t be at your service just because you are there NOW. We do our best to answer your requests and questions in a timely fashion, but don’t be impatient, that is not making things go faster.  Your request is usually not as urgent as YOU might think it is. Did you try to search online and in the documentation on your own? No? Why not?

Remember: there is life out there, and that is often in the way of answering your requests as fast as you would like it to happen.

• Know what you are going to work on

You want to be a GSoC student but you don’t know your basic 101 of coding? Sorry, that is not for you, then. Consider applying for SoK instead. You need to at least have some basic knowledge of the business you want to get involved in. So if you want to participate, show us you know what you are talking about. The best way to show us is to do some coding beforehand, we have plenty of junior jobs with low hanging fruits.

• You can’t choose what project is the best for you?

We can’t do that either, sorry, as we usually only just met you. Just telling us what coding language you know about is not helping either, as we assume that to be part of your 101 skills box. You are the one who needs to decide what to work on, how and in what time frame. You want to participate, then make your mind up, study, read, use the software you are planning to work on, that is the best way to find out if it is suitable for you. And do look at the proposals made by other students in previous years, Lydia did send a nice mail to the kde-soc@kde.org mailing list detailing that. You are not on that list? Well then what are you waiting for?

I am NOT detailing links here on purpose: the various mailing lists of KDE can easily be found online, and there have been dozens of mails from me or Lydia or other people with links and instructions that can all be looked up in the archives, most of that in the last 2 months which will help you narrow the search. These mails contain all you need to know

All of the above applies mainly to GSoC, but also to OPW and SoK to some extend. Don’t recognize these terms? Are you sure you read the kde-soc@kde.org mailing list?

I’m happy to announce that KDE has been accepted as a mentoring organization in Google Summer of Code 2013. This is our 9th consecutive year. Congrats to all accepted organizations, and a big thanks to everyone who helped to make this happen for KDE!

This year KDE will also participate in the Free and Open Source Outreach Program for Women, an internship opportunity running almost simultaneously with Google Summer of Code, from June to September. Please note that while the Outreach Program for Women shares many goals and methods with Google Summer of Code, the two programs are not related. Unlike Google Summer of Code, the Outreach Program for Women also allows non-coding contributions. For more information about applying, see KDE’s Outreach Program for Women wiki page.

KDE will also be hosting Season of KDE 2013, with more information to come in the following weeks. Season of KDE is expected to start later in the summer, around the Google Summer of Code midterm.

Students. Now that you have a list of accepted organizations, it’s time to start working on your proposal. The KDE community maintains an ideas page which is an excellent starting point, and don’t forget to check our student guidelines. Also, last year I published an article with some tips on how to structure your proposal, you might find it useful.

You can come up with your own idea or base your proposal on something from the ideas page, but either way it’s very important that you get feedback from the team you wish to work with well before the submissions deadline. If you have general questions about getting involved with KDE as a Google Summer of Code student you’re welcome to ask on our IRC channel #kde-soc on Freenode, or join the mailing list kde-soc@kde.org. For questions about a specific idea please contact the relevant team (subproject) directly.

Finally, make sure to keep an eye on the official Google Summer of Code timeline – those deadlines are always closer than they seem

Mentors. Now that we know that KDE has been accepted, it’s time to get ready to mentor some students. If you wish to be a mentor your next steps should be:

1. subscribe to kde-soc-mentor@kde.org,
2. sign up on http://www.google-melange.com and apply as a mentor for KDE,
3. contact one of the admins to approve your requests.

For questions you can reach the admin team in #kde-soc on Freenode or at kde-soc-mentor-owner@kde.org.

And most importantly, in the following weeks you’ll be contacted by prospective students with questions and feedback requests for their proposals. It might take a bit of time and you might get questions with very obvious answers. Please be patient and keep an eye on the timeline

 

 

KDE will – for the first time this year – participate in the “Outreach Program for Women”. This was originally started by GNOME, but has also other participating organisations like Wikimedia, Mozilla, Fedora and others.

With KDAB as our sponsor we will be offering one internship. This is in no way only limited to coding, but includes user experience design, graphic design, documentation, web development, marketing, translation and other types of tasks needed to sustain a Free Software project.

The deadline for task submission is March 27. Please all in the KDE Community, suggest suitable tasks on our wiki page and volunteer to mentor. Feel free to contact me or Lydia for more information.

Prerequisites for application: Any woman who has not previously participated in an Outreach Program for Women or Google Summer of Code internship is welcome to apply, provided she is available for a full-time internship during this time period. This program is open to anyone who identifies as a woman regardless of gender presentation or assigned sex at birth. Genderqueer and genderfluid people are welcome to apply.

The application deadline for candidates is already on May 1st, while the program runs from June 17 to September 23.

It’s this time of the year again, where we express our love for what and whom we like:

This year I want to express my personal thanks to

• the kmail developers for the awesome work during the last year,
• the KDE sysadmins for being so fast and efficient,
• the Amarok team for their love and dedication,
• the Sconcho developer for being so responsive and making my knitting pattern editing so easy,
• the whole FSFE team for their hard work on protecting our Freedom!

Some time has passed since I last blogged about the Amarok Amazon MP3 store integration. Much polishing has taken place since then. But during the last few days a few major features have shown up as well. And one might even kill a showstopper for Linux on the desktop for many users.

AMZ Downloader

Amazon really sucks in terms of usability. If you buy more than one music file they don't offer a package with several MP3s in it for download, but an encrypted .amz file with download instructions. Even worse: Their application to handle those is proprietary, buggy and seems to be broken on 64 bit systems. But fear no more, those dark times are over! I hereby present: AMZ Downloader, a small utility to make downloading from Amazon as easy as eating a pie.

The screenshots should tell you the rest:

Opening an .amz file is a matter of one click.

Downloading just takes another one.

From a technical point of view the AMZ Downloader is also quite interesting. It is a separate utility, only requiring Qt and clamz, a command line .amz downloader. So maybe we are going to see AMZ Downloader shipped with other music players than Amarok, too? We'll see.

Context view

But that's not all there is. Amarok now offers further infos about a selected item in the context view.

And it's not just viewing, it's browsing! Click on an artist name to browse through the store and discover other stuff from the artist. Clicking on a song adds it to the playlist. And you can also add a song to your shopping cart with one click.

Amarok Amazon URLs

This is possible thanks to Amarok Amazon URLs, which have been enhanced in latest git. This one for example searches for "Cure" in your store and that one adds a great album to your shopping cart. This could be a great area for script developers to play with...

So, you want it?

Check out git master or wait for Amarok 2.7, our most awesome release ever made!

I'm happy to announce that we will have a KDE 4.8 Release Party in Ulm (Germany), on January 27.

The last party in Ulm was a blast, so we decided to repeat the event for this release as well. We will provide some finger food, live streaming, and plenty of space for having fun. For the details please see here, and add yourself to the list if you'd like to come:

KDE 4.8 Release Party @ Ulm

See you there!

If you have ever wondered why some KDE folks are blogging less frequently now, the reason could be that they have switched to G+. Many FOSS and KDE people are now posting regularly on G+, among them Thiago, Linus Torvalds, Rob Malda of Slashdot fame, Glyn Moody, Trever Fischer, Harald Sitter, and myself.

What makes Google+ so attractive? Basically it combines a social network, quick status updates like Twitter, and blogging, and it's far quicker to do than traditional blogging. As opposed to Facebook, which I am no longer using, its UI is very minimalist, and the "Circles" feature makes it easy to select your target audience. Most of my contacts on G+ are FOSS people and work mates, and I rarely get "Friendship" (what does this mean anyway?) requests from people that I don't know.

You might like or dislike this trend, but it's a fact. Many of my posts on G+ are technology related, but not all of them. Most of the time, my posts are "public", so you can read them without having an account. This is my feed on Google+ (if you check my contacts, you will find many KDE people):


https://plus.google.com/u/0/102602725322221030250


Is this trend worrying, a good thing, or simply a new technology that we must accept?


Update: This is an interesting (public) article on the benefits of blogging on G+:

https://plus.google.com/112546833633391090642/posts/1fkCLdAFGuT

Back in June, an event was held in Berlin called the Qt Contributors' Summit. This was such a success that the team decided that it should not be the last time something like that happened. So, to further this success, Nokia's Qt Frameworks Division has offered KDE a whole day of unconferencing at the Qt Developer Days in Munich later this month.

If you wish to take part in furthering the collaboration between KDE and Qt, and indeed other projects, then join the Qt Contributors' Day on Monday the 24th of October at the Dolce Munich Unterschleissheim. To join in, send me an email at admin@leinir.dk to that effect

You don't have a ticket to Developer Days, you say? Well, not to fret! The KDE e.V. has been given a bunch of tickets to be given out to community members. To get your hands on one of these tickets, give me an email at admin@leinir.dk to inform me of this.

Please note! If you decide that you want to join us, get in touch with me BEFORE the end of this week! (i.e. before Sunday the 9th, which is when i send off the list of people requesting tickets and the like to the e.V. board for evaluation).

So - come to the Qt Contributors' Day at Developer Days 2011 in Munich, and let's make this thing epic! Qt 5 is ahead, and with the launch of the Qt Project, we have more to say than we ever did before!

Hello World!

This is my very first *Amarok* specific blog post. Yay!

(Okay, admittedly I did not really blog at all since now. This will change now, of course!)

As you may know, I've been a rather semi-active Amarok contributer until now, hacking Amarok's codebase to improve the User Experience. My major *feature* contribution is the KNotify backend in Amarok (which of course is not the most crucial part of Amarok). Other than that I was mostly fixing bugs noone cared about or exceeded the patience of the average Amarok developer when trying to be solved. I think there's going to be more activity on this blog now, since I seem to get involved in Amarok more and more these days (which is exciting).

The past week I've been at Randa, the most important KDE Sprint this year, I guess.  To work on Amarok and KDE Multimedia in general. See http://community.kde.org/Sprints/Randa/2011 for hints an information about this event. The most important aspect of the meeting was the Platform 11 meeting of course, where the future of KDE with regards to Qt's Open Governance Process was discussed. This however, is not part of this blog, as I was not really involved in that discussion.

Let's talk about the work spent in Amarok land during the spring in Randa. We (mainly Mamarok and me) managed to close about 92 bugs according to her statistics. Of course most of them were duplicates or already fixed bugs by other commits. However, with a rough estimate: I think I managed to *fix* (as in: fix by committing something) about 10 more or less severe bugs and quite some other annoyances/glitches. Currently, our bug count in bugzilla (bugs.kde.org) is down to 210, an impressive good rate per LOC in open source software with a huge code base like Amarok has. This number refers to the currently open "malfunctions", e.g. no wishes or bugs marked with WAITINGFORINFO (see: https://bugs.kde.org/buglist.cgi?cmdtype=dorem&remaction=run&namedcmd=al...).

The Randa sprint has been an adventure this time which involved meeting new friends and meeting old ones. During the event Bart and me managed to work quite focussed on some issues regarding Amarok without being too distracted by other stuff. That was a really nice opportunity.

The list of commits that went into Amarok by me during the Randa sprint is listed here (42 commits during ~7days):

* e7666c2 - Minor: Fix typo in ChangeLog (2 days ago) <Kevin Funk>
* a4f56ea - Minor: Reduce header dependencies (4 days ago) <Kevin Funk>
* f716da8 - ChangeLog++ (Browser backgrounds) (4 days ago) <Kevin Funk>
* 7a39afb - Apply background images to the various browsers (4 days ago) <Kevin Funk>
* 3df0c45 - Minor: Collections: s/Counting/Counting.../ (4 days ago) <Kevin Funk>
* 83533cb - Add scripting interface for KNotify (4 days ago) <Kevin Funk>
* e43a711 - Use warning() for DEBUG_ASSERT (4 days ago) <Kevin Funk>
* 9320d5f - Pushing an example use of DEBUG_ASSERT (5 days ago) <Kevin Funk>
* 8737ace - Add another debug helper: DEBUG_ASSERT(cond, stmt) (5 days ago) <Kevin Funk>
* c8ef564 - Reset playlist error counter after match (5 days ago) <Kevin Funk>
* c4cceaf - Possible fix for crash in CV (5 days ago) <Kevin Funk>
* df9ec60 - Minor: Reformat code (5 days ago) <Kevin Funk>
* 01ed71d - Fix possible crash in VideoClipEngine (5 days ago) <Kevin Funk>
* fbbb47f - LyricsApplet: Disable scrolling when editing (5 days ago) <Kevin Funk>
* dfbf424 - Minor: Simplify some API in Albums applet (5 days ago) <Kevin Funk>
* 9aa81ce - Fix invokeMethod call to non-existent slot (5 days ago) <Kevin Funk>
* ed5448b - Minor: Remove annoying debug output (SqlRegistry) (5 days ago) <Kevin Funk>
* d21bab5 - Fix playlist tooltip getting too tall (5 days ago) <Kevin Funk>
* cb86a84 - Make equalizer keywords (dB, kHz, ..) translatable (5 days ago) <Kevin Funk>
* fbb54ff - Remove unused (+useless) PNGs from src/data (5 days ago) <Kevin Funk>
* 8098b22 - Unbreak Equalizer presets API a bit (5 days ago) <Kevin Funk>
* 471f0ac - Minor: Prettify ChangeLog (5 days ago) <Kevin Funk>
* 1170062 - Fix regression introduced by 34163f8 (5 days ago) <Kevin Funk>
* bb5c2f9 - Remove some outdated documents from docs/ (5 days ago) <Kevin Funk>
* 34163f8 - Make preset names translatable (5 days ago) <Kevin Funk>
* 66ef047 - Add script error reporting at runtime (6 days ago) <Kevin Funk>
* 34bbda9 - Minor: Improve debug output (6 days ago) <Kevin Funk>
* 82d102b - Fix "Happy" moodbar theme (6 days ago) <Kevin Funk>
* fcc420c - Fix crash by invalid scripts during stop phase (6 days ago) <Kevin Funk>
* 3157057 - Minor: Header/include cleanup (6 days ago) <Kevin Funk>
* 0406303 - Remove leftovers from a5628ac (6 days ago) <Kevin Funk>
* 6d93167 - Fix collection context menu items ordering (7 days ago) <Kevin Funk>
* f6799cd - Header cleanup starting from CollectionTreeView (7 days ago) <Kevin Funk>
* e902c44 - Minor: Rename hintlineedit(cpp|h) to HintLineEdit (7 days ago) <Kevin Funk>
* 76e9be8 - Fix strings in status bar (7 days ago) <Kevin Funk>
* 5eb2862 - Move the playlist length info into the playlist (7 days ago) <Kevin Funk>
* cae9d5a - Minor: Rearrange some code (8 days ago) <Kevin Funk>
* 8879afd - Remove outdated handbook/ directory (8 days ago) <Kevin Funk>
* 36ca680 - Remove stale OXYGEN file (8 days ago) <Kevin Funk>
* 48023de - Remove unused class ExpandingControlsWidget (8 days ago) <Kevin Funk>
* f524292 - Replace some other "LastFM" strings (8 days ago) <Kevin Funk>
* b72b933 - Fix crash when accessing The::statusBar() (9 days ago) <Kevin Funk>

 

PS: We (Team Amarok) also managed to win the Randa foosball cup 2011, by rocking all the other teams. Team Amarok consisted of Bart and me. Evidence can be found in the picture attached picture!

 

     

PPS: A nice picture collection of the event in Randa can be found here: https://picasaweb.google.com/valorie.zimmerman/RandaSwitzerlandKDESprint - Thanks to valorie for sharing and commenting all the pictures!

AttachmentSize Randa_2011_foosball_scoring_board.jpg839.59 KB Banner_NilsFurrer_went_to.png31.46 KB

Following recent tradition, here is another post mostly unrelated to Amarok (next one will be on topic, I promise)

The company that I have recently co-founded, Memolane.com is in need of a graphical and interactive lead designer.

So what do we offer?

As a very young startup, we offer long hours, constantly changing tasks (we all need to pitch in wherever needed) and huge responsibility for doing the best you can as there is no one else to fall back on.

But for the right person we also offer a unique opportunity to help shape a new company from a very early stage, to become a key part of a small, young and dynamic team, a very decent (for a young startup) salary and a nice little bag of lottery tic... uhm... stock options

If this person is you, get in touch with some examples of your previous work. If it is not you, but you know someone who might be interested, a good bottle of champagne or two is up for grabs for the person who refers us the designer we end up hiring.

Anyone interested or who wants to know more can mail me a "Nikolaj{at}memolane.com" or leave a comment below.

So, recently I was looking for something to do, but now I am in the position of having to turn down interesting offers because I am already committed elsewhere.

One of the projects I have been in touch with is of particular interest to me, as even though it is for a commercial company, the project that they need someone to work on would very much benefit the Free/Open Source software community in general and Amarok in particular, and therefore I offered to blog about it in the hopes that someone else might be interested in working with them. Had I not just a week before more or less accidentally co founded a startup (much more on that later), I would have been all over this project myself!

Basically they need a way to synchronize iPods on Windows and OS X, and rather than going a commercial route, they want to look into using libgpod and friends. Libgpod however is currently not ready for this task, as various bits are missing or needs to be improved on Windows and OS X, so the job is basically to do whatever is needed to fill in these missing bits.

They are looking for someone who can work full time on this and are willing to pay good money for it

If this sounds interesting, leave a reply here (remember to put your email in the comment form so I can get back in touch with you)