Feature Request: GUI and an own tab for streaming!

Hiya

First of all, I love amarok. It\'s fast, eye-candy, has great features and, maybe most important, an awesome GUI design! I really appreciate all your work, you guys do this for free and you\'re really helpful on the IRC chan also. Most awesome! I\'m really excited!

I had quite a long discussion with someone on the IRC chan yesterday about amarok and the possibility to add a feature for webradio streaming to it. I know there is already a thread about this it got a bit messy though and my request here is a bit different also. I have to say that I don\'t know anything about coding so my ideas might not be easy to realize, I really don\'t know.

The thing is the following: In my opinion the streaming situation for doing webradio on linux is not very good. I have my own webradioshow and I tried several different clients to stream to an icecast server in OGG but none of them convinced me. DJPlay isn\'t that bad, but the GUI is poor compared to amaroK, it relies on Jack and was really buggy for me. The same for oddcast, sometimes it\'s buggy and it needs xmms. Muse? It\'s a disaster, maybe I\'m too stupid, but it never worked for me, not even the live CD. Darkice and Ices2 are very simple, there\'s no GUI and configuration can be tricky, especially for newbies. So yes, I really miss a good app for doing webradio on Linux. And I think amarok could fill this gap!

My idea would be to have an own tab for doing webradio on the left. I don\'t know what of this is possible, but you could add features like:

- Listener statistics (would need interaction with the server of course)
- Profiles (we have an internal test stream for our webradio too, so profiles would be nice)
- Stream statistics (Bitrate, streamed songs, etc.)
- A mic button (Press to talk feature)
- Generating HTML playlists to publish the played songs after the radioshow
- etc.

Those are just some ideas that would be handy for streaming. Imagine those featues in amaroK! Wouldn\'t it be a killer application for doing webradio?

I would also like to see a GUI configuration option in the settings. I don\'t know how you could realize this, but why not add a backend for ices2/darkice in the GUI and use this client for streaming? I know it\'s possible to use amarok for streaming already now but I miss an own tab and some options for the settings in the GUI. And I know lots of other users that think the same.

I would love to hear what you devs think about this or even see a discussion in the developpers blog. Are there any plans to add this? Is it too hard to realize from a coding point of view? Or is my approach with an own tab silly?

All I know is that amarok would be THE killer application for doing webradio, I just miss some GUI options and room for an own tab. AmaroK could make the situation for streaming on Linux so much better and fill a gap! Think about it!