Nikolaj Hald Nielsen

Last year was started what we hope will become a long running tradition when an Amarok user known as linkmaster03 sent us a href=http://amarok.kde.org/blog/archives/818-Halloween.htmlthis picture of his amazing Amarok pumpkin carving/a.br / br / This year, a href=http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?pid=4438422l=07b6d07ff8id=550641689Jessy Ouellette/a dropped by our IRC channel with this picture of his pumpkin masterpiece, which absolutely blew our minds!br / br / !-- s9ymdb:226 --img class=serendipity_image_center width=604 height=453 style=border: 0px; padding-left: 5px; padding-right: 5px; src=http://amarok.kde.org/blog/uploads/Halloween2.jpg alt= /br / br / So happy Halloween to everyone and a big thanks to Jessy for letting us blog this picture!br /

The upcoming Amarok 2.2.1 release is turning out to be a href=http://amarok.kde.org/blog/archives/1112-Amarok-2.2.1-Were-getting-there!.htmlquite an impressive one/a, especially considering how short of a release cycle we have put ourselves on. The a href=http://gitorious.org/amarok/amarok/blobs/master/ChangeLogchangelog/a is full of good stuff already!br / br / True to form though, I am going to do a little 2.2.1 is going to be great, but checkout what we have in store for 2.2.2 post! img src=http://amarok.kde.org/blog/templates/default/img/emoticons/smile.png alt=:-) style=display: inline; vertical-align: bottom; class=emoticon / br / br / So here goes:br / br / a class='serendipity_image_link' href='http://amarok.kde.org/blog/uploads/2.2.2MoodbarPreview.jpg'!-- s9ymdb:225 --img class=serendipity_image_center width=300 height=160 style=border: 0px; padding-left: 5px; padding-right: 5px; src=http://amarok.kde.org/blog/uploads/2.2.2MoodbarPreview.serendipityThumb.jpg alt= //abr / br / If you are recoiling in horror at all those random colors, fear not, you will not see them at all. If however you have a ton of moodbar files lying around for your collection and liked this feature in Amarok 1.4.x, you are in luck! Showing the moodbar (if available) in the progress slider is configurable, and moodbars have been added to the playlist layout editor so you can add it to your favorite playlist alyout in any way you choose. Even the 4 different moodbar styles (normal, angry, frozen and happy) have been ported over.br / br / The a href=http://pwsp.net/~qbob/moodbar-0.1.2.tar.gzmoodbar generator/a itself seems to work still, even though it could really use some love and a porting to Phonon (or even to qtscript so it could be easily integrated into Amarok and, for instance, run on demand when playing a track or process the entire local collection in one go).br /

The sun is setting on the development of Amarok 2.2.0. With todays release of Amarok 2.2 rc1, we are preparing to release 2.2.0 very soon and end this significant chapter in the history of Amarok. br / br / This rc contains a number of important bugfixes compared to Beta2 and also adds a few much needed features and improvements to the podcast support. See the a href=http://amarok.kde.org/en/releases/2.2/rc/1 title=release announcementrelease announcement/a for a full list of changes and please help us by a href=http://bugs.kde.org/ title=Bugzillareporting bugs/a.br / br / As with any sunset, tomorrow is a new day. And once 2.2.0 has been released, we can start over, improving on Amarok 2.2 and slowly start thinking about 2.3 and how to make it even better.br / br / br /

One of the features from Amarok 1 that has so far been missing from Amarok 2, is the ability to edit track metadata directly in the playlist. While it might sound surprising that such a seemingly simple and oft requested feature should take so long to implement, the extremely flexible nature of the Amarok 2 playlist made it quite tricky to get right.br / br / Recently I decided to have a go at it, and after a few false starts, I think I finally finally made it work. So as of today, cliking on an already selected item in the playlist makes it go into edit mode where (some of) the visible fields can be edited (subject to a few rules about which pieces of metadata it makes sense to manually edit). br / br / The hard part here was to generate editors that fits whatever layout the playlist is setup to use. Below are screenshots of inline editing with 2 different layouts. The look of the edit boxes could possibly do with a little tweaking, but the functionality is pretty solid.br / br / a class='serendipity_image_link' href='http://amarok.kde.org/blog/uploads/inlineediting1.png'!-- s9ymdb:220 --img class=serendipity_image_center width=300 height=273 style=border: 0px; padding-left: 5px; padding-right: 5px; src=http://amarok.kde.org/blog/uploads/inlineediting1.serendipityThumb.png alt= //abr / br / a class='serendipity_image_link' href='http://amarok.kde.org/blog/uploads/inlineediting2.png'!-- s9ymdb:221 --img class=serendipity_image_center width=300 height=228 style=border: 0px; padding-left: 5px; padding-right: 5px; src=http://amarok.kde.org/blog/uploads/inlineediting2.serendipityThumb.png alt= //abr / br / As the attentive reader will note, this also allows changing track ratings directly in the playlist.br / br / Look for this to arrive in an Amarok 2.2 near you.

Today I want to write a bit about some of the stuff that is made possible by me working on both a href=http://http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z1suvKLGbJkMagnatune.com/a and Amarok.br / br / On Magnatune.com, we have recently added a number of features to make the memberships more attractive. One of these features (which has actually been around for a while now) is a personal list of favorite albums for each member. On each album page, there is a small button that adds the album to the list of favoritesbr / br / a class='serendipity_image_link' href='http://amarok.kde.org/blog/uploads/Magnatune.comaddalbumtofavorites.png'!-- s9ymdb:217 --img class=serendipity_image_center width=300 height=290 style=border: 0px; padding-left: 5px; padding-right: 5px; src=http://amarok.kde.org/blog/uploads/Magnatune.comaddalbumtofavorites.serendipityThumb.png alt= //abr / br / Clicking this button adds the album to the favorites page (and in a nifty little trick, the button gives feedback and changes to a link to the favorites page). The favorite page look something like this:br / br / a class='serendipity_image_link' href='http://amarok.kde.org/blog/uploads/Magnatune.comfavorites.png'!-- s9ymdb:218 --img class=serendipity_image_center width=300 height=300 style=border: 0px; padding-left: 5px; padding-right: 5px; src=http://amarok.kde.org/blog/uploads/Magnatune.comfavorites.serendipityThumb.png alt= //abr / br / Besides some basic editing (removing albums form the list) it also provides direct download links (for download members) and an option to start a flash player containing all these albums. Based on the data we now have about peoples favorites, I just pushed our latest feature live this morning. This new page provides personal recommendations based on what a member has in their list of favorites, as well as any previous downloads.br / br / a class='serendipity_image_link' href='http://amarok.kde.org/blog/uploads/Magnatune.comrecommendations.png'!-- s9ymdb:219 --img class=serendipity_image_center width=288 height=300 style=border: 0px; padding-left: 5px; padding-right: 5px; src=http://amarok.kde.org/blog/uploads/Magnatune.comrecommendations.serendipityThumb.png alt= //abr / br / As one of the main complaints that I often hear about Magnatune.com is that it is hard to discover new music based on what you already like, hopefully this will help a little. The feature is currently only available for paying members, but that might change in the future.br / br / So, that is the Magnatune.com side of things, and how, you ask does all this relate to Amarok?br / br / If we go back to the release of Amarok 2.1.0, one of the things I had been working on was something called Amarok URLs. These are basically URLs that Amarok triggers on and that can cause Amarok to do any number of different things. While their use in 2.1 was quite limited, one of the main ideas behind them was to make it possible to integrate html pages, possibly generated elsewhere, that can make Amarok perform certain actions.br / br / Using such urls, the Magnatune service in Amarok 2.2 will fully support the membership favorites and recommendations features. I could spend the next few pages describing how exactly this works from a user perspective, but I think I will just throw a video your way! img src=http://amarok.kde.org/blog/templates/default/img/emoticons/smile.png alt=:-) style=display: inline; vertical-align: bottom; class=emoticon /br / br / As always, note that this is very new code and there may be obvious bugs shown in the video. The most obvious is that it needs to be simple to get back the the Magnatune service front page, but I am working on a solution for that one.br / br / object width=425 height=344param name=movie value=http://www.youtube.com/v/z1suvKLGbJkhl=enfs=1/paramparam name=allowFullScreen value=true/paramparam name=allowscriptaccess value=always/paramembed src=http://www.youtube.com/v/z1suvKLGbJkhl=enfs=1 type=application/x-shockwave-flash allowscriptaccess=always allowfullscreen=true width=425 height=344/embed/objectbr / a href=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z1suvKLGbJkdirect link/a if aggregations breaks the embedded vid (or if you prefer to watch in higher quality)br / br / So this is what I have implemented so far. In essence it is pretty basic stuff, but it shows of what is possible when integrating online content into Amarok 2.br / br /