Amarok

Outreach Program For Women Logo. CC-BY-SA - artists: Máirín Duffy, Liansu Yu, Hylke Bons   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 ... [More] 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. [Less]

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 ... [More] 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! Keep up the good work, folks [Less]

It was a very busy End of Year again: Amarok 2.7 is out! While the code-name “A Minor Tune” would suggest it to be an average release, it is in fact one of the most polished we ever did. 473 bugs closed, 17 feature requests granted and not less than ... [More] 100 commits that fixed bugs directly. Rock On! We also ship a fully updated handbook for this version, with new screenshots. For that we had some help from the Google Code-In students who helped updating the handbook. Amarok also moved it’s wikis to the KDE infrastructure with the help of several students, you can now find the Amarok wiki at http://community.kde.org/Amarok Google Code-In also saw several students doing some quality work for Amarok, testing the 2.7 beta release as well as with the current git source, and updating the testing instructions on the wiki while doing so. A new Team page also has seen the light thanks to Code-In work: http://amarok.kde.org/en/team Over all: great work from the Amarok Team and the Google Code-In students, thank you! PS: the color theme is ‘Evening Lilac’   [Less]

A New Year, a new Amarok! The Amarok Team is proud to present the new Amarok 2.7, codenamed "A Minor Tune". This version comes with the following brand new major features, developed during last year's Google Summer of Code: Preliminary version of ... [More] the Nepomuk Collection plug-in Statistics Synchronization between collections and with Last.fm While originally scheduled before the end of 2012, our code monkeys started to enjoy fixing bugs much more during the holiday period, so we gave them a few weeks more to let them shine. It turned out great: The File Browser's behavior and appearance was greatly improved Audio CD playback was resurrected (at least with recent phonon-gstreamer) We haven't been lazy even before this, as this release also comes with an impressive amount of other bug fixes: a total of over 470 bugs were closed since the 2.6 release, of which exactly 100 are direct bug fixes (with a commit link). Over 15 feature requests were granted directly or indirectly as well. We are also proud to ship a completely updated handbook, with updated screenshots and help pages for the new features. In this context our thanks goes to the Google Code-In students who helped in updating the handbook. Several Code-In students also helped to test Amarok extensively, both with the 2.7 beta1 release and the development version. The students also helped in moving two old wiki instances to a new server, verifying articles were currently relevant with working links. In total, 10 students worked on a total of 47 tasks for Amarok: great work indeed! - See full article for download options Weiterlesen [Less]

A New Year, a new Amarok! The Amarok Team is proud to present the new Amarok 2.7, codenamed "A Minor Tune". This version comes with the following brand new major features, developed during last year's Google Summer of Code: Preliminary version of ... [More] the Nepomuk Collection plug-in Statistics Synchronization between collections and with Last.fm While originally scheduled before the end of 2012, our code monkeys started to enjoy fixing bugs much more during the holiday period, so we gave them a few weeks more to let them shine. It turned out great: The File Browser's behavior and appearance was greatly improved Audio CD playback was resurrected (at least with recent phonon-gstreamer) We haven't been lazy even before this, as this release also comes with an impressive amount of other bug fixes: a total of over 470 bugs were closed since the 2.6 release, of which exactly 100 are direct bug fixes (with a commit link). Over 15 feature requests were granted directly or indirectly as well. We are also proud to ship a completely updated handbook, with updated screenshots and help pages for the new features. In this context our thanks goes to the Google Code-In students who helped in updating the handbook. Several Code-In students also helped to test Amarok extensively, both with the 2.7 beta1 release and the development version. The students also helped in moving two old wiki instances to a new server, verifying articles were currently relevant with working links. In total, 10 students worked on a total of 47 tasks for Amarok: great work indeed! - See full article for download options Weiterlesen [Less]

In case you don't know it yet, we've just released Amarok 2.7! This release is called A Minor Tune, partially because the list of new features isn't pages-long (but you still get statistics synchronization and preliminary Nepomuk integration). But I ... [More] believe it will be remembered for its level of polish and stability - many components like audio CD playback and file browser have been made much more solid, and the number of user-reported problems that were closed since 2.6 approaches stunning 500.On the other hand, due to the lack of manpower there are still components that deserve much more love than they currently get. One such example is the MTP player plug-in, but don't fear, we (or I) have plans with it. Contributions in any form (patches being best) are of course more than welcome. [Less]

The Amarok Team is happy to present you the Amarok 2.7 Beta release. Please test as much as possible so that the final release, scheduled just before Christmas, can be as bug-free as possible. This version comes with the following brand new major ... [More] features: Preliminary version of the Nepomuk Collection plug-in Statistics Synchronization between collections and with Last.fm Another thing to test is the partial rework of Last.fm support and its configuration, which should fix several bugs. We also aim to have as many translations possible, so if you are a translator, please get in touch with your KDE localization team and offer your help! Good news is the readdition of the French translation. A full changelog will be published with the final release. See full article for download options Weiterlesen [Less]

The Amarok Team is happy to present you the Amarok 2.7 Beta release. Please test as much as possible so that the final release, scheduled just before Christmas, can be as bug-free as possible. This version comes with the following brand new major ... [More] features: Preliminary version of the Nepomuk Collection plug-in Statistics Synchronization between collections and with Last.fm Another thing to test is the partial rework of Last.fm support and its configuration, which should fix several bugs. We also aim to have as many translations possible, so if you are a translator, please get in touch with your KDE localization team and offer your help! Good news is the readdition of the French translation. A full changelog will be published with the final release. See full article for download options Weiterlesen [Less]

Heya, Amarok 2.7 Beta is slated to be released in any day now, one of the features it brings is Statistics Synchronization, a result of my GSoC project. Here's a short guide to get the best from it.Unattended SynchronizationGetting started is utterly ... [More] simple, just answer Yes to the above question that pops up when you connect a capable media player (currently just iPods) and you're done! Amarok will work hard in the background from that point to make sure your ratings, first/last played times, play counts and labels are synchronized between all participating collections (Local Collection is included by default) and won't disturb you unless there's a conflict. If you have Last.fm plugin configured, tracks recently played on your iDevice will be automatically scrobbled to Last.fm as part of the synchronization.Conflicts & Synchronize Statistics DialogWhen you for example change a song rating simultaneously in Amarok and on your iPod, Amarok doesn't know what rating it should use. In this case, the last step of the synchronization is made interactive: a dialog with synchronization preview shows up. On top, you can see a few tabs:Matched Tracks: the essential tab where the tracks that Amarok found to be in more than one of your Collections are grouped together. You can tell which tracks and fields are going to be updated using the background: light green above means a new/updated field and light red means an old/overwritten one. In case of rating or label conflict you can resolve it using the check boxes. Conflicts can also be resolved in batch using the buttons below the list, which affect all applicable tracks, not just the shown ones. You don't need to resolve all conflicts, the particular field of the particular tracks won't be synchronized.Unique Tracks: a list of tracks found just in one collection. You can use this as a some kind of a difference view of your collections. This tab supports track dragging.Excluded Tracks: sometimes a track matching is ambiguous. This can happen for example when you have 2 tracks with identical meta-data in your collection. Such tracks are excluded from synchronization in order not to cause disorder.Manual Syncing & Last.fmAt any time, you can start the synchronization manually from Amarok Tools menu using the Synchronize Statistics... entry. You can override what collections and fields to synchronize in this case. If you have Last.fm plugin enabled and configured, you can also choose to synchronize your play count and labels with Last.fm; unattended synchronization with Last.fm is not possible, because that would put too much stress on their servers. Also please note that track matching when Last.fm is selected can be very time-consuming (one hour is not unusual), but you can use Amarok freely while this happens.Synchronizing with Last.fm is a bit tricky, because by default it auto-corrects some common misspellings during scrobbling. So it can happen that even if you scrobble many track plays, it doesn't show up in Matched Tracks because Last.fm knows it under a slightly different name. Fortunately you can opt-out from auto-correction on Last.fm site and the change is applied also to your past scrobbles, both options have some downsides though:auto-correct off: your tracks are matched properly, but if you change your tags after some time (because of an actual typo for example), your play-count on Last.fm site will be split into 2 entries.auto-correct on: can track play counts even if you correct the tags over time, but you have to use Last.fm's preferred spelling or your track's won't match. ConfigurationYou can configure all aspects of statistics synchronization in a new Amarok Configuration tab named Metadata. Apart from configuring which collections should be synchronized automatically you can decide what fields you want to synchronize and edit a list of labels excluded from synchronization (useful if don't what some of your Amarok labels to appear on your Last.fm profile).Technical RemarksCurious what the internal algorithms and principles of the synchronization are? Here you go:Tracks are matched using their meta-data case insensitively. The framework itself and both iPod and Local Amarok collections can match using: title, artist, album, composer, year, track number, disc number. Last.fm can only match using title, artist and album. Common subset of matching fields of selected collections is used. That's why you can get tracks excluded from synchronization due to ambiguity when you include Last.fm in syncing.Local Collection can synchronize everything.iPod Collection can synchronize everything except labels, although and iPod won't update first played time by itself.Last.fm can read play count, labels and rating (see below) and it can write labels and rating; play count is updated by means of scrobbling. In theory, first/last played time should be available too, but their API doesn't export it currently in a efficient way.Last.fm rating is implemented using special tags like 4 of 10 stars. You can opt-out from using these, then Amarok will ignore this kind of tags.Conservative reduction functions are used for synchronization of individual fields, for example minimum-of is employed for first played time and maximum-of for last played time. Play count uses maximum-of + special case for iPods that can report recent play count so that you don't miss anything even if you play a track simultaneously on an iPod and Amarok. TipsUse Last.fm synchronization as a back-up of your precious Amarok data!Use Last.fm synchronization as a tool to synchronize your listening data from multiple places!New! Use inter-collection synchronization and the new Nepomuk Collection to keep your Amarok ratings in sync with your Nepomuk (i.e. shown in Dolphin) ones. Nepomuk collection should be able to handle more fields in future.Test it!I've worked on this and tested it myself for a rather long time, but there will be for sure some bugs that got through. Please test this in Amarok 2.7 Beta or current git and report any bugs you find so that I have a chance to fix them for Amarok 2.7 final. Thanks and have fun! [Less]

Heya, Amarok 2.7 Beta is slated to be released in any day now, one of the features it brings is Statistics Synchronization, a result of my GSoC project. Here's a short guide to get the best from it.Unattended SynchronizationGetting started is utterly ... [More] simple, just answer Yes to the above question that pops up when you connect a capable media player (currently just iPods) and you're done! Amarok will work hard in the background from that point to make sure your ratings, first/last played times, play counts and labels are synchronized between all participating collections (Local Collection is included by default) and won't disturb you unless there's a conflict. If you have Last.fm plugin configured, tracks recently played on your iDevice will be automatically scrobbled to Last.fm as part of the synchronization.Conflicts & Synchronize Statistics DialogWhen you for example change a song rating simultaneously in Amarok and on your iPod, Amarok doesn't know what rating it should use. In this case, the last step of the synchronization is made interactive: a dialog with synchronization preview shows up. On top, you can see a few tabs:Matched Tracks: the essential tab where the tracks that Amarok found to be in more than one of your Collections are grouped together. You can tell which tracks and fields are going to be updated using the background: light green above means a new/updated field and light red means an old/overwritten one. In case of rating or label conflict you can resolve it using the check boxes. Conflicts can also be resolved in batch using the buttons below the list, which affect all applicable tracks, not just the shown ones. You don't need to resolve all conflicts, the particular field of the particular tracks won't be synchronized.Unique Tracks: a list of tracks found just in one collection. You can use this as a some kind of a difference view of your collections. This tab supports track dragging.Excluded Tracks: sometimes a track matching is ambiguous. This can happen for example when you have 2 tracks with identical meta-data in your collection. Such tracks are excluded from synchronization in order not to cause disorder.Manual Syncing & Last.fmAt any time, you can start the synchronization manually from Amarok Tools menu using the Synchronize Statistics... entry. You can override what collections and fields to synchronize in this case. If you have Last.fm plugin enabled and configured, you can also choose to synchronize your play count and labels with Last.fm; unattended synchronization with Last.fm is not possible, because that would put too much stress on their servers. Also please note that track matching when Last.fm is selected can be very time-consuming (one hour is not unusual), but you can use Amarok freely while this happens.Synchronizing with Last.fm is a bit tricky, because by default it auto-corrects some common misspellings during scrobbling. So it can happen that even if you scrobble many track plays, it doesn't show up in Matched Tracks because Last.fm knows it under a slightly different name. Fortunately you can opt-out from auto-correction on Last.fm site and the change is applied also to your past scrobbles, both options have some downsides though:auto-correct off: your tracks are matched properly, but if you change your tags after some time (because of an actual typo for example), your play-count on Last.fm site will be split into 2 entries.auto-correct on: can track play counts even if you correct the tags over time, but you have to use Last.fm's preferred spelling or your track's won't match. ConfigurationYou can configure all aspects of statistics synchronization in a new Amarok Configuration tab named Metadata. Apart from configuring which collections should be synchronized automatically you can decide what fields you want to synchronize and edit a list of labels excluded from synchronization (useful if don't what some of your Amarok labels to appear on your Last.fm profile).Technical RemarksCurious what the internal algorithms and principles of the synchronization are? Here you go:Tracks are matched using their meta-data case insensitively. The framework itself and both iPod and Local Amarok collections can match using: title, artist, album, composer, year, track number, disc number. Last.fm can only match using title, artist and album. Common subset of matching fields of selected collections is used. That's why you can get tracks excluded from synchronization due to ambiguity when you include Last.fm in syncing.Local Collection can synchronize everything.iPod Collection can synchronize everything except labels, although and iPod won't update first played time by itself.Last.fm can read play count, labels and rating (see below) and it can write labels and rating; play count is updated by means of scrobbling. In theory, first/last played time should be available too, but their API doesn't export it currently in a efficient way.Last.fm rating is implemented using special tags like 4 of 10 stars. You can opt-out from using these, then Amarok will ignore this kind of tags.Conservative reduction functions are used for synchronization of individual fields, for example minimum-of is employed for first played time and maximum-of for last played time. Play count uses maximum-of + special case for iPods that can report recent play count so that you don't miss anything even if you play a track simultaneously on an iPod and Amarok. TipsUse Last.fm synchronization as a back-up of your precious Amarok data!Use Last.fm synchronization as a tool to synchronize your listening data from multiple places!New! Use inter-collection synchronization and the new Nepomuk Collection to keep your Amarok ratings in sync with your Nepomuk (i.e. shown in Dolphin) ones. Nepomuk collection should be able to handle more fields in future.Test it!I've worked on this and tested it myself for a rather long time, but there will be for sure some bugs that got through. Please test this in Amarok 2.7 Beta or current git and report any bugs you find so that I have a chance to fix them for Amarok 2.7 final. Thanks and have fun! [Less]