Amarok

Heya everyone, as the Amarok news feed from my blog will be aggregated into Planet Amarok soon I think it's the time to introduce myself. Well, my name is Sven Krohlas, university student from Karlsruhe, Germany, and also an active Rokymoter since ... [More] the beginning. We might have met at some expo. ;-) Currently GSoC now gives me the chance to also dive deeper into the holy Amarok sources. I'll explain my project and the current status in a seperate blog post later today. Apart from that I do web radio shows at Darkerradio.com. The most interesting one for readers of this blog might be the "Free Music Charts", a monthly web radio charts show, where only open music is allowed to take part. Check it out on the website or directly in Amarok. You can select up to five songs to vote for the next month's charts. [Less]

Hello again. In my introductory post I declared that I would post regular status updates about my Summer of Code work on Amarok’s playlist - and of course I’m already slacking off. I started researching and coding towards the end of april so I have ... [More] almost a month of work to report now. Unfortunately there are no pretty pictures this time because all the work has been under the hood so far. As Amarok’s playlist uses a model-view paradigm, I have added a new proxy model between the filter proxy and the grouping proxy, so at the moment Amarok’s playlist view displays data that passes through a stack of four models (1 source model + 3 proxy models). GUI work will begin a bit later, at the moment the interface is just a combo box and a button that says “Sort!” which I use for testing. So what does it actually do right now? The good news is that multilevel sorting of the playlist kind of works: the user just has to hardcode a multilevel sorting scheme or select one of the available schemes from the combo box, click “Sort!” and the magic happens. Basically, the sorting scheme gets translated into a QList that maps all the source indexes to an ordered n-tuple, this QList is then used as a lookup table. The bad news is that sometimes the magic spell goes terribly wrong, as I still have to handle the consistency of the  map when the playlist is already sorted and the user adds, moves or removes some tracks. All the time I put into studying algorithms at the university has finally paid off big time, and I’m being very careful about the efficiency of the code - in the present state the sort proxy stuff might crash Amarok from time to time, but at least when it works it’s quite fast All this and hopefully much more should land in trunk some time after Amarok 2.1.1 gets released. [Less]

I feel like I should blog about something but have nothing particularly compelling to say. As that's never stopped me before, and for no other reason than it's the end of the month and my sidebar tell me I have no entries for May, I'll do it anyway. ... [More] Time to retreat to the good ol' standard then: Bitch, bitch, moan. You were warned. First off KDE/Mac stuff. Benjy's back! Yaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay. That means I can have KDE ports languish in the Macports repo and not feel guilty about it. Not that I would but you get the idea. So yes, for the three of you using macports, I have seem them and am actively ignoring them. Well, not really. The problem is that since someone decided to remove the 4.2.0 tarballs, Macports downloads html 404 pages in their place. The suggested solution of using 4.2.2 tarballs was tried but then I couldn't get kdelibs to compile on my machine. It is entirely possible that there is something wrong with my build env setup. Again. But since Amarok works now I'm not touching thing until absolutely necessary. The rest of you suffer. }:-) Speaking of Amarok I finally figured out how to get qtscriptgenerator to build AND install properly. Hint #1: $QTDIR needs to be set. Hint #2 installing is really you manually copying the necessary files to the correct location. The mighty qmake isn't capable of doing this for you apparently, but enough snide comments. That was my first problem with creating a qtscriptgenerator Portfile. The other stems from the number of Qt4 ports available. There are currently three (eventually just two) versions of Qt4 in macports (I'm responsible for the new ones). I wanted qtscriptgenerator to install to the correct one depending on which was activated (installed and being used in macports speak). Eventually I decided to set a variable in the kde4 portgroup that says which Qt to use, and have qtscriptgenerator use that. The first part is complete in my local macports checkout but the qtscriptgenerator Portfile has yet to surface. I suppose I'll get to it once I figure out how to set environment variables in macports (and thus be able to set $QTDIR). Anyways, qtscriptgenerator can't just be copied to one directory, it has to depend on the version of Qt4 available at install time. The problem this poses is that if someone switches to another version of Qt (e.g. me testing out qt-kinetic integrated build, or me testing out a qt-copy version) then I want my amarok to still work, which won't happen with the current disable/enable ports setup. I'll probably change my qt4-kde port to use the same directories as the normal qt4 port. This would prevent both from being active at the same time but simplify my life. Need to talk to the other qt4 maintainer before I do that though. As for actually fixing exisiting issues in Macports in a timely manner, don't expect much from me. School ends sometime in June (yeah, I'm there again) and until that happens I'm doing nothing more than dedicating a few hours each weekend to getting things I'm interested in working. Which brings us to my net topic! Guess I did have things to say after all. I went and bought a new HD for the lappy and now have a Tiger partition again. Unfortunately universal compilation on 10.4 with Macports is broken. After undoing the change which led to this things were fine; until I tried to compile db46 (for subversion). And that's where that little adventure ended. In slightly related news, the apple-gcc42-devel portfile compiles on 10.4. Eventually I'll be able to see if it compiles stuff too :-) Second off, as I've alluded to I'm back in school again. I applied to the Master's program here and was accepted. I was kinda scared I wouldn't be able to pull off working full time and going to school full time. It turned out to not be so hard once I just ditched all the computer stuff. No more MLs or IRC, except for some exceptions. My withdrawal will only become more pronounced as I get further into the program as I'd like to be done in a year. Boon for some of you, bane for others.Oh well. Summer is coming which will free up some time to look into some issues above. I'm not particularly compelled to update all those portfiles again only to have them disappear from the mirror when 4.3.0 comes out though. They may just languish until 4.3.0 is released. I may even be able to help M. Arthur with the "Great CPackaging" which I'd myself promised months before. [Less]

Many users have been asking us lately for updated builds of Amarok 2.1 for Windows. Here's some good news for you folks! Thanks to our tireless KDE-Windows crew (Patrick Spendrin and others) you can now get nightly builds for Windows right here: ... [More] http://mafia-server.net/amarok-nightly Apparently these builds are pretty solid. Quoting a user from our forum: "Wow the nightly build version is way different. After using it for some days I can say that it seems to be much more stable than 2.0.1. Good job." So, give it a try [Less]

/me is looking for roommate during Akademy from 3rd to 12th July. Or if someone is willing to sleep on the street with me, feel free to call me brother!

Yesterdays blog entry about a prototype QDockWidget based Amarok 2 interface got a nearly overwhelming amount of positive feedback. So let me start out by saying thank you to everyone who commented. It did make us think about some things though. ... [More] Since the vast majority of comments would very much like to see this feature included in Amarok, you guys must have some kind of idea what you would actually use this flexibility for, and what kind of layout you want to create. So today we are going to try to do a little experiment based on all this feedback. What we would greatly appreciate is if you would do a small simple mockup of what kind of layout you think you would create using this feature and post it to imagebin.ca or somewhere similar and then link it in the comments below, if possible with a very short description text. We are not talking about spending hours in the Gimp making a pretty picture, a simple pencil-on-the-back-of-a-napkin type sketch will do just fine. All it should show is how you would, based only on the possibilities show in the video, arrange the main interface elements, which ones would be placed where, hidden completely, or stacked together using tabs. A very important note is that this is not a free form chance to dream up an entirely new interface, but only about what you would change if this new feature became available. To keep things simple, please post each new mockup as a separate top level reply. We know that the results of this will be quite biased, as what seems like a really good layout in theory might not work when you actually try it out in the real world. So ideally this experiment should really be done after this feature has made it into Amarok, but since there is currently no timeline for that, we are going to do this as best we can anyway! The really interesting thing to see here is whether everyone has their own personal ideas about what would be a good interface layout, or if many of the suggestions gravitate towards something similar. If we get enough feedback on this, we will follow up later with another blog post about the result and any lessons learned. If any of you needs to revisit the video, here is the direct link. [Less]

A long time ago I promised to post an update when I got incremental batch scanning working.  Well, as it turns out, that happened a long time ago too, but I never got around to writing the Wiki page for it.  I've corrected that flaw.Anyone ... [More] interested in scanning their collection locally instead of across a network connection, or keeping their collection up-to-date when Amarok is closed, should definitely give it a read!http://amarok.kde.org/wiki/Batch_Mode Continue reading "Amarok Power User Feature: Batch-mode collection scanning (Redux)" [Less]

Two weeks have passed since I announced round 2 and I am very happy with the result. The Amarok page improved a lot and is ready for the release of Amarok 2.1. Many thanks go to Karthikp, the winner of round 2! Awesome work! You definitely get a beer ... [More] when we meet. So who is next? Plasma! A few days ago the Plasma page on UserBase was a sorry little copy of the Plasma FAQ. Einar moved the FAQ already and was kind enough to start the new Plasma page. Now it needs more people to fill the missing spots. This is where you come in! Go to UserBase, get an account (non-OpenID login now possible as well thanks to danimo \o/) and start on either the main Plasma page or updating the FAQ where needed. This is a good way to get started with contributing to KDE and at the same time helping fellow users. As in previous rounds a beer (or similar drink of your choosing) is waiting for the winner at Akademy or another event. If you have questions please join us on IRC in #plasma on freenode. I will announce the winner in 2 weeks as well as the next project to get some love. Which one would you like to work on next? blue, originally uploaded by imago. [Less]

You might know that Akademy 2009 is going to be held in the Canary Islands in July. It’s going to be fantastic and fun and hot and warm and we’ll be absolutely spending time at the beach rather than listening to some technical mumbo jumbo. But I have ... [More] to say - it must be one of the most ill conceived locations to put a conference. It’s far from the US. It’s relatively far from Europe, and it’s fucking far from Australia. The only people that will have a short trip will be those in Western Sahara. My tentative flight route is ridiculous - via Singapore, Milan and Madrid. That’s 3 stop overs. 38 hours of travel time. Plotting straight lines from stop to stop puts the trip at a whopping 19514.39km. Just so you know just how far this is: it is 32% of the radius around Saturn. I’m not even going to tell you the cost. [Less]

Seeing how Leo refuses to give up in our little "battle of the blogs", blogging cool new feature after cool new feature, its time for me to fire the next salvo Disclaimer 1: What I am going to show you here is a personal prototype, made to ... [More] facilitate discussions. It is currently not planned for inclusion in any version of Amarok. In fact there is no guarantee it ever will appear in a released version as it is quite a controversial topic among the Developers. Disclaimer 2: The observant among you will notice many small bugs and glitches in the video, such as album covers in the playlist doing weird things, double borders around some elements and likely many others. This is par for the course when creating a quick prototype like this... That being said, I would really like to hear the opinions of the wider community on this one, so let me know what you think: Want? Don't Want? Wonderful? Horrible? ... Or should I just try to get some more sleep instead of hacking up all this crazy stuff? Now for the actual video. Due to its rather large size, this one is hosted on youtube to avoid killing our server: And here is a direct link (which also gives you the video in better quality) in case syndications kills the embedded video. [Less]