In my last blog entry I talked a bit about how cool it is to have such a strong lineup of services ready for the launch of Amarok 2.0.0.

Since then, something else has started happening in a big way. Scripts containing localized content has started to appear. Peter was first with his Chinese Radio Service, and then all of a sudden yesterday, things started to move fast. In quick succession we got service scripts for Radio France and Bulgarian Radio Stations and this inspired me to put together a Danish Radio Streams script that was released a few hours ago.

While each of these service scripts are very simple and have an audience that is limited by language or region, I think that together they represent a very powerful aspect of Amarok 2 as they make Amarok feel 'native' to people who do not have English as their first language. I know that personally, for me to be able to present a nice list of readily available Danish radio stations, will be a huge plus when showing Amarok 2 to friends and family who are not overly technically inclined (read: non geeks).

I hope (and fully expect) to see a virtual flood of scripts of this type, and while I an most others will each only use a few of them, I am very exited that they are appearing!

We agreed to increase our efforts on promoting KDE in China as we always do agree that KDE rocks. And we also do aware of the project’s lack of exposure in Chinese market. We need change.

We finally made several decisions on 15th Nov.

1. www.kdecn.org will be used not only for KDE China’s index page, but we will startup a brunch of new modules, like the Chinese wiki, forum, planet, and probably the Chinese version of the dot. ( I’ve explained why we need a server within mainland China instead of using the European servers. The current one is in Beijing, so it might be a bit slow for those visitors outside China. )

2. We are setting up a promotion team lead by Freeflying ( Hou Zhengpeng ), responsible for arranging meetings, doing promotion events in colleges, and managing all promotion related stuffs. nihui is responsible for the KDE China news writing and reviewing.

3. Development team will be set up to group the potential developers to involve in KDE development. The team is currently lead by me, peterzl ( ZHOU Lei ).

4. l10n/i18n team will be lead by Lie_Ex. Responsible for translation, including the KDE programs, some news and webpages.

5. The three team leaders will propose their working plans, and the KDE China community council will be formed some time in the future.

It is a great move that we actually made things happened here, and I guess a bright future is ahead. I really like to give thanks to those who are contributing. Like Qi Liang, yuanjiayj, Funda Wang, and many more people that behand the scene.

In 2003, a crack developer squad was sent to prison by a military court for a hack they didn't commit. They promptly escaped from a maximum security stockade to the Amarok Underground HQ. Today, still wanted by the government, they survive as coders of fortune.

If you have a problem, if no-one else can help, and if you can find them, maybe you can hire the AMAROK-TEAM!

With Amarok 2.0.0 rc1 right around the corner, now is a good time to reflect on where Amarok 2 comes from and where it is going. So I felt like writing a bit about the journey of the idea of "services" in Amarok 2, as that has been my main focus, even though I have managed to get my hands dirty all over the place it seems!

Just over 2 years ago, Amarok 1.4.4 was released with a cool new feature, which also happens to be my first contribution to Amarok, the integrated Magnatune.com store. ( Here is a cool page that Magnatune did to document some of the responses ). The overall response to this was quite good, and Magnatune started selling quite a few albums through Amarok, and eventually ended up hiring me, and I still work for them.

Something else started happening as well. People saw the integrated Magnatune store and started asking if there was any chance that their favorite store could get a similar integration. Most of the Amarokers agreed that this could be cool, but there were several obstacles. For one, the way the original Magnatune store required a huge amount of custom code to do simple stuff like adding tracks to the playlist ( and as many will likely know ) the metadata representation of these are not perfect. Also, The Magnatune store had its very own tab on the left side of Amarok, and it was clear that we could not just add an arbitrary number of these as we started to add more stores. Finally, the Magnatune store in the 1.4.x series of Amarok is tied very closely to the rest of Amarok, meaning that it cannot easily be removed, and that people are more or less forced to load part of this code, whether they use the store or not. Luckily for me, after a time, something big happened in Amarok-land, the 1.4.x series was put on maintenance mode and the work on Amarok 2 was started. Since I was only responsible for porting over the Magnatune store and had almost no other code in Amarok, I decided that this would be a good time to try to tackle some of the issues mentioned above, and prepare Amarok for further stores or other services to be integrated.

To make a long story short, we now, after a year and a half of work, have a framework in place that allows services to be implemented as plugins and loaded/unloaded on demand, a service browser to show them in and overall much better integration into Amarok overall, basically solving all the issues that needed to be solved before we could add more services.

My original plan was to port at least the Magnatune store to this new framework, and as the title of this post shows, when I started this work, I would be very happy to have 2 or 3 working services to show up when 2.0.0 was launched. As the image on the left shows, this is not quite what happened.

This image shows the services that are currently available, either included with Amarok 2 itself, or via download from kde-apps.org ( easily installable from within Amarok 2 using the "Get Hot New Stuff" system ). Some of these services are coded using the C++ framework, and some are scripts that run on top of the "Scriptable Service" framework, which is itself an extension of the underlying service framework. I have done a number of them myself, but more and more services are added or maintained by others. There are 13 of them. This is way more than I had ever hoped we would have available anytime soon, and really shows off the power of the framework well. Especially the scripted service framework, that lets people relatively easily add content from an online source ( although in a somewhat limited way compared to a full C++ plugin ) has received a lot of interest lately, and these scripts seem to be pouring in at the moment.

Looking at the picture of all these services, one does start to appreciate how useful it is to be able to only load the services that are interesting to you, and not having to have them all in the list all the time!

So what will the future bring? For starters, I have realized that I might need to extend the API used by service scripts a bit, since these seem to really be taking off in a big way, and requests for new features are already coming in ( and some have already been implemented ). Beyond that, I know of quite a few services that are being worked on, or are in the planing phase, both scripts and very advanced full plugins, so as with the rest of Amarok 2, this is not the end result, it is merely the beginning, and cool things will happen over the next many years, as we fully realize the potential of the new codebase!

So you would like to check out the latest Amarok 2 goodness, without messing up your system? One way to do this is by using our Neon Nightly Builds.

But if for some reason this doesn't work for you, or maybe if you are toying with the idea of contributing to Amarok, here's a simple guide that shows you how to compile and install Amarok 2 in your $HOME, without any danger of interfering with your Linux distro. You can uninstall it anytime simply by deleting the folder. Nice and easy, the way we like it!



This document explains how to install Amarok 2 from SVN in your home directory - in an easy way

If you already have Amarok installed from your distro, uninstall it to prevent setting conflicts and similar.

Install compiler and KDE 4 development packages:

In Ubuntu, Debian, and all their derivatives:

sudo aptitude install build-essential
sudo aptitude install kde-devel

In Archlinux:

sudo pacman -S base-devel kdelibs kdebase-runtime

In Gentoo:

sudo emerge kdelibs plasma-workspace

Append the following to $HOME/.bashrc:
export PATH=$HOME/kde/bin:$PATH
export KDEDIR=$HOME/kde
export KDEDIRS=$KDEDIR

Reload your edited .bashrc:
source $HOME/.bashrc

NOTE: if you are not using the bash shell, edit your proper shell config file (~/.zshrc or ~/.tcshrc or whatever it may be)

Create folders:
mkdir $HOME/kde
mkdir $HOME/kde/src
mkdir $HOME/kde/build/amarok

Check out Amarok from SVN:
cd $HOME/kde/src
svn checkout svn://anonsvn.kde.org/home/kde/trunk/extragear/multimedia/amarok

Building:
cd $HOME/kde/build/amarok
cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=$HOME/kde -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=debugfull $HOME/kde/src/amarok
make install

Updating KDE Config
kbuildsycoca4 --noincremental

Now you are ready to run Amarok 2, by typing "amarok" in the shell.


NOTE:
If you have installed MySQL Embedded in non-default location (i.e. $HOME/usr),
Amarok may fail to start with error regarding libmysqlclient library. In this
case, add the following string to your ~/.bashrc:

export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$HOME/usr/lib/mysql:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH

where $HOME/usr is the path you've used in --prefix option.


Have fun

Hey fellow developers and users,

In Juli 2007, at Akademy Glasgow I started implementing podcasting support in Amarok2. Since then I was sidetracked a little, as you may be aware.

The little time I did manage to spend designing and implementing was short and far from focused. So a lot of features are not finished or just plainly missing. The framework I created underneath suffered from the same lack of focus and is need of a good review. I'm aware there is probably some overdesign and some parts might be to complex. If you feel you can help in that area I suggest you take a look at extragear/multimedia/amarok/src/podcasts . Send questions, comments and suggestions to amarok-devel@kde.org .

The 3rd beta from Amarok 2.0 is already out the door and podcasting support is still not finished. In order to make it I had to reduce some goals I had set for myself during those rainy summer days in Scotland. Here's the plan:

Amarok 2.0:
The focus ATM is on finishing the SqlPodcastProvider, Podcastmodel and PodcastCategory (GUI).
SqlPodcastProvider uses tables in the standard SQL database, adds and updates the feeds using PodcastReader and downloads to disk using the regular KIO-jobs.
To make the podcasting fully functional though we'll need to reintroduce:

• Autoscan the feed for updates
  
• Download when available
• Episode purging (delete downloaded episodes automatically)
  

The settings dialog for this exists, next up is using them :).
The GUI currently shows all episodes ever read from the feed, which obviously needs to be addressed.
The GUI for 2.0 should be very similar, if not identical to Amarok 1.4, probably minus folder tree grouping support since that is better handled generically for all Playlists (which PodcastChannel is in our class diagram).

If anyone has a bit of Qt Model/View experience and would like to see podcasting in Amarok 2.0 I suggest you send a mail to amarok-devel@kde.org or ping me on irc (Stecchino on #amarok).
Without help we might have to drop it's from 2.0 completely because it's a bit much for me alone to complete and stabilize.

Amarok > 2.0:
I do have a plan for a complete GUI overhaul post-2.0. I'll get some art and usability advice in another blog post when the time comes.

The 2.x releases should see more advanced features being introduced that the framework is already designed to support:
For the SqlPodcastProvider specifically:

• Renaming and sorting individual episodes (popular request)
• Purging based on episode age and/or total size on disk
  
• Labeling of PodcastChannels (perhaps to replace traditional folder tree grouping)

More general

• Mediadevice Podcast support: iPod being the most advanced implementation but also generic usb devices, music phones and Canola2, I'm sure the INdT guys could help us with that.
• OPML import and export
  
• Podcast Directory personal subscription list.
• BashpodderProvider: to use bashpodder and Amarok in parallel with synchronized download status
• ...

On to hacking.

With the release of Amarok 2 growing closer and with such cool scripted services as NPR, BBC and Free Music Charts being recently released ( if you have a recent version of Amarok 2 , all of these services can be installed simply by going to the script manager, clicking the "Get More Scripts" button, and clicking install on the scripts you want ), we are starting to receive quite a few questions about how to start writing a cool service script for any number of on-line content sources.

This finally got me to take the time to do something I should have done a long time ago: start writing a guide. So, if you want to write an Amarok 2 service script, check out the scripted services tutorial on the Amarok wiki.

So, if you have a favorite website that provides freely available audio content, writing a service script is a great way to make this accessible to a large number of new users!

Most of the Amarok crew are on Twitter - it’s been said before.

But if you’re a little more excited about developments in Amarok as opposed to the lives of the developers, you should checkout the official Amarok twitterer. You’ll be able to follow announcements, updates, cool tips, links, and we might throw in a few early announcements there ;).

Earlier this summer I had noticed that National Public Radio (NPR) launched a brand new open API based on open source technologies. My initial reaction was at best skeptical. I assumed any sort of “API” released by a major media outlet would turn out to be nothing more than a few customizable RSS feeds. If the company was particularly progressive the RSS feeds might include full articles, rather than the neutered one-sentence teasers you find in all the big name’s syndicated content.

I couldn’t have been more mistaken. NPR’s API is no small potatoes. Just take a look at the comprehensive Query Generator to get an inkling of the types of complex queries you can create. Looking at the Query Generator also sheds some light on the content you can retrieve using the API. The API’s main page says the API exposes the entire NPR archive of content starting from the launch of the NPR website in 1995. Just how big is this archive? Over 250,000 stories including text, images, video, and audio!

This quote from the article announcing the API caught my eye immediately:

There were quite a few questions that we addressed when developing the API, but one thing that was not really in question was the need to open as much of our content as possible.1

This isn’t the first open media API. BBC was the first to offer a public open access API, however BBC’s API is restricted to the content from the past 7-days. Seven days! That’s nothing compared to the (approx.) 4748 days - and counting - that NPR’s API offers. NPR and the BBC are two large companies leading the technological shift towards open and free information.

But that’s only half the story.

After discovering this fantastic API I had to do something with it, and the new service architecture in Amarok 2 provided the perfect platform to build a NPR mashup. That was several months ago, and at the time the scripting API in Amarok was still being flesh out (Thanks to Peter). On Monday I noticed the BBC scriptable service Nikolaj had created for Amarok 2. I happened to have several hours of free time, so I cooked up a similar service for NPR:

You can get it at kde-apps or via the “Get More Scripts” button in Amarok 2’s Script Manager.

There is definitely room for improvement and in fact here are a few things I plan to do with it:

• Display more than 20 stories under a category
• Sort content by date
• Support searching
• Display the full articles, with images, in the context view

Major props and thanks go out to the entire NPR technical team and all the contributors who made API a reality.

1. NPR API is Live on NPR.org

Again, school keeps me busy and away from solving issues, but here's the most recent thing I've been working on.

(Yes, the dialog isn't at all final, I just put it there as a placeholder)

A few collections like the MP3Tunes service, and the local collection, are actually able to delete tracks already! They just... have no GUI to make it all happen. Devices like iPods and MTP devices can delete too, but only one track at a time (far from optimal). So I'm working to bring this ability to all collections alike. Actually getting this working isn't too hard, but making the code nice, understandable and maintainable is a bit of a trick. Luckily I've got a pretty good idea now of how I want it done.

Beta 3 is out =D but still so much left to be done on my end:
- fix MTP track playing, so that the next track properly loads/plays
- add orphaned/stale track checking for iPods
- enhance the Media Devices Applet, and add interface to root item of TreeView for connect/disconnect
- fix cover-related things on iPods (and _possibly_ implement it for MTP devices, by popoular request)

The list goes on, but that's already enough. More manpower for any of these jobs is MORE than welcome. Do apply =)

Amarok 2.0 beta 3 has been released. Check out the release announcement, digg it and get it while it’s hot! Lot’s of nice improvements, bugfixes and new stuff. This is going to be the last beta release if no major problems arise. Amarok 2.0 final is getting nearer every day \o/

Ok, I admit it, my blogging recently has been a little, hmmm, erratic? Ok, so maybe non existent is closer to the truth.

The thing is that I mostly blog about cool new stuff in Amarok, and since we have been in release mode for a while, not that many really col new features has been added. Now, I am not saying this is a bad thing, as we really needed to start focusing on getting Amarok 2 ready for release, but it does make me a much less active blogger.

So, what is someone like me, who has an urger do do something new and exiting every once in a while, todo? Well, yesterday the answer was served on a silver platter when I discovered this.

Looking at that, my first thought was "Hey, that is very cool", my second thought was "Damn, they have something that Amarok 2 does not", soon followed by "No way!"

My personal pet feature in Amarok 2 is the service framework. But there is a certain part of it that has really been growing on my, namely the qtscript interface that allows you relatively easy add a new service using small qt script. Lydia blogged about the Librivox service a little while back, which was built as a scripted service. So, a few hours after finding the BBC feed that lists the freely available content I had this up and running:



This script is now available from kde-apps.org or it can be automatically installed from within Amarok 2 by using the "Get More Scripts" button int the script manager.

I think stuff like this really nicely shows off the power of these scripted services. Just recently, Sven Krohlas, a long time rokymoter and Amarok contributor released his Free Music Charts service, and I already know of a few other cool scripted services that are under development. If this keeps up, Amarok 2 will have quite a nice selection of scripted services when it launches, and hopefully this will inspire other people with cool ideas to implement even more.

First of all, I am giving some figures which the Chinese government wants the world to know:

1. China has the most internet users (253 million) (hey, there are 1.3 billion people in China)
2. China has the most broadband users (214 million)
3. China has the most cc-TLD domain names (.cn) (12.18 million)
4. China’s internet penetration rate continues to grow (19% now)
8. Not only Beijing and Shanghai, but China has Tier II & Tier III cities (93 cities have more than 1 million population)

They are convincing, aren’t they? These facts make the Chinese IT market really attractive to everyone. But before entering the market, there are something more you need to understand, and probably you won’t.

1. Chinese loves QQ and forums
77.2% of the Chinese people uses instant messengers(40% in the States), and QQ is leading the market with 77% market share. QQ has 342 million active user accounts, 42 million peak concurrent users, 26.1 million paying internet subscribers and 13.4 million paying mobile subscribers.

63% of the Chinese uses emails and 69% uses search engines(92% and 89% in the States)

People love forums and forum like websites. The idea of wiki and twitter are too new. The internet is a toy for Chinese people instead of a tool. The big IT companies makes entertainment contents and online games, which in my opinion, should be changed!

2. The Great Firewall and CERNET

The great firewall is a censorship and surveillance project. Not only some political contents are banned, but websites like sourceforge, wikipedia, flickr, github, feedburner and etc. are all banned from time to time. Flickr and wikipedia(non political content) are free to visit now, sourceforge was removed from the blacklist during the Olympics(was blocked again the day before yesterday), but github is recently blocked. The firewall’s behavier is very hard to predict. It blocked several of my friend’s blog on livespace(just technical blogs), and as I mentioned before, it blocks sites without any reason. YouTube, part of google.com can be in the blacklist at any time! Don’t ask me why, who knows!

Every public site needs to get an approval. You need to provide your personal info to the government in order to run the web(and even if you just want to buy a virtual space for wordpress). And if you want to run a forum, a 24 hour emergency phone call number is needed, thus they can ask you to delete any post at anytime…

OK, we would like to have a Chinese KDE forum since Chinese regards forums and instant messengers as the most important things. Why wouldn’t we run it outside China?

There are only two backbones in China, one in Shanghai and one in Beijing. The infrastructure quality inside China is good. I can get 250KB/s downstream rate in Shanghai, but the speed can be terrible if I want to connect to the servers outside China(1KB/s-10KB/s). The high school and university students use CERNET.  The speed within CERNET is around 1M/s-10M/s but the speed is unacceptable to outside China(<1KB/s?). Some university have only the local network connection in default, and you need to pay for the connection outside China. It is not special, and this is the case in Peking University, the best one in China. You can find any free movies, free musics and software copies within CERNET. Copyright? ah…

Things can be changed, and it is changing. We have many students using and developing free software. The situation in China is not hopeless. Many people use proxies to avoid censorship. That is why we’d like to have a forum and website of KDE for the Chinese people, and the server must be within China.

The government is not fighting with the free software communities. They just have no idea what free software is. We are making efforts here to spread the idea and motivate the people. And we need support.

Reference: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/china-ten-things-you-should-know-about-an-online-superpower

If you’ve got a mailing list dedicated only to bugzilla traffic, you might find these rules useful to filter out any spam. Since the Subject field of these lists are so rigid, we can obviously tell which emails are spam.

Use the following rules in your mailman config:

Rule 1: Discard any emails flagged as spam

matches? ^X-Spam-Flag: YES action: discard

Rule 2: Accept any emails which fit our [BUG 1234..] subject header

matches? ^Subject:.*\[[bB][uU][gG]\s\d*\].* action: accept

Rule 3: Discard or hold the rest, they’re probably spam!

matches? ^Subject: * action: {hold,discard}

Ever since I switched to the dark side and bought a macbook pro this spring, I've had slight trouble developing (and using) Amarok 2 and KDE4. Imagine my frustration as I spent a week cycling through all possible permutations of {VirtualBox, Fusion, Parallels} and {Ubuntu, OpenSuse, Mandriva} trying to get a development environment that didn't make my eyes bleed (or my computer choke).

Anyway, after approximately 7 months, I have been able to finally use Amarok as it was meant to be used: native on OS X!

How did I do this, you ask?

The KDE Mac Site

However, if you want to be able to build a collection (as I have in the screenshot above), you'll need to compile/install mysql manually (following instructions for MySqlE). But just out of the box, I got perfect audio, low CPU/memory usage.. and in general awesomeness.

In other news, I have locally switched Amarok from using our old last.fm code to a brand new snapshot that will provide much more long-term stability. This should resolve the various last.fm bugs that have been around the Amarok code for quite a while. and you can see the result here:


Finally, if you are still wondering what other crazy stuff you can do with amarok, look no further:


let me give my huge thanks to our very own illogic-al, who has dedicated more brain cells to packaging amarok/kde on os x than i would like to count, and who is officially awesome.

Amarok 2 is really gearing up to become a great piece of software. We are all are frantically trying to find any time we can steal from our busy schedules of work, study, and good-times to put some of that extra special attention to detail and polish on the application.

This week I finalised the third revision of an importer tool to recover your beloved statistics, scores, ratings, lyrics and album art from an Amarok 1.4 installation. After a rather draining and involved process starting off with Ruby, moving to QtScript (javascript) I finally cut my losses and have implemented an extendible framework directly in the application with c++. You’ll be able to retrieve your stats from any of sqlite, mysql or psql database backends. Throw in a wizard, some multi-threaded goodness and an output logger, and we’ve got a snazzy new tool for your convenience.

I put a bit of extra effort in on the side to make sure that the tool won’t go to the land of bit heaven after the release of Amarok 2.0, and incorporated a pretty nifty infrastructure to allow implementations of arbitrary importers. I’m thinking iTunes, Rhythmbox, Banshee, WMP, Winamp et al. If you’re looking for easy entry into KDE development ask me how to write an importer.

There have also been a plethora of other significant updates to Amarok, such as:

• Totally reworked play list subsystems which respects groupings, dragging, extended selections, viewport updates, styles.
• The status bar, it works!
• Locale aware sorting in the collection browser. No more unintuitive placement of your Åwesome ḿusic ṱitles.
• More reliable lyrics retrievals.
• Snazzy new icons.

Stay tuned for Amarok 2 beta 3 which we’ll have out in the wild very shortly.

So, it will be Halloween soon, and what better way to celebrate than with a nice Jack-o'-lantern?

Oh, I think I have the answer to that: A nice Amarok styled pumpkin carving!



Pumpkin carving awesomness by linkmaster03

I went to Beijing last weekend for the three-days GNOME Asia event. I was there not only for promoting KDE, but also to promote open source concept in mainland China.
Open source communities in mainland China are not as active as the European communities, neither GNOME nor KDE has a very good growing environment there. I’d rather regard it as an open source in general event in mainland China instead of a GNOME Asia summit.

Around 300 attenders went to the talks and BoFs, about 90% of them were local Chinese. There were employees from SUN, Novel, Nokia, Motorola, Redhat, and some Chinese local companies. There were students and opensource community members, and most of them were using open source operating systems. Although there are half of the talks and BoFs were introducing pure open source concept, histories and current situations, it is rather understandable that Asia people, especially mainland Chinese need this kind of education. As I introduced the scripting concept in Plasma and Amarok, there were also speakers focused on development and improvement of the current projects. About 30% of the speeches related to GNOME applications. ( the schedule is here: http://www.gnome.asia/en/schedule/ )

When talking about GNOME, many KDE guys may regard it slow and ugly, but I still enjoyed sharing ideas and different perspectives with the GNOME developers. KDE and GNOME are not really competing with each other. We learn from each other, and we fight for freedom together, especially now in China.

Freeflying and I talked about we would probably hold KDE Asia or KDE Asia Pacific some time appropriate in the future. We would learn from the failure and successful experience from GNOME Asia community and we should introduce the beauty of KDE to the Asia users definitely.

I found the “western developers” or the “far east users” actually didn’t communicate well, I will write more English blogs for the KDE guys to introduce the situation in Asia as I wrote many Chinese blogs to promote KDE. I’d like to share my point of view from the perspective of a local Chinese KDE developer.

Here are some photos token by the volunteers during the two-days-event, and token by me for the last day Beijing trip.

Booth area with people

From GNOME Asia 2008, Beijing

Firefox and Sun in the booth area

From GNOME Asia 2008, Beijing

Talks in a small conference room

From GNOME Asia 2008, Beijing

The conference rooms were awesome. And from the European standard, you cannot imagine how cheap they cost.

From GNOME Asia 2008, Beijing

Stormy Peters in her talk

From GNOME Asia 2008, Beijing

Kate was promoting Maemo ( hey guys, n810s )

From GNOME Asia 2008, Beijing

I was promoting KDE, HAHA.

From GNOME Asia 2008, Beijing

One day trip in Beijing

From GNOME Asia 2008, Beijing

Some time ago I wrote about the LibriVox script in Amarok. It has been ported now and works like a charm.
For those who don’t know how the script came to be: Hanno Svoboda reported a bug on bugs.kde.org saying that he would like to have LibriVox integrated in Amarok. We asked if there is a nice API we can use and Hanno got in touch with the LibriVox developers to find out. After some emails and chats everything we needed was provided and Nikolaj sat down to code the script for the service in a very short time and it is now one of our nicest scripted services. All of this was just a matter of a few days and getting the right people to work together.
Hanno has been so kind to do a short video. Please enjoy and thanks to Hanno for the video and for bringing this wonderful service to our attention in the first place.

This should show you two things:
1) Is is really easy to integrate a service into Amarok 2.
2) If you have great ideas and help us realize them amazing things can happen.