Seb Ruiz

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 ;).

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}

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.

You may have already noticed, that we have released Amarok 2, beta 2. This is a very exciting release for us as we have put an incredible amount of effort into features and bug fixes. This release pushes most of the significant work which was discussed or achieved during Akademy, such as changes to the Amarok core which will bring significant stability improvements and improved user experience.

We’ve made a rather large change with the removal of SQLite as our database backend, opting instead for the MySQL-embedded platform. As I know that many users might not be able to rationalise this change, allow me to explain. MySQL-embedded provides users with the performance boost of a standalone server without actually needing to run the server and without needing to bother with the rather complex procedures of intialising a database, users and permissions. It was also important for us to only support one database backend as we were constantly plagued with problems across different databases. Using MySQL-embedded will thus make it very easy for us to support standalone MySQL servers (in the future) for those that already have these services running, or may want to share databases over a network.

Notable mentions include improved scripting support, the return of lyric fetching and incremental scanner support. It’s important to remember that Amarok 2.0 will not be at feature parity with 1.4 as most of the code base has been rewritten. Many of the features that are not present have simply not been reimplemented due to lack of developer time, or we are unable to complete due to current technical limitations (such as equalisers, visualisations, replay gain).

We hope you enjoy this release.

A quick service announcement:

The Amarok project has started it’s annual fundraiser campaign Roktober. We’re hoping to raise a staggering €10,000 - for server costs, developer hardware, travel costs, expo and trade show exhibitions, developer meetings.

For every €10 you donate, you’ll go into a draw to win an iaudio7. This year we have two grand prizes and we will also give t-shirts to 4 second chance winners.

Also, please digg it.
digg_url = 'http://digg.com/linux_unix/Support_Amarok_during_Roktober_2008';

I do believe that my recommendations very much match the mainstream of the opinions of the key people in Linux multimedia and desktop audio. Of course I don’t nearly know everyone of the key hackers in Linux multimedia. But I do know most of those who are actively interested in collaboration, whose projects have a lot mindshare and who attend the conferences that matter for Linux desktop audio.

Lennart forgets that Amarok is definitely a contender for the most popular music player on desktop Linux today. It possibly has the most mindshare of any Linux music player project. Remember that a long time ago, Amarok supported aRts, xine, GStreamer and helix. Now we can take advantage of not needing to care about a specific implementation for an audio output device by using Phonon.

Lennart again:

“Use GStreamer! (Unless your focus is only KDE in which cases Phonon might be an alternative.)”

This implies that a developer should only use Phonon if and only if the developer is targeting a KDE application. Frankly, this reasoning is not very well formed and is shameful. Perhaps what Lennart meant to say belongs along the lines of “Developers using the KDE development libraries might want to use Phonon”.

Amarok is a perfect example of an application which uses the KDE development libraries, but is not tied into the KDE plasma workspace. A grand portion of GNOME users pro actively install Amarok on their system because it is their preferred application for listening to music. Time to pick up the slack and get with the times.