The best ideas are common property.

Live from Randa (timeshifted ;) )

2011-06-10T10:20:00.008+02:00

Here is what was^W currently is^W^W we are^W^W. I give up, can fool anyone that I actually blogged about real work from Randa. But I did blog about foosball!

So in the aftermath of the Multimedia sprint I finished up a few branches I started working on in the Swiss Alps:

Drag and drop tracks to any Collection

Commit

While copying tracks was already possible using the context menu we've made it a lot more intuitive with drag and drop support. And as a free bonus drag and drop from The Playlist is also working now.

While this feature is not specifically meant to fix iPod support, it might earn us some cash: http://mail.kde.org/pipermail/amarok-devel/2011-May/009047.html

Artify Amarok

Commit

Let's call a horse a horse: Amarok on desktop looks ugly. This is what happens when you put design up for review by a committee and bike-shed any good idea to dead. In order to improve the looks KRF and me skipped the whole discussion and started implementing some design artwork that was submitted to us by Lee Olson, Thomas Lübking and others.
I've removed the statusbar and replaced it with a smaller progress and message area on the colored bar in the Media Sources panel. This bar is always shown and is painted using the current schema's highlight color. Notice the logo in the background of the browser, this breaks empty areas a little, but there is still a "field of gray" effect going on. The other panels will get similar background logos.

Both features can be seen in this screenshot:

An the non Amarok specific front I participated in the Phonon, KDE-Multimedia & Communitydiscussions, help Colin with a little UI review and generally ran around like a headless chicken a lot, once time in the vicinity of Seif to find a good single malt.

Also did not get a single night of decent sleep, which I why you could find me crawling into bed @2:00 and asking for early breakfast @5:30.... man I hate bunk-beds.

Foosball KDE world cup @ Randa 2011

2011-06-05T11:59:00.004+02:00

The daytrip got canceled so we need excuse to get us away from our laptops.

So I decided this morning @ 5:30 AM to host a foosball tournament. That is on the table with the red and blue plastic guys, not outside on the grass in the rain. Just to be clear.

Anyone that wants to join should keep an eye this kde-events thread and sign up on the wiki: http://community.kde.org/Sprints/Randa/2011#Foosball_tournament

Teams of 2 people, if you don't have a team member yet add yourself to the loners sub-topic.

Update: We won!

KDE commit template

2011-06-03T18:17:00.004+02:00

I would recommend every KDE developer to use this useful git commit template.

Enable it with

git config --global --add commit.template ~/.commit-template

or just for KDE without the --global from a repo directory.

It's very complete, so once you get the hang of it you might want to remove the first 16 lines so you'll have a nice reminder of the BUG:, FIXED-IN:, etc commit-hooks (I'm looking at you rengles ;) ).

Amarok contributors should also remember to include a Changelog entry to any commits introducing features, changes or bugfixes. Probably a good practice for all.

If you use vim as the commit editor (core.editor=vim) you could use this git commit template as well.

Amarok Podcasting - Progress

2009-11-23T22:26:00.011+01:00

Here is what a day off from work can mean for Amarok:

VERSION 2.2.2
FEATURES
* Make it possible to change a podcast channel's URL. (BR 195204)
* Also support feed:// urls for subscribing to podcasts.
* Limiting the number of simultaneous podcast updates and downloads to 4. Can be
configured separately in the rc-file.
* Import podcast subscriptions from OPML.
* Show HTML info for podcast channels that support this. Patches by Mathias Panzenböck.
(BR 193357)
CHANGES:
* Podcast auto-update interval is now configurable in the rc-file. Default is 30
minutes. (BR 212467)
BUGFIXES:
* Made dragging from podcast list to external program work. (BR 212343)

That is 2 branch merges (one from me and one from Mathias) and about 20 commits. Energy that would otherwise be spend commuting and beating an embedded system into shape. I would call that a well spend day off :).

Podcast configuration options
There now 3 hidden configuration options added to amarokrc:

[Podcasts]
AutoUpdate Interval=30
Maximum Simultaneous Downloads=4
Maximum Simultaneous Updates=4

The interval is in minutes and updates also includes adding a new subscription.

OPML import
You can also import subscriptions from an OPML file. And it's pretty fast already.
Proof in the form of a screencast: I'm importing 50 feeds from the Digital Podcast directory.
Uploaded to vimeo, ogg version also downloadable there.

Bart

KIO::UPnP

2009-10-09T21:21:00.004+02:00

I've started a new project on gitorious, KIO::UPnP.
Originally wanted to upload it to svn but discovered I lost my account's password. Expecting KDE to move to gitorious soon anyway (hint!).

This code has been in development for a long time, started at the first UPnP Developers Sprint in Paris back in May, by Ade and me.
Then it slumbered a bit on my hard-drive, and grew a bit on Ade's as it seems. Because of Ade's various other projects I took it over from him some months ago. But because of all my various other projects it took until the 2nd UPnP sprint last weekend for me to touch it again.
Friedrich's network:// kio-slave also lists upnp devices but from a higher view. He lists all UPnP devices with any services but will forward to upnp:// when you click a upnp-mediaserver entry.

The project goals as so concisely written on the projects wiki:

Create a UPnP kio slave that will connect to a UPnP Media Server to interact with content on it.

Supported actions depend on the servers capabilities:
– Browse
– Search
– Upload
– Edit

For most UPnP servers you should only expect the browse though.

The ultimate goals of the upnp kio-slave is to be used as the base for an Amarok Collection. There I'll have to do some trickery to allow even the simplest servers to be searched. Thankfully the MemoryCollection and MemoryQueryMaker will help me there.

For now I'm stuck at demarshaling DBus reponses from Coherences org.DLNA.DMS.CDS.Browse. I think there are just to many levels of DBus variants (variant which is an array of variants that holds an array of dict entries which are string,variant v[av[a{sv}]] ). Frank is fixing that for me this weekend though (should be aa{sv}).

So now it's out there in a conveniently collaborative form, don't be afraid to help me out.

Apple breaks Palm Pre compatibility. Or: an open letter to Palm

2009-07-16T11:11:00.015+02:00

Dear Palm,

When you launched the Pre everyone was very excited about the excellent job you did. Everyone except Apple that is, they don't like such strong competition.

You decided to reverse engineer the iTunes database "protocol" used in Apple products and implemented it from the device side on the Pre. This has the benefit of being able to sync the Pre with iTunes on any PC or Mac without installing extra software.
And you didn't have to invest in development of your own desktop software, which is not a differentiating feature for you. You're in the business of selling phones, not software. I don't think deciding to "outsource" this to Apple was a smart move though.

So now the bully is attacking you on *their* playground:

From Engadget Mobile

And then they say it's your own fault. You could go crying to the principle (or whatever you want to call court you want to file the anti-competitive lawsuit with).

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

The media-player support in Amarok 2 is shaping up to be very flexible, complete and easy to implement thanks to the hard work of 2nd time GSoC student and hacker extraordinaire Alejandro.

We can quickly add support for the Palm Pre, or any other player, providing there is a way to access the database and we have documentation of the data-format. We already have iPod and MTP support and the same system is used to implement audio CD as a collection. iPhone OS 3.0 is being worked on as well as UMS (generic USB device) and OBEX (many cellphones).
We promise not to change our application to prevent users to use Amarok with your device. Not only do we care about our users, we are not a competitor to you or have any ulterior motives.
Amarok is already fully supported on all flavors of Linux and we have beta releases on Windows and Mac OSX which just need a bit of polishing and stabilization.

Serious business proposals can be send to the Amarok team at business@getamarok.com (these emails will not be publicly readable).

UPnP DevSprint in Paris

2009-05-10T08:01:00.007+02:00

Hi from Paris, where together with [ade], dev, erwan, philn and lightyear I'm at the Coherence/KDE developer sprint focused on UPnP.
Yesterday, after struggling with QtDBUS (specifically the under-documented qdbusxml2cpp) I managed to the signals from Coherence and call functions. So now I can discover the devices on the network.

The signals are connected to a UPnPCollectionFactory that should create a new collection for each mediaserver (containing music) on the network.

Next step will be to really talk to the devices themselves. That will require some XML parsing, which can get a bit complicated. With any luck I'll find a Qt based DIDL-lite parsing library. Consider that a lazyweb questions :).

A bientôt,
Bart

UPnP support in KDE and Amarok

2009-02-13T14:31:00.000+01:00

During FOSDEM [ade] and I met with Frank Scholz, the lead developer of Coherence. We discussed DLNA/UPnP and how Coherence can be used in KDE and Amarok. The conclusion of this meeting was that we should use Coherence as our base for supporting UPnP services in KDE. The first implementation will be a KIO slave for browsing media stored on remote devices.

UPnP is a network technology using a combination of SSDP, XML and SOAP, with some GENA thrown in for eventing. A group of UPnP services called the UPnP A/V Architecture has been picked up by an industry organization called the Digital Living Network Alliance. DLNA specifies device classes which have to implement specific services and support a minimal set of filetypes and codecs.

Coherence is a framework, written in Python but it exposes a DBUS API, that allows an application to participate in the "Digital Home Network". For the moment this means mainly UPnP, but support for Ampache is available and Apple's DAAP is also considered. It's published under the MIT license and is multiplatform.

In Amarok we have been planning to integrate UPnP for a long while. But except for a failed Google Summer of Code project last year not a lot of effort has been spend. Thanks to Coherence this will quickly change: in relative short term (read 2.2) we will introduce a UPnP Collection that will list and enable playback of music stored on a DLNA Digital Media Server.

We could even consider publishing the content in the local Collection, basically making Amarok a DMS. Amarok can then track plays on remote devices and use it in the scoring algorithm.
Even more advanced functionality would be to control one or more Digital Media Renderes, such as
the Philips Streamium, from Amarok.

A few mails have been going back and forth between interested developers about discovery of network services in general. In order to simplify using technologies as UPnP, zeroconf, Samba, etc I'm wondering if we can integrate this in Solid. Only the discovery part obviously, using the services would be the task of separate frameworks, such as Coherence. With this functionality in Solid it should be trivial to show a kind of "Network Map" to the user with all the services per device.

As you can tell, plenty of cool things to keep a few people busy for a year or 3.

Bart

Amarok Junior Job: Auto-download new podcasts

2009-02-02T19:43:00.005+01:00

A recent comment by progmanos on the post of the 2.0.1.1 release reminded that I still have to implement Podcast episode auto-downloading. In the hurry to get 2.0 released I did add the config option, but forgot to add the actual code to make it work.

In Amarok 2 Podcasts are implemented in classes derived from PodcastProvider. There can be mutliple providers, which allows for instance podcast syncing between Amarok and an iPod.
The default provider is SqlPodcastProvider. This is where the auto-download function should get implemented.

This is a nicelly contained and not to steep introduction to Amarok development. So it's an excelent Junior Job.
If progmanos or anyone else would like to have a go at it, contact me on #amarok on irc.freenode.net. My nickname is Stecchino.

Amarok podcasting 2.0 and post-2.0 plans

2008-11-04T13:51:00.012+01:00

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.