Akademy 2008: Amarok’s Projects for the Summer of Code

Students recently introduced their Amarok 2.0 Summer of Code Projects at the KDE developer meeting, Akademy 2008. At the end of the meeting, students were rewarded with a KDE Appreciation Award.

Within the past few weeks, Casey Link has integrated the online music service MP3tunes to Amarok. With this development, the KDE Jukebox is the only program outside of the official client where users can upload and synchronize MP3s to the MP3tunes server. The MP3tunes integration is a step toward incorporating more community features into Amarok. Users can now listen to music from the online collection on their mobile phones or over Internet radio.

Peter Zhou also worked on a new scripting interface for Amarok. QtScript for Amarok makes JavaScript available for use with the audio player.

Until now, Amarok 2.0 could not operate with external players, but Alejandro Wainzinger wrote the code to make this possible. The hardware management from Amarok is now on par with Amarok 1.4, and Alejandro wants to implement a few more features, such as Playcount tracking for typical USB storage devices.

Amarok 2.0 uses Plasma to display song information. Previously, corresponding applets assumed this task, but the Summer of Code project from William Soares changed this.

Teo Mrnjavac reimplemented the mass tagging system and simultaneously improved the usability of the dialogues. Users no longer need to work with variables such as %t, %a, or %n; instead, tagging diagrams can be generated as easily as drag & drop.

Daniel Jones implemented a complex playlist system for Amarok 2.0, which allows biased playlists and fuzzy biases to run. A biased playlist can categorize songs according to various criteria. For example, all tracks that haven't been played, including 30 percent hardrock and 10 percent jazz, can be grouped onto one playlist. An example of this can be seen on Youtube.

Fuzzy biases can group songs together according to more obscure terms. Songs from 1973 can be placed onto one playlist, or songs that are three minutes long can be a playlist. Daniel improved the Amarok file tracking system so that songs that are placed in one file and then re-filed according to other criteria within the playlists are not lost in the process.

The new features are already available as part of Amarok 2.0.
(Marcel Hilzinger)