Amarok

Image by Guerrilla Futures | Jason Tester


As I am finding myself in a similar situation as my fellow Amarok developer Nikolaj Hald Nielsen is currently in, I figured that doing something similar as Nikolaj did could make sense.

To sum it up, I have been working as a software consultant for quite a while. Having my own small company (Kretschmann Software Consulting - KSC), I have mostly worked as an independent contractor doing software engineering. Recently I have worked for Gibson Guitar Corporation, and more recently for Collabora Ltd. In my free time I work on Amarok, a Free Software music player.

I am specialized in C++ development with Qt, and I have been an active member of the KDE community for a long time. Further on, my special areas of interest include Software Quality (finding and fixing complicated bugs), GUI Design and Usability, and Multimedia.


If you are a company that would like to work with me, please contact me at kretschmann@kde.org for getting my full CV.


Thanks

Image by Roozbeh Shafiee

Dear Community,

you might have heard it already elsewhere, but I thought it would be a nice touch if I wrote a short article as well. The good news:


Fresh Release: Amarok 2.3 'Clear Light'

We are rather happy with this release, and I think we were able to deliver a nicely rounded start of the new Amarok 2.3 series. As always, you can expect new releases in this series fairly rapidly, as we plan to keep our "roughly 6 weeks" release cycle.


I hope you enjoy this release, have fun

For the last 2½ years I have been working full time as a developer for Magnatune.com. While I have enjoyed this work very much, within the next few months, Magnatune wishes to transition me to a part time position instead.

This means that I will either have to find some more clients for my small one man consultancy business or find something else to do altogether.

So, if anyone is interested in working with a skilled developer with a passion for Free Software and Free Culture and a proven record of making stuff work (whatever unconventional solutions it takes) I am putting myself up for grabs. I am very skilled in C++/Qt/KDE through several years of contributing to Amarok and I can work with pretty much whatever technology is needed to make a given project work (at Magnatune I have done mainly PHP and TCL and in previous jobs I have worked with Java, Perl, Lua, Delphi, C and host of other things)

Alternatively, if anyone out there wants to sponsor a particular feature for Amarok, now would also be a perfect time. I wrote the integrated Magnatune service and the framework behind the services in Amarok 2 (as well as many of the other services as well) so anything that aims to integrate an online source of music I am particularly good at.

If you have any interesting proposals, ideas, questions or just want a full CV, please mail me a nhn@kde.org

Image copyright by Ben Golub

The Amarok Team is happy to announce that we have produced a new issue of the Amarok Insider, our monthly newsletter. We have prepared many interesting bits of information for you, giving you an insider look into Amarok development. This issue features:

A sneak preview of the upcoming Amarok 2.3.

Many tips and tricks for new features that we have been working on.

An exclusive interview with an Amarok developer.

Last not least: Juicy details about the romantic life of small gerbils.

Please enjoy:

Amarok Insider - Issue 14


PS:
The last part I wrote might not be exactly true, but it's interesting anyway

Amarok teamster Abhishek has again produced a great video, this time explaining some new Podcast features of the upcoming Amarok 2.3:





Here is a direct link to the video, in case the embedding did not work:
Video: Podcasts in Amarok 2.3

Enjoy

What is Kraut Sourcing? No worries, I will explain this later on. First I would like to ask our community for a favor:

The Amarok team is about to release Amarok 2.3 fairly soon (our release schedule is tight), perhaps in about three weeks from now. What I am asking our community (especially artists) for: Creating a new splash screen for this release


This is how the current splash (kindly made by Lee Olson) for Amarok 2.2.x looks like:




As Amarok 2.3 is the start of a new major series, we would love to have a new splash screen. Any takers?


The winner will be chosen by the Amarok team, and the reward is:

1 Amarok t-shirt, a mention in the "Thanks To" dialog of Amarok, and... hmm, a beer at our next meeting. Does this sound ok?



PS:
"Kraut Sourcing" is pretty much what just happened here: A German asking for Crowd Sourcing.


Update: Please note that the license must be Creative Commons, cc-by-sa

Amarok user and enthusiast Abhishek has made a great video, showing off some features of the upcoming Amarok 2.3.


Again, please remember that this is a beta release, and some things are not fully finished (e.g. the toolbar).



Enjoy:

Video: Amarok 2.3 First Look

KDE Software Compilation 4.4 has been released!

I haven't used it yet (waiting for package), but let me tell you: This is an amazing product. We at KDE are happy to present you something the world has never seen before. A product so unbelievably terrific, you will love it! It's simply huge, and amazing. And great to use. Please, without further ado and silliness (we don't need more Stevenotes in this world):

Go check it out





One more thing...
I've switched jobs. I used to work for Gibson Guitar Corporation for a while (which was great, but all good things come to an end), and now I'm working with these friendly chaps:

A friendly user has today created a screenshot of the latest Amarok from Git Master. I was rather surprised that it actually looks fairly decent on Windows (had expected worse things), and the user even said it also works pretty well, with the new Phonon-VLC backend.

Anyway, I wanted to share this with you, but please keep in mind: This is a preview of the next Amarok version. Some things (like the new toolbar) are not yet fully finished, so please don't complain about that.


Preview of Amarok 2.3, on Windows

A while ago I had written an article about the dangers of "micro-options" in software. Like many articles about usability, this one was discussed somewhat controversially (which is good in a way), but overall I did get a positive reception, even from a professional usability expert.

While this article was perhaps interesting, there was no "proof in the blog pudding". Let's be honest here, anyone can claim the wildest things in blogs, which may be true, or not. I did however stumble upon an interesting connection between psychology and usability, which appears to back up my speculations. The connection is this:

The Paradox Of Choice
Have you ever been in the following situation: You're in a supermarket. You want to buy a salad dressing, and the timing is somewhat tight. Guests are waiting, the usual...

Alright, found the "salad dressing" section (which can he hard in itself, in huge supermarkets). So, not much time, let's choose something that looks yummy, and preferably not too fatty! So, what do we have here? Vinaigrette, Blue cheese dressing, Caesar dressing, Honey Dijon, Hummus, Italian dressing, Louis dressing, Ranch dressing, Russian dressing, Tahini. Hmm. Nice choice. Let's go for some Italian Dressing, I like that one. Wait, there are three different brands of dressing, each of them offering further varieties of this product. Chef's Choice, Low Carb, Lite, Very Lite, and hey: the Special Edition!

Here is someone who can explain this problem of choice much better than I could ever do. His name is Barry Schwartz, he's a professor of psychology, and he made one of the best TED talks ever (according to the founder of TED himself):


TED Video: Barry Schwartz - Paradox of Choice


I very much recommend watching this video. Few have been disappointed by it, and I suppose you might find it enlightening too. It does explain many phenomena in our modern life in a surprisingly simple way. One of them can be translated to usability: Too many choices can reduce the user's satisfaction with a software product.

I'd be happy to read comments on this article, be it positive, or negative. Discussion is important, so I think we should do that. But please, do me one favor: Watch Barry's talk before commenting. Thanks

Dear Amarok and KDE users,

I'm sure that you have heard of the terrible earthquake disaster that has happened in Haiti. Current estimations of deaths range from 100,000 to 200,000, and this number keeps rising. What we are looking at is very likely one of the worst natural disasters of the last 10 years.

I would like to encourage our users to help Haiti in this situation, if you can. One way of doing this is by sending donations to international humanitarian groups that support helping Haiti. I'm sure there are other ways, if you know some concrete examples, please add a comment.

Please do not voice your opinion if you have any bizarre theories (be it from religious motives, political fearmongering, conspiracy theories, etc) about how this disaster happened. I've heard many of them, and there is no need to hear any more. This article is only about helping, but not discussing backgrounds.


Thanks.


Disclaimer: I do not speak for the Amarok team, nor do I speak for KDE. This article is a private matter.

biased playlist with both new weekly top bias and last.fm similar artists bias with track modeone of my longstanding goals as an amarok developer has been to expand the way that amarok helps you explore your own music collection, and discover your own music. for those of you who will be attending campkde a few days (my flight leaves tomorrow am...) i'll expand on this point quite a bit more in my talk on sunday. but here's a nice little precursor that shows the sort of features that I think media players should be able to do.

most people who use amarok are aware of this "dynamic playlist" framework, and I hope that a good percentage of users understand what it's for. for those who don't, basically, it allows you to modify the composition of The Playlist (right hand side) based on a set of pluggable criteria. historically in amarok 2.x these criteria have been things such as "artist name == FOO" or "playcount > 5" etc. I think 2.2.0 was the first release (or was it 2.1.0?) that had a lastfm similar artists bias--that is, amarok would try to play similar songs by asking last.fm what artists were similar to the currently playing one.

now that i've pushed another option to the last.fm similar bias, and added a completely new bias, i'm getting closer to helping amarok help you play music you want. so what's new?

playing-history based bias
if you've been a meticulous user of last.fm (which is easy thanks to the seamless amarok integration) you know that last.fm knows a lot about your listening history.

every so often I sit back and realize how much my music tastes have changed over time. the music I listened to 4 years ago i rarely hear today. but is that because my tastes have really changed? or is it also because i've simply forgotten some of the more obscure bands I was listening to? well, now you can tell amarok to play you music that was in your "weekly top artists" list between any two dates in your listening history.

that's right, so when you remember that you listened to a ton of electro-punk last july but can't remember all the bands, just set up the dates and let amarok rip. a trip through history lane indeed

new track-based similarity
for those who have used the last.fm similar artists bias, you've probably noticed that on the whole it's not super accurate. that's because it just asks last.fm for similar artists---and if you happen to like an artist that covers a wide variety of genres, this can get pretty inaccurate.

anyway, last.fm recently introduced a new track similarity function---you can ask it for similar songs to any given song. this, of course, is much more accurate. it's also harder to find matches (the odds that you have the exactly correct track in your collection is lower), but that's the tradeoff you have to make.

in any case, there is now a combobox that lets you choose between artist similarity and track similarity when using the bias.

enjoy!

Here's a little story I wanted to share with you. It's so bizarre, you might not believe it when you read it, but it really happened


Some back story:

A few months ago Amarok had migrated to Git, and then Konversation had migrated too. We had to write a special "commit hook" script for making the commits show up on IRC, via the CIA bot. This script was running on our Amarok server (called "Kollide"), and all was fine. At some point then we migrated our server to new hardware, as the old contract had expired. That also went really well.


What happened later:

At some point the CIA bot started to print everything twice. Yes, every single commit, all duplicated. I guess you can imagine how annoying that was. So we tried to debug this for weeks, looked at all scripts, at Gitorious, and whatnot. Noone was able to spot the bug, it was a mystery. Two days ago then we discussed this problem again in our #kde-git IRC channel, with Jeremy Whiting, and Eike Hein. Basically we were close to giving up on the whole thing. For fun, Jeremy said something like: "Hmm, what happened to your old server, btw?". That got us thinking. Then Eike compared the IP addresses of the server that sent out the commit message, and what did we see there: Two different IPs. What had happened:

The old server (we like to call it our "Shadow Server" now) had continued to run happily, because the hoster had forgotten to switch it off. So it was still running our web site, all sorts of other stuff, plus this little commit hook script!

When we realized what had happened there: There was just one possible reaction: Headdesk


Don't know about you, but we found that quite bizarre and funny, as noone had anticipated that (not even our admin)

This is the second part of my series of articles about "good music", which was originally planned to become a series of three. In the first article of this series I had talked about Progressive Rock. The plan was to do a follow-up on Electronic Music, and then one on Classical Music, but somehow I got inspired today to write about Rock Music instead, so I'm changing the plan a little.

As a preface I should again say that this is of course highly subjective. Tastes differ wildly, and talking about art is especially subjective. Why am I writing this? As a developer of a music player I simply get to hear a lot of music (all day, basically), and I've always been fascinated by music, although I'm personally not a musician. So, take all of this with a grain of salt. What motivated me to write this second part is that I did actually get some very nice feedback on the first article, including a fellow KDE developer talking to me at the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit about this article, which I thought was really nice. Apparently there is some interest in talking about music, so let's just do that

Now I should explain why I originally didn't plan to write about Rock Music. The reason is a bit weird: I am somewhat ashamed of admitting that I do enjoy Rock, simply because there's so much crap in this genre. Again, this is highly subjective, but I just don't consider run-of-the-mill Rock very exciting. However, some bands managed to do Rock with a twist, either by adding components of other genres to it, or simply by being freaking good. Most of these "freaking good" bands also are versatile though, and they do incorporate different styles into their music.


Queen
It is pretty hard to describe Queen briefly. It's also pretty hard not to hit superlatives when talking about them, because they were very super in many regards. I personally consider Queen the best rock band of all times, that's probably the best way to sum it up. Queen also happened to be my first "love" in music, and to this day I love them just as much as I did when I was 14. What made them so special? First of all, their singer Freddie Mercury was simply as good as singers can get. Incredible vocal range, fantastic and unique voice. Freddie Mercury died in 1991 from AIDS, one of the first prominent victims of this virus. Back then this caused quite the media stir, as Freddie was more or less openly gay, and the media tried to do the best they could to explain that "the guy died because he was gay". I'm missing words to describe this stupidity, so let's switch to Brian May, their guitarist. May is in fact "Dr May" now, as he has recently completed his PhD in astrophysics, and he's currently listed at #39 of Rolling Stone magazine's "100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time". It's hard to call the man anything else than a genius, if you have ever listened to his compositions and guitar work.

Freddie Mercury was able to switch effortlessly between Falsetto voice and Modal voice (what you would consider the normal voice), without really pausing or causing a hitch in the transition. As far as I know, this is pretty difficult to do, and not mastered by many. In my mind, I always had the image of him using his voice more like a musical instrument than just a voice, much like a trumpet. He was able to start deep, and then lifting it up, higher and higher. If you try that at home, chances are you'll end up with a sore throat next morning.

If you care about music at all, you should listen to some Queen songs. Some recommendations for especially good songs: "Bohemian Rhapsody", "Who Wants To Live Forever", "The Show Must Go On".


U2
This band is a bit of a strange bag. I have some sort of love/hate relationship with them, caused by a moral dilemma: Their music is among the best you can get. Their believe system is comparable to a fruit cake.

U2 is an Irish band, but these days they are more like a worldwide corporation. Their singer Bono is a bit of a controversial person. On the one hand, the guy is simply a good singer. On the other hand, he tends to get a bit over his head, meddling in politics, trying to cure world hunger, and kissing the Pope's ring. One of his latest escapades even made it to Slashdot. You be the judge if this man can be liked. My opinion: It's important to separate the personal from the professional. And professionally, this band simply is damn good. Bringing us to the next important band member:

The Edge, who is the guitarist and main composer of U2. I personally find him more likable than Bono, but all this is of little relevance. What is relevant to me is that Edge is a very good guitarist, with a unique style that is different from most other guitarists. His electrical guitar soli are rarely there for showing off, but more for creating a mood, and that he does masterfully.

It is important to note that most of U2's brilliant albums (they also made some crappy ones) were co-written by Brian Eno, who is widely known as one of the most influential persons in the music industry. My suspicion is that Eno is the true mastermind behind U2, as all albums with him tend to be masterful. The rest, not so much.

Some recommendations for U2 songs: "One", "With Or Without You", "Unknown Caller".



Honorable Mentions
Here are some more "rock" artists that I enjoy (they are all not classic rock'n' roll bands, but let's keep it at that):

The Verve

Guns 'N Roses

Pink Floyd

Frank Zappa

R.E.M.

I hope you enjoyed this article a bit, thanks for reading! And as always - I'd love to hear some feedback

Nice holidays and a happy Hackmas to all of our users, developers, and basically to everyone else too

Cookie Image (TM), Made For The Upcoming Amarok 2.2.2 Release


PS:
There are two easter eggs hidden in this xmas blog article. If you can spot them, you deserve one extra "Happy Hackmas" from me

Some of you might have heard about the Malware incident that recently has hit our friends from gnome-look.org. While some of you might chuckle about it because it hit the competition, there really is nothing to chuckle about, because the next target could easily be us. In fact someone might be uploading a Malware component at this very moment. Noone could tell until it's too late.

So, there have been some discussions about possible solutions for this issue. Some have proposed that we add a review process to all of this, so that anything that gets uploaded gets a security check from some KDE developers. That's a neat idea on paper. But only there. This couldn't possibly work out, for two reasons: 1) Manpower - We simply don't have enough of that. 2) Responsibility - Who wants to be responsible for letting Malware slip through your fingers? This can happen to anyone, and it would be pretty embarrassing. I certainly wouldn't want to be responsible for anything.

Back when we designed the scripting system for Amarok 2 (QtScript, in-process), Ian Monroe and I realized that there isn't really any way to make it secure on a technical level. Sandboxing, automatic malware detection, flying cars - all this works somehow in theory, but in reality it requires some Bruce Schneier to do it, which we don't have (there is only only one Schneier, I guess). So basically we realized that the system would be unsafe, and that we would have to live with it. Amarok is very vulnerable to Malware scripts, because scripts can access most of Amarok, and Qt, and whatnot. Any Joe Schmoe could hack up a two-liner script that deletes your $HOME. So we accepted that reality, and tried to think of some other methods for making it all safer. What we came up with is this:

Mandatory Version Control
Basically our idea was that all Amarok scripts (and the same could help with other download components) would have to be hosted in a public version control system (VCS). This system could for instance be SVN, simply because it's relatively easy to learn, and we could use a central server for it. These are the three advantages that we'd expect from the proposed system:

Malware. With a VCS, it's very easy to tell who inserted Malware, and when this person did this. This fact alone would provide some accountability, and I think it might prevent a good deal of attempts of messing around with the code. And even if it happened anyway, it would be trivial to revert the change, and we would just ban the person who did this from ever committing to this repository again. Another positive effect is the sheer number of developer eyes on this code, which could catch many issues before they become a problem. Currently we have this #kde-commits channel on IRC, and some developers are watching it (if only to kill some time). I think something similar could work with this system.

Abandonware. One of the major issues we had with Amarok 1.x scripts was the sheer amount of forks. Developer A created script A1, then developer B came along, forked the same thing (in other words, copied the code), enhanced it a bit, and released it as B1. This left us with a huge amount of varieties of the same script, and noone could really tell which version was maintained at all. With a VCS, developer B could simply take over maintainership of script A1, if for some reason developer A stopped maintaing it (which happens all the time).

Crapware. Learning the VCS means an extra hurdle for contributors. This can be seen both as a disadvantage, or as an advantage, depending on the point of view. That's because learning something like SVN is pretty simple, and yet it would prevent very unexperienced programmers (who are also missing motivation) from starting the project, in the first place. But it's easy enough that it probably wouldn't prevent someone from doing it who really is motivated, which is probably for the better. So it might just work out in reality.

As an addendum, I should say that this system could only work if we enforce it, making it mandatory for all scripts and any kind of program code that is reachable via GHNS. Making this system optional wouldn't solve anything, because then a Malware person could still merrily go ahead with his/her evil intentions.

To sum it up, I think that this approach could really help us, and all that's missing is a practical implementation. We would have to work together with the kde-apps.org people (mainly Frank Karlitschek), and the GHNS developers, and then set up an official VCS repository (maybe KDE SVN, maybe something else). I'd be interested in hearing your opinions about this proposal, so please leave a comment if you have an opinion on it

Short article about a new project we started:

ColdStorage
What is ColdStorage? Well, basically it used to be a Vaporware project, started about two weeks ago, which is now no longer Vaporware. It started out with some of us KDE folks getting fed up with existing solutions for using Git as a backup tool (for backing up $HOME, etc). There are a number of existing projects that try to do the same, but I found none of them working, either not working at all, or not fully working.

So we thought, hey, let's give it a try by doing it ourselves. What we started with was a basic idea, a cool name, a Git repository, an IRC channel (#coldstorage on Freenode), two developers, and a bunch of code stubs. Thanks to Thomas Zander, we now actually have some code. Thomas managed to create some initial code for it basically on a Sunday evening.

Now, the project is still in very early stages, but in the FOSS spirit I wanted to announce it anyway, since my feeling is that the more people know about it, the more contributors we might attract, and the faster we can get it done. After all, what we want is a tool that just works, as quickly as possible.


Here's some more info about ColdStorage:

ColdStorage is a backup tool using Git at its core.

Written in C++, with QtCore.

GPL v3 licensed.

Multi-platform (in so far as Git is multi-platform, not sure how far the Windows support is).

Still in its very early stages of development, but the core functionality is there.

If you are interested in helping out, come join us sometime on IRC

Thanks to Sven I stumbled upon a rather cute and very well done Free movie/musical called Sita Sings The Blues. Excellent (greatest?) love and break-up story with great music and cats.  Watch it!

Please share links to other great Free (short-)movies in the comments.

(image by Nina Paley)

2 weeks ago I asked people to help with getting our Junior Jobs list above 100. That worked out nicely. We’re at 140 right now and reached 148 at some point in the last week \o/  200 in 2 weeks from now?

Keep adding Junior Jobs. As some people were unsure how to do it, here’s a screenshot:

Interested in getting involved in KDE by writing code? There are 140 bugs waiting for you

Today I'd like to write about a topic that has interested me for a while, and at the same time tell an anecdote, about an event that I found fascinating. You might find it interesting, or not, but I guess some might like it.

To make a start, let's make a jump back in time, about one year ago. Back then, I had never met a real "VIP" in person. I had met a few "Internet-famous" people, among them Matthias Ettrich, and Alan Cox, but let's be honest here: While some of us FOSS people are well known in our Free Software circles, ask Joe Sixpack in a bar about them (or really just some guy in the non-FOSS IT area), chances are slim that they'll know them.

At this time I got an interesting offer for a software project, the nature of which is irrelevant to this story, so I won't disclose it. What I can disclose is that it had to do with Gibson Guitar Corporation, and I (along with two co-workers) was invited to a meeting in Berlin, for a presentation of the project, with the the boss himself, Henry Juszkiewicz (on this photo he was meeting Steve Wozniak). You may have never heard of Henry himself, but you sure have heard of Gibson, because it's basically a given that some of the artists you listen to are playing a Gibson guitar. Gibson is one of the biggest musical instrument manufacturers in the world, and if you like guitar music, you'll probably know that most guitarists either play a Fender, or a Gibson, or possibly both (many guitarists use multiple different guitars, depending on the thing they are writing).

Being a big music fan, I realized that I was about to meet the man who made the guitars played by Mike Oldfield, Pink Floyd, U2, you name it. I don't know about you, but this made me very excited (and nervous). I was wondering, how could such a person be in real life? Would he a be a chair-throwing tyrant like Ballmer, or arrogant and preachy, and would he talk to me at all (a lowly FOSS coder)? As it turned out, I didn't have to be nervous at all. Because the man is completely different from what I had expected.

What I met was a calm person, considerate, quiet, and very friendly. Henry knew all our names, he knew exactly what we did (he had used Amarok before), and he talked to us just like you would talk to any other person. It boggled my mind when the guy shook my hand, and said something like "Hey Mark, thank you for coming here! It's nice to meet a developer of Amarok, I really like this software." Bahm. Just like that. After a few seconds of disorientation, I started to talk to him, and realized that there was no need to be nervous at all. I wasn't talking to some VIP (although he is that), but to a normal guy, intelligent, witty and friendly.

Fast forwarding a bit in the meeting, I learned to know another side of Henry, no less fascinating: He was given a presentation of some audio gear, and evaluated the speakers. At the same table, there were three audio experts in speaker technology. Henry listened to the speakers for a few seconds, then went like: "Stop. Ok guys, these speakers here are... something. They aren't good though. What I want, is the best. Get me XY on the phone ASAP, he's the best guy for this job, I've worked with him before." Bahm. You should have seen the faces of the "experts" at the table. It's hard to describe the exact look, it was something like flabbergasted.


To sum it up, I've often found that really important people (not those who pretend to be) have the following qualities:

They are in that position for a reason.

They know exactly what they want.

They don't have to be arrogant, because that gets you nowhere. They prefer getting things done.

Hope you enjoyed this little anecdote


Henry with The Edge, guitarist of U2