Linux.com is running a very informative article on Phonon, the new multimedia layer for KDE 4. It explains the rise and fall of Phonon's predecessor aRts and elaborates on the ups and downs of an audio abstraction layer. The article also gives an overview of common use cases and provides some example code.
After many months of work on the new Multimedia API for KDE 4 it is time to
finally announce Phonon. Phonon will
provide a task oriented API for multimedia, making it easy for KDE
applications to use media playback and capture functionality (and more)
resulting in application developers being free to concentrate on the user
interface aspects. The number of possibilities to integrate multimedia into the
For those of you living on the bleeding edge, I discovered a document describing features recently added to amaroK "Fast Forward" 1.4 in SVN. Although this document is a work in progress, it should give you a good idea of what to expect in the next major amaroK release.
At the beginning of March 2006, I started a fundraising campaign with the goal of collecting 1000 Euro by
the end of the month in order to buy a new computer system. I soon discovered how very unrealistic this goal
was! You -- the K3b users -- taught me a lesson: by the end of the second day I had already received more than 1000 Euro and in the end the goal was surpassed by far.
Read the full story at the K3b news page.
Sebastian Trüg has been working on K3b for a long time now and his computer has always served well for development. However it is now old and showing the first signs of senility. In order to keep up his work on K3b he needs a new machine. That is why the K3b fundraiser has been launched. The goal is to collect €1000 Euro by 31st March 2006. If you are willing to donate you can do so using PayPal or a bank transfer. There will be one major reward and that is K3b 1.0.
Fresh from the amaroK development squad, comes the first beta release of amaroK 1.4, the 'Fast Forward' series. This generation has a lot of shiny new features and eye-candy.
It seems to be review time for amaroK. The amaroK team is thrilled to see amaroK way ahead of the pack in a recent Grumpy Editor review on LWN.net, in which the author describes the best and worst features of four popular Free Software audio players. The review points out some of the weaker features of amaroK and the developers have written about how they are addressing some of the issues mentioned.
The amaroK team would like to announce the immediate release of version 1.3 of the innovative amaroK Live CD. This complete operating system is a unique collaboration between Free Software and Open Music that runs entirely from a single CD.
After four months of development, the amaroK team has finished the new stable release of the popular KDE based audio player. amaroK 'Airborne' introduces the highly anticipated Wikipedia lookup feature. The cooperation between KDE and the Wikipedia project has already been the topic of an earlier article.
Among users of the K3b CD and DVD burning application there has been quite some confusion with the new audio project so I wrote a little overview of the new features and changes in version 0.12. Check out the K3b 0.12 New Feature Guide to get an idea of how much more there is under the hood in the new version.