OSNews.com: Interview with amaroK Developers

Wednesday, 8 December 2004  |  Mkretschmann

OSNews.com has posted an interview with the developers of amaroK. The interview was conducted by Christian Schaller from GStreamer and covers the cooperation between the GStreamer project and KDE, and it provides an overview of the history and future prospects of amaroK development.

Comments:

UI modification - Ask - 2004-12-08

Amarok is a great application and I think a slight modification to its UI will make it even greater and easier to use. The collection tab should look like what the playlist now looks, that is, should include columns for artist, album, title etc, while the play list need only contain the title. this will be much more usefull for doing a search, than the current design. One rarely does a search on the items in the current playlist, but frequently does a search on the collection list to select songs and add to the playlist. To do search, a juk like interface is strikingly simple and intuitive than the current amarok design. Or if only juk had got a temporary playlist to which songs can be added, or removed from, easily. The custom playlist in juk are intended to be very large collection and one does not want to play all of them in that order at a time. ask

Re: UI modification - Mark Kretschmann - 2004-12-08

amaroK 1.2 offers a "Flat mode" for the Collection-Browser, listing items directly with Title, Artist, Album. This is a handy alternative to the tree display, which can be cumbersome to navigate when doing searches.

Re: UI modification - Sebastian Gottfried - 2004-12-08

A three clumn view would be cool Left: existing tree view Middle: flat view of selected titles in tree view Right: Playlist (but smaller as now)

Re: UI modification - Ask - 2004-12-09

Good news. thanks to the developers for including a much wanted nodification -Ask

GNOME-VFS - ac - 2004-12-08

>For accessing non-local protocols like http (for streaming) or ftp, all >current GNOME based GStreamer applications relies on the gnome-vfs plugin, >which depends on GNOME libraries. This is, of course, not an acceptable >solution for KDE applications. So there were efforts by myself and others to >offer KIO support, which is the KDE equivalent to gnome-vfs, but >unfortunately KIO does not cooperate very well with GStreamer's design If KDE adopts GStreamer in addition to Qt4 this could ironically mean that KDE has now adopted Glib, GObject, GModule, GNOME-VFS, ATK, AT-SPI, OrBIT, libxml... One guess as to which of GNOME and KDE is now the defacto standard? If you install KDE, you will have to install half of GNOME...

Re: GNOME-VFS - superstoned - 2004-12-08

afaik they try to not let this happen, and thats good, because I whoulnt like it :D more C/gnome dependency's, please, no...

Re: GNOME-VFS - Christian Schaller - 2004-12-08

Umm, the point of having a plugin system, like GStreamer does, is so that you can offer a lot of diffent plugins for different systems, desktops and whatever. The fact that GStreamer has a Sun audio plugin for instance does not create a 'solaris' dependency for Linux users (to illustrate how broken your logic is). And the gnome-vfs plugin do not create a dependency on GNOME libs for KDE users, just like the KIO plugin will not create a KDE dependency for GNOME users.

Re: GNOME-VFS - ac - 2004-12-08

I am satisfied by the answers. Thank you for your big contribution to the Free Software and hence KDE community! I admit I used to think of you as "the enemy" because of some of your KDE comments in the past. =)

Re: GNOME-VFS - Christian Schaller - 2004-12-08

Like most other people I eventually grow up :)

Re: GNOME-VFS - Scott Wheeler - 2004-12-08

Uhm, first glib is hardly "half of GNOME". I don't know if you've noticed, but they've got something like 80 tarballs in their source distribution. GStreamer is split up into a "core" which just requires glib (libxml is optional and won't be used in the next version anyway) and plugins. The plugins have lots of weird dependencies based on what they do. i.e. the aRts plugin requires aRts, the GNOME-VFS plugin requires GNOME-VFS, the (defunct) KIO plugin requires kdelibs, etc. That's not a GNOME leaning thing; that's just up to the plugin authors. Packagers split up those plugins into several packages so that the deps don't get out of control. Qt 4 does not require the accessibility stuff. IIRC it's plugin based, so it can be shipped in a different package.

Re: GNOME-VFS - Michael Pyne - 2004-12-08

Although Christian has already replied, I think I should add that using gstreamer instead of aRts would actually add 0 (zero) g* libraries to KDE. aRts already uses glib, and I'm pretty positive we already use libxml2 somewhere anyways. ORBit was never a possibility (and I betcha GNOME ditches it sooner or later), so don't worry yourself about that. ;) The rest Christian and Wheeler have already explained about.

Re: GNOME-VFS - Carewolf - 2004-12-09

libgobject would be added. It is not currently used anywhere, since it doesn't do anything more than a _poor_ impersonation of C++.

Re: GNOME-VFS - ac - 2004-12-09

To be fair Stefan only added the glib dependency to aRts to get GNOME adoption. He basically added it despite objections that nobody wanted to maintain that code and then disappeared. So aRts is now this monstrosity that is considered tied to KDE but which really duplicates almost every single KDE technology. Hardly a good excuse for basing the decision of KDE's next media framework on.

Re: GNOME-VFS - Anonymous - 2004-12-09

> aRts is now this monstrosity that is considered tied to KDE but which really duplicates almost every single KDE technology How good does it render HTML?

Girlfriend? - Jim - 2004-12-08

I can't believe they had to link the word "girlfriend" to a definition in case the readers didn't know what the word meant.

Re: Girlfriend? - Macavity - 2004-12-08

Ha-ha-ha!! You don't know any Real Geeks(TM) then ;-D ~Macavity

Re: Girlfriend? - AC - 2004-12-08

Yeah, I even got angry as I wasted my time clicking on it. It's not funny.

Re: Girlfriend? - ac - 2004-12-08

I find your lack of amusement amusing. =)

Re: Girlfriend? - Christian Schaller - 2004-12-08

Just out of curiosity, what did you expect to find behind that link since you bothered clicking on it in the first place? ;)

Re: Girlfriend? - ac - 2004-12-08

Hmm, Maybe a pic of the girlfriend to drool or a datin service ?

Re: Girlfriend? - Mark Kretschmann - 2004-12-08

Oh, she was lovely, I tell you! :) Now she's gone, and we have amaroK. Ummm.

Re: Girlfriend? - Max Howell - 2004-12-08

We all love you markey! You made music fun again!

OSNews observation - SMEAT! - 2004-12-08

All though I like the articles on OSNews for the most part, the comments are basically eye cancer. There is such a great percentage of vocal uninformed people that post on that site. Bret Baptist.

Re: OSNews observation - Niek - 2004-12-08

Completely agree. I check the site regulary for news updates (they're pretty fast), but I refuse to read a single comment. The people replying there are ignorant as hell.

what I don't like in amarok - Pat - 2004-12-09

what I don't like in amarok is that it doesn't take into account path name when I make a search in my files, and most of my files are poorly tagged. Also every time I restart it I need to wait 10 minutes for it to rescann my files (more than 9000, half of them are from an smb connection) which not the case with Juk and kaffeine. Other than that it's great

Re: what I don't like in amarok - Max Howell - 2004-12-09

I don't really understand what you mean here, but if you submit bug reports against amaroK at bugs.kde.org, we'll fix them. WRT to rescanning, it only rescans if something has changed in your collection folders. You can turn off monitor changes if you like and it'll never rescan, if you prefer.

Komplaint - spikeb - 2004-12-13

My only complaint isn't even amarok's fault, it is Mandrake's fault - their package of amarok can't lookup tags on the internet. :)