Wannabe

[Nikolaj Hald Nielsen]

> Hi, all. I'm not sure if this is the right mailing list or if these kinds of
> requests should go on the main one, but here goes:

I think it is the right one! :-)

> I'm a high school student with minimal programming experience (I took a
> couple of Java classes, and my final projects are a report and Tetris
> clone), but (I think) a good understanding of the basics and a love for
> FOSS, Linux, KDE, and most specifically Amarok. I'd love to become an Amarok
> developer (or otherwise involved in the project), maybe through Google's
> summer of code in a few years, but I don't know where to start. I've found
> that usually the easiest way for me to learn syntax or an algorithm is to
> practice it, and I was wondering if there's any small part of Amarok I could
> take a look at and start rewriting (just for practice), or if there's any
> watered-down source/API overview I could look at to start getting an idea of
> how the pieces of Amarok work together.

How to get involved is always a tricky question, as it the best way
almost always differs from person to person. I would recommend that
you join us on irc channel #amarok on irc.freenode.net.

Also, we are currently working on the next major version of Amarok,
namely version 2.0., and setting up a development environment for this
can be quite tricky as it requires that most of KDE4 be built from the
subversion trunk.

Another alternative for getting involved could be to check out
Rokymotion, the Amarok promotion team, at
http://amarok.kde.org/amarokwiki/index.php/Promotion or #rokymotion on
irc.freenode.net

> My other question:
> At the moment, the idea I'd like to see implemented in Amarok (hopefully by
> me!) is Rhapsody support. I don't know if it's in the works or not, but I
> assume not as I haven't seen anything on the developer blogs or main website
> about it. The main issue, I believe, is that it's proprietary, and non-free,
> and also that the last thing Amarok wants (or needs) is to become a DRM (or
> otherwise) music store. So my question is: would this be allowable as a part
> of Amarok, and would it be possible to make it a separate package (like the
> various Amarok engines are in Debian-based and RPM-based distributions)?

Rhapsody support might be tricky. First of all they use DRM which we
have absolutely no technical way of supporting. Secondly, I dot think
it would fit well with the Philosophy of Amarok, or free software in
general to be supporting services that restrict their users with DRM (
This is just my personal view )

There are many other services that we would like to support however,
and work is happening on making integrating these easier in the
future.

Hope to hear from you! :-)

 - Nikolaj