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<p>Hello... </p><p>Okay, so I'm fairly certain the e-mail list is the best place to raise discussion about this, as IRC seems a bit fleeting for what I have to say. First off I think it's inevitable that Amarok is going to completely obliterate iTunes marketshare once Mac OS X and Windows versions are released. I've been using Amarok for some time now, and watching its growth has been nothing short of impressive and delightful. There are so many areas I can easily sell people on what a great music program it is, and it truly is somewhat of a killer app for GNU/Linux.<br /><br />In short, I want to make a feature request for version 2.0; something that wouldn't require a new feature being created from scratch persay, but taking a preexisting project and merging it with the Amarok codebase. I feel as if this is the best route of action when compared to other options for reasons I will explain below, and I feel very strongly that this is something that will raise the appeal of Amarok to a significant degree. I feel as if the projectM visualization plugin should be part of Amarok itself, shipped with the project in addition to the already existing libvisual support (so people can add their own plugins of course).<br /><br />First off, why do I feel as if this is something that should be bundled with Amarok in the first place? Well, I'm a college student and a big Free software advocate: I switch anyone of my peers' computers over to GNU/Linux from a proprietary operating system for free and promise free tech support after that. Through doing this a number of times to various people's desktops, MacBooks, and Dell/HP/whatever laptops, I've gained an increasingly rounded sense of what is solid about the GNU/Linux desktop experience in 2007 and what needs more work. I'm very glad to say that Amarok is pretty much universally loved over iTunes, especially after I bowl them over with the list of features it has. Unfortunately only those prepared to make the switch to GNU/Linux get to use it, but that will change in time.<br /><br />There are a number of things that I've noticed are extremely pivotal in enticing people to switch to GNU/Linux: Beryl is likely one of the most significant projects of recent times that makes it very easy to show people the benefits of the Free Software community and development process if explained in the correct context. People always ask what it is I'm running to be able to do such advanced and cool effects with my desktop. But aside from that, the second most asked-about element of my software configuration is undoubtedly my music visualization program. I run Debian and have the libvisual and libvisual-dev packages and downloaded and compiled the projectM 0.99 source against the libvisual headers so I can use it with Amarok. I choose projectM because before Debian+Amarok I ran Windows 2000+Winamp and got a healthy taste of Milkdrop within Winamp and the existence of a Milkdrop reimplemantation for non-Winamp platforms aided my decision to switch to GNU/Linux. Anybody who has seen Milkdrop/projectM (they look essentially the same and use the same .milk preset files) in action pretty much agrees hands down that it's the best music visualizer around.<br /><br />See these for screenshots (still images do this no justice though, one must experience it with the element of time):<br />http://xmms-projectm.sourceforge.net/shots.html<br />http://www.milkdrop.co.uk/screenshots.htm<br />http://www.nullsoft.com/free/milkdrop/screenshots.html<br /><br />I leave projectM on a lot in my dorm, and one of the first things that people usually say is "Wow, this is wwwaayy better than the iTunes visualizer." I smile, and reply that yes, it is... and it's Free Software to boot! I then explain to them about Amarok and how much better of a music program it is, drawing the analogy that projectM is to the iTunes visualizer as Amarok is to iTunes itself. I get asked a lot if my visualizer only works with Amarok, or if they can get it as well without first switching operating systems. Now, projectM is indeed cross-platform so I usually reply with the truth that you don't need Amarok to run it, but the problem arises when people do get Amarok and they expect it to also have the awesome visualizer that they saw I had. It ends up that I have to manually compile and install projectM for everybody that requests it, which is certainly a pain.<br /><br />Now there are a couple ways to alleviate the problem that I'm experiencing, one of which is to get projectM included in the libvisual-plugins package for common distributions like Debian and Ubuntu. This would mean people would only need to install that package to get projectM working with Amarok, a far better scenario than exists at present. But through my experiences seeing the reactions of literally hundreds of people to this particular visualizer, I can't help but try and relay my observations and try to put the message across to the developers of Amarok that this is a *huge* deal for a lot of people. Sure, there are many people who don't care one bit about music visualization and would never use it in the first place, but there is an unignorablely large section of people (in my experiences I'm mostly talking about the 17-24 year old demographic, but damn that's an important one in terms of technology) who are really attracted to such a well-built visualization plugin.<br /><br />To have projectM built-in to Amarok 2.0 so that it's available out of the box as Amarok's own adopted visualizer in the precompiled binaries for GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows would be huge. It would be just another element that directly relates to digital music playing where Amarok would flatten the competition hands down, something that would only hasten Amarok's already inevitable dominance in the digital media playing software world. projectM itself is GPL/LGPLed, and there are hundreds of .milk presets that are both included with it and many many more that can be downloaded from the Milkdrop website that work jhttp://www.milkdrop.co.uk/screenshots.htmust fine with projectM itself<br /><br />I'm still learning how to program, otherwise I'd add it in myself, but I want to make the case that from my increasingly extensive firsthand experience in a university environment, this is a feature people care about, and this is hands down the best visualizer to adopt for Amarok's default release. I'd like to hear what the various developers think about this, about the technical feasability along with any more political reasons that might be had to avoid or embrace this idea. I love Amarok and only want the best for it, and I think this would be an ideal addition to an already stellar project.<br /><br />Keep going strong on the 2.0 release!<br /><br />--dexomsrc</p>
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