Bite-sized Amarok projects

[Bart Cerneels]

On Tue, Aug 31, 2010 at 05:09, Leo Franchi <lfranchi at kde.org> wrote:
> On Mon, Aug 30, 2010 at 10:02 PM, Valorie Zimmerman
> <valorie.zimmerman at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Mon, Aug 30, 2010 at 12:44 PM, Leo Franchi <lfranchi at kde.org> wrote:
>>> Hey,
>>>
>>> So as some of you know  had some French university students working on
>>> Amarok last year, through a program that Kevin  Ottens(metalworker
>>> extroardinaire) runs. This year we're looking to do it again, and I'm
>>> collecting potential project ideas. Last year the students wrote the
>>> Similar Artists and Upcoming Events applets, as well as the playlist
>>> tooltip feature.
>>>
>>> If anyone has anything they'd like to propose to the students, some
>>> somewhat-self-contained projects that can be accomplished in 3-4
>>> months by a team of 2-4 students, let me know ASAP. A good example
>>> would be adding playlist support to services in the Playlists
>>> framework (so you can see your lastfm/ampache playlists) for example.
>>>
>>> I'll be sending off our ideas in a day or so, so be quick :)
>>>
>>> cheers,
>>> leo
>>
>> I have some small wishes, but have no idea whether or not they are
>> "bite-sized" projects. It would be lovely to have both gapless
>> playback, and cross-fading back. Short of that, how about allowing
>> fade on pause if the main toolbar is in use? Right now, people set the
>> fadeout duration, but it has no effect with the main toolbar.
>
> While these are useful, I think they're a bit small for the scope of this.
>
>> It would be useful to be able to copy a playlist and the tracks
>> associated to a mobile device. It would also be nice to have
>> playcounts from the device scrobbled.
>
> This, however, is a very useful and needed feature, and probably a
> good amount of work :)

Normally it would be quite easy, but the MediaDevice framework is in
the way. So that means reimplementing iPod and MTP devices without the
MD overhead and letting the playlistmanager et al do it's thing. It's
already working for UMS podcasts because it was easy to do outside of
the Media Devices code.

>
>> Also, we have the ability to burn CDs via a script, but it would be
>> nice to generate a playlist, and initiate burning the CD from the
>> playlist menus.
>
> Maybe better "Amarok to k3b export" set of capabilities would be nice,
> though I don't know how much work it would be, it seems a bit light.
>

This can also be done as a playlistprovider, but probably it will be a
bit to convoluted. There is no need to have the overhead of the
playlistbrowser UI for this. It should be implemented as subclass of
Playlists::Playlist and used from the main menu, similarly to "export
playlist", in fact, code wise it's the same.