University project for Amarok

[Leo Franchi]

On Thu, Sep 9, 2010 at 2:06 PM, Christian Wagner
<christian.wagner86 at gmx.at> wrote:
> Hello!
>
> We are 3 students at the vienna university of technology. Next semester we will visit a course where we need to work on a project (or make a new one, but we prefer to work on an existing open source project). Since we all use amarok as music player we thought it would be an intersting project to contribute.
>
> Alltogether the hours of work should be about 300h (but keep in mind that we maybe need to learn the used technologies).
> We have already experience in C++, and 2 of us have also little bit experience in Qt.
> If you have ideas for one or more features we could work on please contact us.

Hi Christian,

Awesome idea :) We have run programs like this in the past, and we
just came up with a list of ideas for other students to look at as
well, so I am pasting it below. Do ask if you have questions, want
clarification, etc!

We should coordinate if you guys choose any of these ideas to make
sure there is no overlap and redundant work, so let us know! You can
also find me on IRC as lfranchi in #amarok if y..ou want to chat more
directly

* Remote playlists support
Amarok has a powerful playlist framework that is currently
underutilized. It allows for pluggable Playlist Providers that can be
used to expose playlists from web services to the local user.
Supporting Last.fm and/or Ampache playlists natively would be a great
way to add a very useful feature to Amarok. The Last.fm/Ampache
playlists would show up in the Playlist Browser and the user would be
able to create/delete/modify the playlists as if they were normal
local playlists (while they are in reality stored on Last.fm, or
Ampache, etc).

* GPodder.net Podcast discovery and provider
The online service gpodder.net helps you keep multiple podcast clients
in sync on your various devices. Amarok's podcast implementation can
be made to sync using the webAPI developed by the developers of the
gnome program gpodder. Data from all gppoder.net users is used to
generate podcast recommendations which can be used in an Amarok
internet service plugin.

* Extending the Automated Playlist Generator with support for
Last.fm/The Echo Nest recommendations
The Automated Playlist Generator (APG) is a new feature in 2.3.1 that
allows users to specify custom rules for generated one-off playlists.
It is powerful and flexible, sort of a Smart Playlists system on
steroids.  It is lacking support for a "similar artists" constraint
that would be informed by the Last.fm or The Echo Nest services---with
the addition of this feature, users would be able to create playlists
that take into account the similarity of tracks within them.

* Designing a new APG UI
The APG (Automated Playlist Generator, see above) is powerful and
flexible, but the UI is severely lacking. As it is now it is designed
for geeks, not for the average user. This project would be mostly UI
design and Human-Computer-Interaction---not an easy task. Designing a
powerful but easy to use and intuitive UI for users to create
automated playlists from constraints would do a lot to expose the
awesomeness of the APG to all of Amarok's users.

* Batch Tag Editor and Auto-Tagging UI
This is one of the most requested features in Amarok, a batch-tagging
feature. The backend code will be easy to write, but the complexity is
in the user interface--designing a usable way to easily tag batches of
tracks is NOT an easy problem. Furthermore, an additional part of this
could be to create a way to "auto-tag" tracks with labels from
last.fm. There is already a Labels Applet that allows the user to add
common tags from Last.fm, but there is no way to automatically tag
multiple songs at once from Last.fm. This could be accomplished as
well.

cheers,
leo

-- 
_____________________________________________________________________
leo at kdab.com                                 KDAB (USA), LLC
lfranchi at kde.org                             The KDE Project