Help wanted to evolve KDEs music players

[Allan Sandfeld Jensen]

On Thursday 30 July 2015, Stefan Derkits wrote:
> Hello Teo,
> 
> On 2015-07-30 13:30, Teo Mrnjavac wrote:
> > Have you thought about picking up and taking over Amarok? A quick look at
> > the commit log for the past few months suggests that it's essentially
> > unmaintained, so if it keeps this pace it's unlikely to stay the
> > swiss-knife of music players as you suggest.
> > 
> > This stuff is hard and time consuming so I think it makes sense to reuse
> > code.
> > 
> > While Amarok does have a sizeable feature set, a good portion of those
> > features are either poorly designed, broken or outdated. Perhaps by
> > taking over as maintainer, yanking out all the cruft and taking UX hints
> > from the VDG you could get a modern and pretty music player up and
> > running more quickly and easily than jumping into the umpteenth "magic
> > rewrite that will fix all things forever". You could cut down on the
> > feature set significantly, and present the features that you don't
> > remove in a much better way.
> 
> thanks for your answer.
> 
> I was definitly thinking about starting (actually I don't feel confident
> enough to create the architecture) from an existing codebase, but
> probably not from the Amarok codebase (except of reusing some parts). I
> also talked with strohel at Akademy who has a better knowledge of the
> codebase and his opinion was that UI & backendcode are too much
> intertwined to allow replacing the UI easily.
> 
> What I don't want to do is to take over Amarok. While it is true that
> Amarok is pretty much unmaintained, I don't think a player that has
> maybe only a third of the features should be called Amarok.
> 
As long as it does the core functionality that users of Amarok uses (indexing 
and playing audio), and the Amarok team are on board, it shouldn't be a 
problem. It IS a large codebase however. Just remember while a simple audio 
player is simple to write, the hard part is the audio indexing and cataloging, 
and dealing with third party plugin for the popular internet audio products de 
jure.

`Allan