Amarok plugins, is there any plugin system?

[Jeff Mitchell]

Got this reply from Daniel, forwarding here in case people have ideas.  
Although events scheduling could happen through dcop/dbus + kalarm or 
so, some things, such as auto-volume-leveling when a DJ speaks, are not 
currently possible, and I don't know that they belong in Amarok even in 
a plugin (especially since we don't allow binary plugins outside of 
trunk)...thoughts?

Forwarded message:
Hi!, thanks for the feedback.

There are a couple of radio automation programs that you might be able 
to download through the internet. May be you should check them out and 
get an idea of what I'm trying to do.

First of them, and the one we use most is ZaraRadio (from Zaragoza 
Radio), available at http://www.zararadio.com/. Was written and 
maintained by some Spanish guys. Very nice, but I think I can build a 
better one by combining Amarok's power with the features ZaraRadio 
offers, (specially events scheduling).

And the other one is Raduga, proprietary software for radio automation. 
I don't even know if is still maintained by somebody. It's a little bit 
old and its queue manager system has caused me enough problems.Googling 
a while I found its site: www.raduga.us, it's unbelievable that a single 
license for the complete version costs  US$ 1049, I could by a new 
laptop with original WinXp with that!!!!

Basically, radio station needs a way of scheduling tracks at some 
particular time, (e.g. National Hymn should be broadcasted at 6:00, 
12:00, 18:00, and 00:00). They need their sponsors announcements to be 
broadcasted at some particular time too. They need a way of keeping 
songs playing low while speaker announces the artist and song name. They 
need additional mechanisms in case that something goes wrong. These are 
some of the features that both Raduga and ZR offers. But now imagine 
somebody getting automatically organized its whole music collection of 
dozens of GBs by Amarok. Imagine a listener requesting a song that would 
be found in milliseconds by Amarok's collection manager. Imagine the 
speaker seeking for something to say about the artists and getting its 
answer in seconds just using Amarok's built-in Wikipedia searching 
support.Being not too ingenuous , listeners could also vote in real time 
for their favorites songs via SMS, providing additional income to the 
business. Not even a word about using Amarok's magnatunes store to 
promote new hot albums.

Is it clearer for you?, just write me back if  you need me to be more 
explanatory. Thanks again friend.


Jeff Mitchell wrote:
> Daniel--
>
> What kind of radio automation are you looking for?  What kinds of features do 
> you require?  We don't have a "plugin" system per se, except for media 
> devices and (in 2.0) music sources.  We do have a fairly comprehensive 
> scripting API however that in the stable branch uses DCOP and in trunk uses 
> DBus, so this may actually be enough to suit your needs.  Can you provide 
> more information?
>
> Thanks,
> Jeff
>
>
> On Saturday 21 April 2007, Daniel Peraza wrote:
>   
>> Hi, I would like to thanks to Amarok team for bringing this wonderful
>> player to life.
>>
>> I've been working in the local radio broadcasting industry for a while,
>> we are using a couple of radio automation programs that doesn't satisfy
>> our needs. I wonder if there is any plugin system for Amarok that could
>> let me customize it in order to use it as a new radio automation
>> software, with all the stuff we need.
>>
>> I think the current UI is ok, so I want to find a way to add new
>> features instead of rebuilding the whole source from scratch. I'm good
>> with C/C++ and basic Qt, but I know almost nothing about digital sound
>> processing. So I hope reusing the code would let me to achieve my goals
>> through a high-level API  without bother about implementation details.
>>
>> This differences from other projects which pretend to stream music over
>> the internet. I only want to broadcast the sound output through radio
>> station frequency, which in fact, is almost as easy as keep the original
>> Amarok running on a normal PC.
>>
>> Any suggestion you could give me would be a great help.
>> _______________________________________________
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>> https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/amarok
>>     
>
>
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