Amarok as official Myth-Music replacement

[Colin Guthrie]

Hi,

Halim I. wrote:
> Beeing an avvid Amarok fan in my home office and MythTV fan in my living
> room, I propose that the Amarok and Myth teams invest a couple of hours
> in investigating how Amarok could be tweaked to be the preferred
> Myth-Music replacement plugin in MythTV.
> 
> The benefits for both Amarok and Myth exist on multiple levels. For
> Amarok, it would significantly increase the user-base and usability of
> the excellent work already gone into the program, and for MythTV, it
> would further propel MythTV into being the number one Linux-based
> mediacenter solution.
> 
> (I know MythTV is primarily a TV-centric solution, but when a PC is
> already present in the livingroom, it's no longer sufficient to be the
> best TV recorder/player - it should also be the best music-player)
> 
> As MythMusic appears to be virtually unmaintained, and Amarok is by far
> the most user-friendly and consistent Music-player available on any OS,
> I see only benefits from making a "Myth-port" of Amarok. Both are
> KDE/Qt-based, and I'm sure I'm not alone in wishing I had better
> compatibility in my music-collection in my living room and office (both
> getting the source .ogg/.mp3's from the same NFS share).
> 
> I'm no expert programmer, but would very much like to contribute to an
> AmarkOnMyth-project if any of the expers on this list see the benefit?
> 
> The least we should do is open the item for discussion.

Well I'm a long time amarok and myth user and partial mythmusic developer.

I was responsible for adding "album artist" support to mythmusic and
also did a lot of the development on porting MP3Act into MythWeb to
replace the rather basic implmentation that was there before.

For me, I really like the idea, but I'm not really too sure how the idea
would float with the real MythDevs (I tried some time ago to become the
maintainer for MythMusic but this never really happened - more due to
apathy than anything else I think)

My understanding of the Music component was that it woudl eventually
migrate to the mfd and mfe modules and use DAAP in the middle allowing
music to be started then left running and you could then go to e.g. the
gallery etc. Thor did a lot of work on this a few years ago but the
project kinda died when he stopped developing on Myth.

Now I'm no Amarok Dev, but I'm sure I'd be able to modify mythmusic to
use the Amarok Database structure if desired (for the tunes, smart
playlists and playlists at least).

But in order for Amarok to be a MythMusic replacement it would have to
be hacked to hell and ripped apart so much that it would be almost
unrecognisable. Also some of the things that are perfectly acceptable to
Amarok will not be acceptable to Myth - e.g. more external dependancies,
the whole engines thing adds a huge dependency that would probably not
be acceptable to the Myth Devs (fine on Desktop systems but embedded
players are different bread).

So ultimately I think this is actually the WRONG thing to do. It was
posted recently about the collaboration with other audio players to work
on a DBUS control spec. This is a great idea but I have long advocated
having a similar spec for the backend metadata storage. All applications
Amarok, Banshee, xmms2, MythMusic etc. should be able to use this
backend system to store/edit/query the additional metadata.

Ideally this could be done at the filesystem level, but this is far too
much development for the medium term.

I wrote a long time ago this:
http://colin.guthr.ie/development/projects/metalibrarian.html

which basically describes this intension.

Since I wrote that I found out about Tracker
(http://www.gnome.org/~jamiemcc/tracker/) which would purport to do what
I want (at least eventually). Don't be put off by the Gnome.org address
it really does purport to be DE agnostic. That said, Tracker is really
just another desktop search really. It's effectivly the same as beagle,
kat and another new KDE one that I forget the name of at the moment.


Regardless of whether it's Tracker or something semi-similar, the way I
would prefer this feature to be implemented would be to completely
abstract the SQL in amarok to be a strict API that could then use either
a local database or Tracker/Whatever as the real backend. Obviously the
same could be done for MythMusic etc. too. Thus if both Amarok and Myth
use Tracker then they are effectivly working with the same metadata.

This woudl stnad true for Desktop audio players too. Say I wanted to use
Xmms2 instead of Amarok because it was just more appropriate at that
moment in time, or I'd hosed my amarok install by being stupid and
wanted to listen to tunes when I fixed it etc. then I could fire up the
program and all my music, metadata, playlist etc. were all there! No
configuring, no time consuming scan etc. It would be ace!

So perhaps this is some food for thought and hopefully further
discussion. Apologies if the above doesn't read too well. English is my
first language but it is the 1st of Jan and I am very hungover!!!!


> Happy New Year!

And the same to everyone else!!