Google Summer Code

[John Chilton]

Hello,

    I was hoping to submit an application for Google's summer of code
and I wanted to run my ideas by the list. My ideas are related to
podcasting with Amarok, I talked to eenam on the IRC channel and it
sounds like it sounds like all of the 1.4.5 features compile on 2.0
but no one is in charge of getting them working and testing them.  So
the first part of the project would probably be just be to throughly
test and debug all of the existing features on Amarok 2.0, unless that
gets done in April. I would also like to implement the following
features:

-----------------------
- Ability to cap the number of simultaneous downloads. They all just
crawl when downloading 10+ podcasts. Also it would be nice if the
downloads could be paused, all of them simultaneously and each
individually

- Ability to hide individual podcasts in a feed. Its nice to be able
to cap the number of podcasts shown and to hide feeds into folders,
but it would be a lot easier to manage large collections and more
aesthetically pleasing if you could just hide individual podcasts in a
feed also.

- The biggest time saver would be the ability to synchronize a podcast
collection with a media device. I spend probably an hour every week
deleting podcasts and marking them as listened to, etc. and I have to
do it twice, once for the local collection and once for my Ipod. It
seems that the Ipods handle podcasts differently then normal
playlists.

- I think with ITunes most people find new podcasts though the ITunes
interface. Implementing something like this for Amarok builtin browser
would really help novice users, we can pull data from podcast alley,
digg's new podcasting section, NPR, or whatever.

- Once every few weeks I actually have to go into the directory the
podcasts are stored in and delete orphaned files that Amarok doesn't
have a in its database, but that didn't get deleted. I am not sure how
this happens, but my guess is that this is what happens when Amarok
crashes while downloading podcasts. The easy fix might be to have
Amarok sync its podcasts with its directory structure once a week,
another more robust fix might be to keep a log of files Amarok is
downloading with atomic additions and removals, and then delete any
file left on this list when Amarok starts up.

- A lot of times I will have dozens of podcasts in the queue to
transfer to my media device and Amarok will crash and so I loose those
changes. It seems like this queue is only saved when Amarok closes,
but I think it be saved more frequently than that. Another thing,
-------------------------


Amarok is obviously a better music player than ITunes, I think if
these changes were made to Amarok it would be unarguably a better
podcasting client than ITunes also. What do people think, is this
worthy of a Google summer of code project, does it have a chance, what
other ideas do people have, what ideas from the above list are
unimportant or already implemented?

Thanks for your time all.

John Chilton - chilton at cs.umn.edu
www.jmchilton.net/