Automatic Lyrics Scrolling ; 2.0 Status ; DBus Interface Requests

[Sébastien Laoût]

Hello all,

For Kirocker Music Display 4.0 Beta 2, I included Lyrics display.
I tested a feature I wanted to try for a long time:
Automatic lyrics scrolling.
In Amarok, it often arrives that a scrollbar appears for long lyrics.
During karaokees, or just when reading lyrics, it's (relatively) painful to 
scroll the view.
The feature just adjust the scrollbar to where it is playing in the song (eg. 
move the scrollbar to the middle if the song is 50% elapsed).
In arround 10% of tracks, this automatic scrolling is not really in sync with 
the music, so I fianlly came to the solution of allowing people to scroll 
manually, and the automatic-scrolling continues from that new position (a 
sort of offset set by the user).
You can test it here:
http://www.kde-apps.org/content/show.php/Kirocker+Music+Display?content=52869
I think this feature would be handy in Amarok 2.0.
It truely made me rediscover my music, and enhance my speech-recognition in 
English ;-)

Then, how is Amarok 2.0 by now? Is it somewhat usable? Is Amarok 2.0 playing 
music now?
After I finish Kirocker Music Display 4.0 (or after Party Lock is done), I may 
want to start porting to KDE 4.
Is it possible now? Or in one month?
If I start making a plasmoid, is it possible for it to show in Amarok? And on 
the desktop as well? Or should I wait for that feature to mature?
Has then new DBus interface been started?

For KDE4, I will implement iPod-6G-like menus to choose music right in full 
screen (and when screen is locked in Patry Mode). I continue to ask to NOT 
remove the query() DBus method (like mentionned in an earlier thread about 
the new DBus interface). Because I will need to do SQL queries to quickly get 
the number of albums an artist has, the number of songs are in an album... 
displayed in blue or gray like on the new iPods, to add more contextual 
information. I will also need to retreive all songs that have rating, to 
propose a smart playlist "Favorite/Rated Songs" (which I strongly think 
Amarok must provide by default), etc. You can't plan all those queries into a 
DBus interface, so please keep the query() method.

And finally, will it be possible for scripts, Amarok plasmoids, or anything 
else, to display sentences like "Song i of n", like displayed on iPods, and 
other music players ("currently playing song number i in a playlist 
containing n songs)?
It is very important in full screen display, because the playlist is not shown 
(the interface has to be kept simple), so we're lost out of context.
But this has to be foreseen in Amarok core.
This "position in the playlist" information should also work for random mode!
And, in the same way, have "Next Playing" songs working in random mode would 
be very cool.
For those two features, Amarok need to decide in advance what tracks will be 
played next, and keep an history of what has been played in the playlist (one 
boolean per item).
Do you plan to do such thing?

Best regards,
Sébastien Laoût.