Moodbar in Amarok 2.0?

[Jeff Mitchell]

Soren Harward wrote:
> On Thu, Aug 21, 2008 at 8:30 AM, Daniel Winter <dw at danielwinter.de> wrote:
>> And what relevance has that patent in the rest of the world? Europe, china and
>> so on? (well I am not a lawyer so I do not know)
> 
> Look, I dislike US software patents as much as everybody else in the
> FOSS world, but the fact stands that in at least some part of the
> world (which is home to a large number of Amarok users) that code is
> not going to be usable.  It might not even be permissible to store the
> code on servers located in the USA.  These are both significant, but
> not insurmountable, barriers to development and distribution.
> 
> If someone outside the US would like to take on maintaining the
> moodbar, I don't think any of the Amarok developers would mind.  But
> all I hear right now are inquiries about its status (or complaints
> that it hasn't been ported), so I'm being a little pessimistic that
> given the patent problem, I doubt that it will get picked up any time
> soon.

What this really means is that the situation is similar to MP3 support:
Amarok can work with it, but cannot be distributed with it.

If someone wants to rewrite the moodbar using the analysis covered by
the patent, it must be done in such a way that it can be plugged into
Amarok independently, yet, if plugged in, work seamlessely.  This
happened somewhat in Amarok 1, but as Mark said, the integration wasn't
great.

An aside: if Soren and I team up to make a single external app for both
AFT tagging and fingerprinting, which will likely happen at some point,
then the same app could be used for moodbar calculation, methinks.  It
would save a lot of time and keep from there being a proliferation of
helper apps.  I'd also like to see the mood information stored in the
files, if they are small enough.

--Jeff