amarok 2 questions for linux magazine article

[Nikolaj Hald Nielsen]

> what back end is being used instead of xine?

We are using Phonon as the backend. But as phonon is really just an
abstraction layer, any number of engines can sit belwo it. The default
one is actually a Xine engine, so saying that we are no longer using
Xine is not comnpletely true. There are, however, many other engines
in different states of development. Trolltech ships a Gstreamer
engine, for *unix, a QuickTime engine for OS X and a DirectShow ( If I
recall correctly ) for windows. There is also a cross platform VLC
based engine in the works.

> i have noticed that the list of streams that 1.4 has are no longer in amarok
> 2 will those streams be included into the list of streams?

Go to Tools/Script Manager

Look in the "Scripted Services" category. There you will find a script
called "Cool Streams". run it and go check out the internet tab!

> is there an expected release date for amarok or even a date for when it will
> move into beta testing?

Nothing fixed, but we hope that we can release _something_ after the
Google Summer of Code ends. We are hoping to put out an alpha really
soon though, we just have one nasty showstopper bug left. In the
meantime, the nightly builds are working really well.

> for me to get audio to play on kde3 i was unaware that i needed to download
> jack. will amarok 2 be supporting jackd so that the jackd mixers
>  can be used in conjunction with amarok 2?

?? I am pretty sure that you don't need Jack. This sounds like an
issue specific to the sound setup on your distro!

> if someone wants to help debug and develop amarok 2 what programming
> languages would come in handy to know?

Primarily C++/Qt 4. Although scripts and scripted services can be
written in pretty much anything.

> how fast is teh development of amarok 2 progressing?

That is hard to quantify. In general I would say that it moves along
quite nicely. And with 7 GSoC students starting to work full time on
Amarok in a week or so, things are going to get quite hectic. This
sort of development also has an interesting rhythm. When a lot is
happening and things are changing fast, everyone is motivated to hack
on it, but sometimes things slow down a lot. Then it takes someone to
start doing something interesting again, which often motivates other
developers to follow suit.

- Nikolaj