amaroq by regomodo

RoadMap

Due to my constant frustration with Phonon, at least PyQt's implementation of, I shall be switching to PyGstreamer. There will not be any new features for the next release, just porting what exists to PyGst.
After this the main things to be achieved in the following release are:

Audio-CD playback

Podcast support

Saving and loading playlists

News

27th October 2009

Version-0.2.3 released. Fixes issue(26) caused by 0.2.2. It boils down to a Phonon.State not working as expected.

26th October 2009

Version-0.2.2 released. This release has a few new minor features and bug-fixes. Most of the effort was refactoring code and trying to figure out issue(25).

New features:

Media Library building can be cancelled.

The highlighted track in the playlist will always be played if played by pressing the playButton.

Bugs fixed:

Unneccesary multiple on_playBttn_toggled calls.

When a track is stopped by the user, a long wait to play the same track occurs.

Track column in playlist was being fixed to a width for no reason

Wikinfo and cover art was only being set if the wikiinfo tab was visible in certain cases.

Method of a custom track_changed SIGNAL/SLOT from Phonon was awfully inneficient and being called by multiple items when no needed.

There is one major issue outstanding, issue(25). It happens rarely and unpredictably.

Old News

ScreenGrabs

Capabilities

• Interface Familiarity: The interface strives to match that of Amarok-1.4
• Playlist Sorting: Tracks that are added to the playlist will be played correctly if the order is altered
• Media Library: Tracks can be added to the media library via sqlite which will be loaded on startup.
• Wikipedia Information: The wikipedia page of the currently playing artist will be displayed
• Album Art: The Album Cover of the currently playing track will be displayed
• Multiple Codec Support: Although not final, flac, ogg, and mp3 are currently supported.
• Systray Implementation: On each track change the track info will be displayed as a systrat notification. It is possible to minimise the app to the systray by clicking on the icon. It is also possible to paus/play the track by middle-clicking on the icon.
• Track Seeking: Basic functions such as play,pause, next and previous are possible. Seeking of the track by dragging the progress slider is available.
• Track Metadata: By using tagpy the metadata of the tracks will be added and retrieved from the database.
• Gapless Playback: Cross-fading is not yet possible but in the works
• Playlist Manipulation: Track(s) can be removed from the playlist
• Random Playback: Tracks in the playlist can be crudely randomised in an infinite loop
• Media Collection Filtering: The media collection tree can be progressievly filtered
• Playlist Searching: The current playlist can be searched and matching results are highlighted

Dependencies

PyQt4 - ver-4.5, tagpy, lxml.

Ubuntu Issues

Ubuntu Karmic

I have just tried this application in Ubuntu Karmic. If you install python-qt4 you have to manually install python-qt4-phonon, phonon-backend-xine, and libxine1-all-plugins. For some reason none of these pull in the other which is odd. Do not bother trying phonon-backend-gstreamer as that backend appears to be broken.

Although the xine-backend works it is very buggy for anything but oggs. Mp3s will play but stutter and the pause/play button has a very delayed effect.

Ubuntu's Taglib, which tagpy is built on, appears to be very picky and complains about files a lot. I'm not sure if this is because the Ubuntu package maintainers have compiled it with debugging enabled.

Volume interaction i.e. muting and varying the level, is delayed by almost a second.

The final thing i've noticed is that Karmic has made the placing of icons in buttons peculiar. The play/pause button has caused the icon to be offset to the right.

Note: I rarely use Ubuntu and understand that if this application is to ever get notice it is going to have to play well with Ubuntu. However, I have no patience to work with something that is so buggy, perhaps caused by distro specific patches, that brings it far from the vanilla source. On Funtoo with near vanilla source I have absolutely none of the issues that this app running on Ubuntu does. Therefore, I am only going to spend my time developing on vanilla libraries and tools. It's up to somebody else to bodge the app to work on Ubuntu.

Ubuntu Jaunty

Don't bother trying this application with Ubuntu 9.04. The Qt4 and PyQt4 package versions are too old.

License

Gplv3

Authors

Jon Noble

Contact

jonnobleuk @t gmail dot com

Download

You can download development project in either zip or tar formats.

You can also clone the project with Git by running:

$ git clone git://github.com/regomodo/amaroq