What I hear a lot from users lately if I’m talking about my current projects for Amarok: “Are we there yet?”. I’m mainly working on three things at the moment: A spectrum analyzer applet, a visualization applet and song fingerprinting. Today I’m happy I can say to at least one of this projects (and maybe even a second one) the answer is: “YES we are!”. I’ve just pushed my last changes to my spectrum analyzer applet. Sadly it won’t go into trunk as of now because bugs in then xine and vlc backend are preventing it from working correctly. If you want to try it out anyhow have a look at my gitorious repository (Be warned! The applet currently only shows data if you are using the xine backend and with that you WILL get crashes as soon as you stop or end the current song in any way!). The second project I might give a positive report about is my fingerprinting code. It works. Suffers from the same problems as the analyzer though (use of xine backend will crash, use of vlc will give no data). If you’re feeling adventurous you can also find this code in my repository. If you find any bugs or stuff that bother you (or just want to say how you like it) don’t hesitate to contact me. As a little appetizer I’ve made some nice pictures of the analyzer (this time with real music input):
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- Bar without decor
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- Bars with peaks
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- Bars with peaks and wave
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- Wave
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- 3D Waves
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- Waterfall
I am glad to hear that someone is finally working on bringing visualization to Amarok 2.
Honestly this was one of the reasons I joined the Amarok Dev Team. However I had to do some low profile work (this analyzer is part of that) first to get to know the Amarok and phonon code in order to get such a big task successfully done ;o). Especially I had to write a template applet which makes it possible to use OpenGL stuff in the context are (not that easy believe me). The spectrum analyzer was more like a project that came naturally because I already had a valid OpenGL context hat my fingertips and the audio data was grabbed for it anyway. If the work is progressing the same speed it has lately visualization will be included in Amarok in the next 2 releases ;o). Though this doesn’t depend only on my work.