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Archive for the ‘Amarok’ Category

Are we there yet?

Thursday, August 12th, 2010

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):

Recapitulation

Monday, June 21st, 2010

This where an intensive few weeks. First the KDE Multimedia Sprint. It was awesome and a lot of fun. I met a lot of cool people and (hopefully) made a few new friends out there. We (me and my girlfriend) stayed 5 days longer in Randa / Täsch for some R&R. Every time I have to leave this place I feel like leaving home. And every time I come back there its just like I was never gone. I’ll miss it.. but in September I’ll be back ;o). Not even a week after I got home the next event was on the agenda. LinuxTag in Berlin. Helping Kuba and his Girlfriend at the Amarok booth. Winning new users, supporting present ones and convincing old ones to come back. I guess we had quite some success. At the end of the event my voice was gone, I had “cleaned out” the Google booth and had a wonderful time with old and new friends! Folks.. I’ll miss you!

KDE Multimedia Sprint

Monday, May 17th, 2010

Soon its time for fun, relaxation, good air, good code and mountains ( which of course means a lot of rock climbing 😉 ). Why that you might ask? Simple:

KDE Multimedia Sprint Badge

I’m very exited to meet all my coding friends in real life. I’ve been looking forward to this for a long time now. Sadly enough this week is crazy like hell. filled with a lot of work for study and all surrounding stuff. I don’t really have the time to look forward and be happy. All the more a good reason for a long earned vacation! See ya all in Randa Fellows!

Amarok Spectrum Analyzer

Friday, April 9th, 2010

I’m currently working on a Spectrum Analyzer applet for Amarok. The applet will benefit from my OpenGL applet template I made a few days ago (see this Post). This way it will also have all the nice functionality the template has (like switching between fullscreen, windowed and widget mode). I’ve already made some nice pictures with fake audio data (since the real audio data currently is hard to get via phonon). Enjoy!

Plasma Applets and OpenGL

Friday, April 9th, 2010

I lately tried to implement an Plasma Amarok Applet that has an OpenGL Widget inside of it. One would think this is a rather easy task since all this new and fancy KDE Plasma stuff smells a lot like OpenGL. Sadly not by a long shot. Implementing an OpenGL Plasma widget normally works this way: create a widget, set the Viewport of the Graphics view to an new QGLWidget and you got it. This approach has 2 Downsides though: first of all if you Viewport is an QGLWidget all you drawing will be rendered via OpenGL. And not only on this applet but on all Applets that share this widget. One might think this is no Problem. But OpenGL handles a lot of stuff quite different then the Qt Implementations of the Graphics Objects. For starters colors. The same color values won’t give you the same output if one is rendered by OpenGL and the others by Qt. So you get strange colors all over the place (and not only in this particular applet but in all the others, because all Amarok Applets share one Viewport). The second problem with this approach is that it will make rendering of non OpenGL stuff and OpenGL stuff at the same time quite hard. You’ve got to watch out for what you’re painting when and in what order and a lot of OpenGL functionality will have to be left untouched because it would mess with you Non OpenGL windows etc. As you might have guessed this was not an acceptable solution. All other approaches I made (render into the QGLWidget and get the Framebuffer from there for example) ended in either an empty Widget or a separate window for my OpenGL stuff. Googleing my ass of and tyrannizing a lot of nice people on IRC finally got me the “right” answer to my problem: I had to render all the OpenGL stuff into a QGLPixelBuffer and then paint this buffer onto the Widget with all the other Graphics Objects. Insane? Definitely! But it works like a charm. And know what? Its quite fast and reliable. I even got it to paint either to a separate Window, the Widget or even fullscreen just by clicking a button. Looks like we’re living in an insane world after all :-P.

Welcome

Friday, April 9th, 2010

Welcome to my new Website. This Blog will mostly be about me and my work. But there will also be a lot stuff about KDE/Amarok development to be found here soon. As I’m working for the Amarok Project and thus for KDE I might be able to give one or two insights to development under Linux and KDE. But I’ll also now and then give a hint about what I (and the other Amarok Devs) am currently working on in Amarok. So stay tuned as this Blog is going to get filled soon ;o).