The-Source.com » KDE http://www.the-source.com Free and Open Source Software News and Opinion Wed, 22 Dec 2010 01:04:49 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.1.2 Synchronicity: Amarok in the Field http://www.the-source.com/2010/10/synchronicity-amarok-in-the-field/ http://www.the-source.com/2010/10/synchronicity-amarok-in-the-field/#comments Tue, 19 Oct 2010 01:38:28 +0000 Jason http://www.the-source.com/?p=1210 I recently had an opportunity to put Amarok to the test: at a 2-day outdoor rock festival I promote, I dragged out bits of my mini-home studio to provide backstage BBQ and after-party tunes.

It's Business Time

The Gear
You can see from my awesome photography the basics: a laptop (running KDE on Arch), a couple of Mackie Monitors, an Edirol UA-25 USB sound card (on top of the left monitor). Emergency boom box on the top right monitor.
You can’t really make out the external WD hard drive, but it’s there with the tracks.
The Plan
Last year, we just backed our cars up and played music. This worked alright, but wasn’t great. For one thing, I wanted to offer a wider selection of music and I wanted to take requests from people. I also wanted people to feel free to get up there and pick music themselves if they wanted.
The Player
I wasn’t sure exactly what audio player to use. I knew several people there used WinAmp (fairly popular at the local clubs), so I thought about either setting it up in Wine, or finding something very close to it.
However, I eventually decided to just stick with Amarok. I would be on hand most of the time anyway – and I wanted to be able to give decent feedback on Amarok under “battle conditions”.
The Setup
There were a couple of issues getting setup: first, it took about 10 minutes for Amarok to scan in all the tracks. Also, at one point someone unplugged the hard drive and Amarok wouldn’t automatically pick it back up when I plugged it back in. I had to re-scan everything back in. Again, took about 10 minutes for about 25K songs.
The next problem I ran into was that I didn’t have any playlists already set up, and a pure “random” playlist was too random. It would jump from NOFX to Emperor to GG Allen to Elvis, which is a bit too disjointed for even the most adventurous listener.
Also, I didn’t have the time to create a long playlist. During the day, I needed to run around a pretend like I was actually doing promoter-type stuff. At night, I didn’t mind diddling with the playlist so long as it didn’t interfere with my drinking too much.
Playlists
It didn’t take long to really dig the dynamic playlist functionality of Amarok.

Amarok - Dynamic Playlist

The coolest feature is how you can customize it. On the left side there, you can see that the playlist won’t bring up non-music tracks like podcasts and audiobooks. At the time, I had all audio under one “Music” folder, so I needed a quick way to omit that stuff.
Then you can play with specifying how much of a genre/artist/album should show up – this was cool because once I had the genres in there I could play with the percentages and change the overall effect of the total playlist.
Of course, you can add/remove/re-order specific tracks as you like, so usually what would happen is I would have Amarok randomly populate a playlist and then tweak it a bit.
It took about 5 minutes to set up a rough and quick basic dynamic playlist with the various parameters to get a decent-enough selection that, although far short of someone actually picking songs, was still good enough to run in the background.
Problems
While the overall experience with Amarok was a success, I did run into a few problems – one of which was fairly severe.
First, the worst: sometimes when skipping a song, the playlist would go crazy with errors and look like it was rapidly cycling through the songs. The name/title popup would very rapidly cycle through the songs in the playlist. A few times, I just had to re-start Amarok. Even worse, one time someone else was trying to set up some songs and this happened. That pretty much put an end to other people playing around with the setup.
The other issues were much less severe – one time after restarting Amarok, the drop-down controls in the dynamic playlist didn’t show the values (such as genre) – even though the sliders retained the percentage and everything seemed to work as expected.
Occasionally, double-clicking on a song in the playlist (to immediately start playing that song) wouldn’t work, and instead the next song or the song after next would start playing instead. Problems with the file? Not sure.
Closing Amarok (I mean actually closing from the system tray) always results in a crash error. Doesn’t really matter, as the application closes, but still…
Interface Annoyances
There are some interface annoyances, though perhaps these just personal preference.
For example, why have a pop-up when the track starts playing when there is a huge-ass portion of the interface already dedicated to the currently playing song which updates simultaneously?
And check out all that wasted space for the currently playing selection! First off, who really cares about that? In this use case, the most important area was either setting up the dynamic playlist settings or browsing the available music.
(Later I was able to tweak some settings and get the above items a bit more to my liking – the original context is getting things working right “out of the box” in an area with no internet connection while you have a lot of other stuff to do!)
It’s easy to add an entire album, but not so easy to remove it – it seems you can only remove tracks individually or by highlighting a range. But albums or artists are “grouped” in the playlist when they are sequential – so it seems like you should be able to remove the entire group.
Similarly, I could find how to remove an artist or album from the local collection without also removing it from disk. I don’t like this, because as a general rule I don’t want my non-file manager applications to do file management. And, if I could have simply removed albums and whatnot from the collection, I could have simplified my dynamic playlist settings.
Tagging

One issue I ran into that wasn’t an Amarok issue was file metadata. I’ve spent various levels of efforts over the years and cleaning up and organizing the MP3 tags. In a moment of synchronicity (and we finally get there!), I opened up my feed reader to see someone talking about puddletag.

Puddletag In Action

Fantastic little MP3 tagger and I’ll be spending some time (although not near enough, I’m sure) tagging and organizing my files better for next time around!
Minor issues with puddletag: Arch recently moved to Python 3, so you’ll need to tweak it to point to /usr/bin/python2. Also, puddletag crashes a bit frequently.
I did try Picard, but couldn’t get it to match up with my needs. Looks nice, though.
One more for the road
skwizard is a nice little M4A->MP3 conversion script that might come in handy if you are organizing your music collection.
Apologies
For some reason, WordPress is destroying spacing and formatting this post crazy-style. I’ve already re-done it once, and fooled with it and it’s still sticking in stupid mce div tags, so apologies for the lack of line breaks.
]]> http://www.the-source.com/2010/10/synchronicity-amarok-in-the-field/feed/ 2 Demystifying Akonadi http://www.the-source.com/2010/08/demystifying-akonadi/ http://www.the-source.com/2010/08/demystifying-akonadi/#comments Fri, 27 Aug 2010 03:32:29 +0000 Jason http://www.the-source.com/?p=1124 Sebastian Kügler has a very informative essay, covering lots of good stuff about Akonadi.

KDE in General

I’m very glad to see this sort of thing, for I have long lamented that KDE is not getting out good information on all the advances they are making.

I’ve been on KDE 4.5 on my laptop since it was released, and just updated to 4.5 on my desktop last night. With only one issue[1], I’ve been very pleased with what I’ve seen. KDE continues to firm up as an integrated whole that have an over-arching sense of continuity, and the level of polish is very high.

People that are still knocking KDE 4 or are hestant to try it based on what they have heard need to give KDE another chance.

Explaining Stuff

For reasons I don’t fully understand, KDE faces a PR problem. When compared to a project like Ubuntu, where the slightest change is fawned over by a hundred blogs, KDE seems to have a very hard time getting the word out.

Mr. Kügler does a great job breaking down Akonadi, clearing up some misconceptions, and showing how it will be used across many KDE applications. Even though I am not a KMail user, I found myself quite interested in that application, as it served as the primary example throught the article.

I’m also especially liking the new plasma email notifier:

I hope this style propagates, because I prefer the fully enclosed bits of information here in contrast to the “faded out folder tabs” of the existing style.

Keep Doing This, Please

Someone please break down NEPOMUK like this - I still don’t understand what that is all about.

[1]KWin keeps locking up on my laptop if compositing is enabled. This is slightly different from the KWin issues I’ve read others are having, so I disabled effects for now until I can delve deeper.

]]> http://www.the-source.com/2010/08/demystifying-akonadi/feed/ 0 Netrunner Blacklight Released! http://www.the-source.com/2010/07/netrunner-blacklight-released/ http://www.the-source.com/2010/07/netrunner-blacklight-released/#comments Thu, 15 Jul 2010 22:37:17 +0000 Jason http://www.the-source.com/?p=1001 Huzzah! So, the official (and huge) ISO for the second release of Netrunner is up, out and available right now! (torrent)

Here’s the distrowatch announcement.

Moving to KDE

The biggest change in this version is moving to KDE for the desktop.

Something important to understand about that:  when I say “KDE for the desktop”, that doesn’t mean Netrunner is running all KDE apps. There are a lot of GNOME (and other) apps in there, because we are trying to present the best selection of applications and for some reason some people like some of the non-KDE apps better.

Still, I really like the idea of mixing KDE/GNOME. The obvious downside is the “bloat” – the Netrunner ISO is ~1GB, which kills the LiveCD route - but the upside is we do have the ability to present a different (and hopefully better) mix of applications.

If you have input on the application selection – especially if you want to “side” with me and push for more KDE! – get on the netrunner forums and let me know what you like!

Spit and Polish

This is a strange thing for me, because as I’ve said many times I have zero graphic design skills combined with near-apathy for how a distro looks out of the box.

That being said, there is someone (Starbuck) who obsesses over the visual end, and I hope his efforts are appreciated. I do like the wallpaper and theme, and again if you have input on the graphical direction, take it to the forums, because I guarantee you it will get read and discussed.

So give it a try already

Enough yakking from me – download the thing and give it a try and if the spirit moves you post some feedback on the netrunner forums.

]]> http://www.the-source.com/2010/07/netrunner-blacklight-released/feed/ 3 The Future of KDE http://www.the-source.com/2010/04/the-future-of-kde/ http://www.the-source.com/2010/04/the-future-of-kde/#comments Wed, 14 Apr 2010 06:02:38 +0000 Jason http://www.the-source.com/?p=755 Bruce Byfield has up an interview with Aaron Seigo on the Future of KDE.

Good Stuff

I like to hear about some of the new stuff for KDE: Desktop changes according to geo-location? Very neat! OpenChange, the “Samba for Exchange”? Much needed!

That’s good stuff – exciting and useful with clear potential.

Confusing Stuff

Confession time: I don’t understand what the hell Nepomuk is. Here’s the main page – front page – description:

NEPOMUK brings together researchers, industrial software developers, and representative industrial users, to develop a comprehensive solution for extending the personal desktop into a collaboration environment which supports both the personal information management and the sharing and exchange across social and organizational relations.

Um, ok?

Here’s the “Project Summary“:

NEPOMUK aims at empowering individual knowledge workers to better exploit their personal information space and to maintain fruitful communication and exchange within social networks across organizational boundaries.

NEPOMUK brings together researchers, industrial software developers, and representative industrial users, to develop a comprehensive solution for extending the personal desktop into a collaboration environment which supports both the personal information management and the sharing and exchange across social and organizational relations. This solution is called the Social Semantic Desktop.

Blah blah blah. Who writes this stuff? The acronym is horrible as well. Whoever wrote this might be far more educated than I am, but probably has much more boring weekends.

So please break this down so people can understand why they should be excited about “the social desktop”. Pictures and/or video preferred.

What does NEPOMUK bring to the desktop? Is it a button? An application? A search engine? A tasty dessert topping?

A sort of a start

If I follow about 4 links I eventually end up at Discover Neopmuk As a User, which is a good start but a bit hard to find and not as compelling as it could be. (It looks a bit out of date.)

This is an example of where I would like to see more effort put into the PR end of KDE. Instead of defending 4.0, move on and break down and hype up some of these new features! They are worth talking about – and they are worth explaining to potential users.

I would wager that the vast majority of current users only have a very vague idea (if any) of Nepomuk, and that potential users have no idea whatsoever. I also wager that fully half of those who DO know about it think it is “Neopunk”, and is some sort of new desktop theme.

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It’s interesting to see that even now, 2 years down the line people are still bringing up the KDE 4.0 release. Perhaps it’s me but I don’t (either as a user or developer) feel that KDE 4.0 was labelled a “Complete” or “User ready” release.

Long Memories

I was just discussing KDE with some other people, and it sure didn’t seem like 4.0 was two years ago! It’s funny how memory works, but those of us in the discussion that had tried 4.0 when it was released remembered it like it was just last week!

Part of my issue with 4.0 was I never saw anything that indicated .0 was an “alpha” or “developer-only” release, or anything like that. Needless to say I was very disappointed in KDE 4.0 – which led to a period of using XFCE (which I found quite satisfactory).

I did try each major release and somewhere around 4.2.somethingoranother I finally felt comfortable enough to get on a pure KDE desktop and live with the bumps. My main desktop is KDE now and I am perfectly happy with it.

Try to explain that KDE is working fine now-a-days though and I get skeptical headshakes. For whatever reason, some people are hesitant to give KDE another try.

On Promotion and Defense

Here’s Mr. Crouch again:

I do agree that with the author in the article above that we really need to push the message to users that may have left KDE since the 4.0 release. KDE 4.4 is a GREAT release which may 3.5 users, I think, will find not only usable but a great step forward.

I strongly agree with this. Please, please, drop the “only idiots thought that 4.0 was for end-users” and similar defenses. (The comments here are chock-full of this).

It may or may not be true, but a lot of people thought that — myself included – and it just needlessly antagonizes people!

KDE 4 right now is an awesome desktop and doesn’t need to retroactively justify the earlier releases.

Instead focus on a clear listing of the improvements and features, and maybe even engage in a little self-depreciation and poke a bit of fun at the 4.0 release along the way. Let people know what they are missing today if they decide not to give KDE another look.

Try to re-capture those that might have left KDE! Don’t burn calories calling them liars – they obviously at one point cared enough to give 4.0 a try, I bet they could be convinced to give 4.4 a try as well –hopefully with a different result!

]]> http://www.the-source.com/2010/04/kde-4-4-positive-spin/feed/ 8 Review: qBittorrent http://www.the-source.com/2009/12/review-qbittorrent/ http://www.the-source.com/2009/12/review-qbittorrent/#comments Tue, 22 Dec 2009 00:10:08 +0000 Jason http://www.the-source.com/?p=353 It was a little rough getting there, but KDE 4 has reached a point where I’m using it on all my machines. The pain was worth it (barely) and KDE is by far the most satisfying desktop environment for my personal use.

That being said, I was running into quite a few strange problems with KTorrent, the default bittorrent client. The number one problem was the vast majority of new torrents I added would have a status of “stalled” and rarely change to a normal downloading situation. This is apparently a known bug in KTorrent. I didn’t always experience this problem – KTorrent worked fine for several months -  but once it started happening it seemed to “stick”, and made KTorrent virtually unusable for me.

So, after trying (but failing) to resolve the bug,  I set out to find an alternative!

In the past, under XFCE, I really liked Deluge. A very solid and feature-rich client with a responsive dev team. However, this time I wanted to find a QT based client.

After a bit of searching, I ran across qBittorrent. Here are the things that were important to me that qBittorrent delivered on:

  • Free Software
  • QT-based
  • Optional Web Interface for torrent control
  • Optional Minimize to tray
  • Stop/Start All Torrents easily
  • Under active development

After using qBittorrent for several weeks now, I can only find one thing to complain about: You can’t seem to view/preview individual files in a torrent. One of things I often want to do is to look at a file in a torrent that is complete, even though the entire torrent is not complete.

Some clients make this very easy, and you can view (or even prioritize) files inside a torrent. I can’t find that functionality in qBittorrent.

This is a fairly serious shortcoming – not severe enough to reject qBittorrent over – but it is certainly something I would like to see added and certainly something I miss.

One thing that I don’t miss, but others might: the queue controls are not as fine-grained as in some clients. Personally, even though I would consider myself a fairly heavy torrent user, I’ve never really found such detailed control necessary. I felt like I should mention it though, because someone out there might like setting up scheduled queues or the like.

Special kudos go to the web interface which is very clean and responsive and is the best such interface I have dealt with.

If you are in the market for a new bittorrent client, especially once based in QT – I highly recommend giving qBittorrent a look. It’s a solid and reliable client with well implemented features and under active development so chances are good it will continue to improve!

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