Amarok 2 is really gearing up to become a great piece of software. We are all are frantically trying to find any time we can steal from our busy schedules of work, study, and good-times to put some of that extra special attention to detail and polish on the application.
This week I finalised the third revision of an importer tool to recover your beloved statistics, scores, ratings, lyrics and album art from an Amarok 1.4 installation. After a rather draining and involved process starting off with Ruby, moving to QtScript (javascript) I finally cut my losses and have implemented an extendible framework directly in the application with c++. You’ll be able to retrieve your stats from any of sqlite, mysql or psql database backends. Throw in a wizard, some multi-threaded goodness and an output logger, and we’ve got a snazzy new tool for your convenience.
I put a bit of extra effort in on the side to make sure that the tool won’t go to the land of bit heaven after the release of Amarok 2.0, and incorporated a pretty nifty infrastructure to allow implementations of arbitrary importers. I’m thinking iTunes, Rhythmbox, Banshee, WMP, Winamp et al. If you’re looking for easy entry into KDE development ask me how to write an importer.
There have also been a plethora of other significant updates to Amarok, such as:
- Totally reworked play list subsystems which respects groupings, dragging, extended selections, viewport updates, styles.
- The status bar, it works!
- Locale aware sorting in the collection browser. No more unintuitive placement of your Åwesome ḿusic ṱitles.
- More reliable lyrics retrievals.
- Snazzy new icons.
Stay tuned for Amarok 2 beta 3 which we’ll have out in the wild very shortly.
15 Comments
Will there/is there an importer for data from Amarok 1.5, things like tracks, album artwork, play count and ratings?
I would rather not have to do that all again.
Tim, there never was an Amarok 1.5, so I’m not sure what you mean.
The latest Amarok 1.x release is 1.4.9.10
Where can I get this migration script. I’m using amarok 2 now for quite awhile and a script like this would be like heaven for me.
> Locale aware sorting in the collection browser. No more unintuitive placement of your Åwesome ḿusic ṱitles.
Does this include provisions for non-English articles, along with offering the user a choice to have the first word be considered an article? Kinda like the “sort under various artists” (or not) option in Amarok 1.4. E.g. I’d like to have the German band “Die Ärzte” appear under A, while “Die Happy” should go under D.
Oops, my mistake Mark, I meant 1.4.x (or just 1.x in general for that matter)
Does this script support remote importing? getting my old machine up and running with amarok2 to get my old database would be a lot of work, but if this works in a network i could start my amarok2 on the new machine and importthe from the old,
im using it in a production enviroment so i need a nice transover to amarok2
@Tim:
Did you even read the article? It says:
“This week I finalised the third revision of an importer tool to recover your beloved statistics, scores, ratings, lyrics and album art from an Amarok 1.4 installation”
Btw: there are two things I would like to see in Amarok 2:
- Replay Gain (I know the tool for Amarok 1.4 but I don’t like it because it faids. But I don’t want to hear it faiding.)
- better audio-cd support (I want to add one or two songs to an existing playlist. For me its unpossible in 1.4. Maybe there could be an plasmoid?)
“We are all are frantically trying to find any time we can steal from our busy schedules of work, study, and good-times…”
Work and study, ok, but good-times are optional!
Amarok 2 is looking great. Thanks for doing all the hard work so I can jam out at my PC.
@sebr: Your blog doesn’t remember the user’s info over sessions. That’s a bit annoying
@simba: checkout latest SVN or wait for beta 3
@cyrus: no, “The ” filtering only exists for English. We once discussed making it i18n-able but decided against it for various reasons. Perhaps we’ll discuss this again soon.
Great to see this being implemented. I think the Rhythmbox importer should be high priority, being as it is the default music manager in GNOME.
An hour ago I did installed Amarok 2.0.2 (I was using 1.4.10 before) and… I don’t see your migration script there
It would be very useful for me right now… where can I get it?
@Nexion: In the collection configuration pane under Amarok settings there is an “Import” button.
Oh, i was blind >_< Thanks a lot for your work!
One Trackback
[...] Amarok October Updates [...]