GSoC Status Update – Week 6

This is a status update for my Google Summer of Code 2013 project - implementing advanced statistics importers for Amarok. Please read the first post if you would like to know more about the project.

This week, I was meant to implement iTunes importer, bringing the total of created importers to two.

So, as you can see, I kind of overshot my goal here.

What happened is, importers are now really easy and fast to implement. The only really piece of programming required is to retrieve track data from whatever source (in case of both iTunes and Rhythmbox the source is an xml file), and all the rest is just filling the blanks.

As is visible on the screenshots, the icon used for iTunes is a generic double eight note used elsewhere in Amarok as well - it will probably stay that way. The fact is, Apple does not grant a blanket license for usage of their logos, and different countries have different notions of what consists of "fair use" of such an icon. So there's that.

I also managed to implement a prototype (i.e. it's almost done) ID3v2 importer, reading POPM (Popularimeter) frame for statistics and otherwise acting as a wrapper for existing collection's track. I'm conflicted about its usefulness, though, as Amarok already reads POPM on collection rescan provided that corresponding FMPS tags are not set - if they are, they have precedence. Besides initial importing, which should be doable by simply removing FMPS tags and doing a full rescan, there's also question of updating these statistics, but I've yet to find a prominent media player using POPM as a primary way of storing ratings and playcounts. And for a good reason - to begin with, there's no standard as to what different ratings mean (the values range from 1 to 255), and POPM is an ID3v2 feature only - not that useful from media player's point of view.

So, the future is now. Some more importer targets can definitely be expected (Clementine? Foobar2000? I guess I'm taking requests!). Aside from that, I'm still not done yet. Here's a short, by no means comprehensive list of what I have yet to address:

• code deduplication: right now declarations for importers' classes alone can easily be longer than actual logic,
• Amarok 2.x importer,
• robustness, error handling: if anything, all plausible errors should cause a warning in the terminal (and definitely nothing should break),
• tests: this can take some time to adapt to the new framework,
• two-way synchronization: this may very well introduce its own set of problems, with synchronization and whatnot.

As always, you can check out my progress on my public Amarok clone. The branch is named gsoc-importers.

Thanks for reading!