Category: YouAmp

After upgrading to natty and discovering Banshee I basically stopped YouAmp development as Banshee basically fulfilled all my requirements and bringing YouAmp on par to Banshee feature-wise would cost me at one year of work – fulltime.

But recently I got more and more annoyed by Banshees slow startup-times and since I wanted to hack on python again anyway I dug out the youamp sources again. So these are the news in the YouAmp version available in my PPA right now:

• SoundMenu integration (only tested on Natty)
• Shares cover-art library with Banshee, to avoid duplication
• Updated translation from Launchpad

So in case you are looking for something more lightweight than Banshee, you can take a look…

If you still remember my small and lightweight media player called YouAmp, you might wonder why there were no recent versions available for an up-to date Ubuntu…

First of all I was quite short on time to spend on the project and pushing an version in a PPA for all supported Ubuntu is quite time consuming. As for me, I still used the karmic version in maverick, which is quite some hack.

Fortunately there is now a package autobuilder available on Launchpad, which automatically builds the current bazaar version and puts it in a PPA. The first benefit of this is that YouAmp is now available for Lucid, Maverick and even Natty through my PPA.

The second benefit is that you get the new features as soon as I implement them, as the package gets updated on every code change :D. And therefore there is already something new in the available packages:

• support for the Application Indicators (necessary for Natty)
• clicking on the timescale now jumps to the location instead of just doing a step

I just moved the code hosting of YouAmp from garage.maemo.org to launchpad and thus also moved the source code management from svn to bzr. And I must say bazaar is really great. I have already had some experience with git before, but I could never really wrap my head around it, but I got the workflow if bazaar in just about 5 minutes.

I do not want to start another VCS war here, since there are already enough of them ongoing – instead I just want to mention some things bzr got right:

• it lets you accomplish your task without getting in your way: if you want just to publish your code on a public repository, it just does that instead of trying to teach you the concept of decentralised VCS
• if you try to do something which requires knowledge of  the concept decentralised VCS, it points you directly to some instructions to what you have to do and why
• it is really greatly integrated with launchpad: you can have the translations on launchpad synced up with the ones in your repository automatically 😀
• it displays only the basic(mostly used) commands as default so you can quickly find the right one

In other news YouAmp now uses launchpad for the hosting, which means you can start help translating it there. Since I have not posted about YouAmp for some time, here is the current status:

• it was ported to Tracker, currently waiting for the 0.7 release to take real advantage of it
• it also uses GtkBuilder now so you can easily change the interface
• there is basic Playlist support, but it has to be reworked
• once the Playlist rework is done, there will be a new release
• and a backport to Maemo4 using the new codebase

There has been a while since I have last written about the progress of YouAmp – my pet music player. Menwhile I realeased the 0.5.x series, which mainly feature the cover view.

the full changelog is:

• do not require restart to accept last.fm credentials
• view the cover if saved along with the music files in the same directory
• details view of the song
• right click menu allowing filtering by album/ artist
• allow to jumping in the playlist with “play this next”

and there is also the first release for Ubuntu; you can find it in my PPA.

As for the next task I am engaging is getting rid of my self written indexer and use Tracker, which will fix some problems with the current design and also is intresting for Frementale.

Yeah, I have missed the YouAmp 0.4.0 release announcement, but since this update is just a few days ahead, I will just merge that two.

So the changes since 0.3.8 are

• support submission to last.fm
• submissions are happening in background and do not block UI
• cursor is moved on shuffeling/ unshuffeling, so you can just unshuffle if you want to get more of the same artist
• the playlist is now automatically updated if you change the music folder
• mp4 and wmv files are now also supported

“the localisation” release is just out

coming with the new Maemo Diablo Release there is also a new YouAmp release. This new release features:

• changed the way to switch the views
• improved browser behaviour
• several playlist orderings supported
• now being launched over d-bus
• bugfixes & code cleanup

It should be available through diablo-extras soon.