rullzer

Sander and I are thinking about adding last.fm support to QtMPC. This since the interface for requesting album covers, artist/album info is so much easier then the amazon-api.

For this we found a nice library: libmaia. Beside a small bug I found (which reminds me I have to report it upstream). This works very well. I browsed a little trough the source and it is pure Qt so it won’t limit the platforms QtMPC can run on.

Now of course last.fm support does not limit us to retrieving album covers. We can also submit the played songs to last.fm so the users can keep scrobbling. Now the only thing I could not figure out if submitting played songs can also be done trough XML-RPC? Is there anyone with experience in this are that can tell me if it is possible?

Other than this we are waiting for MPD 0.14, which will include idle (event) support, before go coding like crazy on QtMPC again. This since events will require a change in QtMPC. Good change which will allow QtMPC to have much less wake ups. Which is generally a good thing.

Of course we still do bug fixes.

Yesterday Sander and I released a new version of QtMPC (0.4.1).

However when thinking about some of the features we would like to have in QtMPC we once again got annoyed by the MPD protocol. One of the main issues we had was that it is not event based, or even publish-subscribe. You have to ask for every little detail you want. This is a choice and it is true that this way you do not get unwanted messages thus generate unwanted network traffic.

But we feel that some sort of event based protocol will do a better job here. Lets say in the default nothing is send as well. That way mobile clients can still control the player without receiving anything unwanted. Or just subscribe to events related to playback. This way mobile clients are still supported but again. They do not have to request the status ever x seconds. They just get a message once had changed.

For full blown clients event bases is also a positive thing. For example the reaction time. When adding a new song. Right now this has to be noted by the client when requesting the version of the playlist. A simple message from the server saying playlist current newsong …….. (or something like that) could be send right after the song is actually added. It just makes things easier.

Another thing that kind of bother us that there was no inotify support. This would be great however. Lets say you have a music server running on your server. And add some new music to the collection. It would be best of course if it would find the new music. Add it to the database and notify the clients of a change in the music library.

Now we have not written any code yet. But we are thinking about it. For the music playback part we are planing to use gstreamer. Since well it already supports a lot of audio formats. And why reinvent the wheel right?