Lowblog

Hi all,

QtMPC development has stalled a bit due to other activities. But I’ve cleaned up all the spammy trac tickets, so only the valid ones remain. Other than that, we’ve received some patches written by users which I’ll try to commit soon and Roeland secretly told me he’ll start doing some development as soon as he finds the time… ;)

Because of the massive spam, I’ve currently disabled the creation of tickets for anonymous users and since there’s currently no way of registering yourself that means you can’t create tickets anymore. You can still post comments on the weblog or use the contact information in the about dialog of the program. We apologize for this, but cleaning up spam is a waste of time, but we’ll look into other solutions.

I am honored to announce the release of QtMPC 0.5.0
So why a 0.5.0:

• last.fm support:
  • Album covers and general info
  • Now Playing
  • Track Scrobbling
• KDE 4 support
• Use your theme icons
• Fully intergrated in KDE
• And much much more
• Dir View

This are the changes with the largest impact. Of course we fixed many bugs and did optimizations where possible. But for the whole list check the CHANGELOG.

Since we now have last.fm support why not join our last.fm group?

Also we did a reorganization in the subversion repository so svn users should switch to http://qtmpc.lowblog.nl/svn/trunk

And now what you have all been waiting for:
QtMPC-0.5.0 (source)
QtMPC-0.5.0 (windows installer)

The last few weeks I’ve been working getting QtMPC to integrate with KDE. Obviously, since QtMPC is written in Qt4 this means KDE4 support, it won’t work with KDE3.

If you want to try this out, grab the latest checkout and read the INSTALL file, basically you’ll need cmake and of course KDE4 installed, or at least kdelibs.

At this point most of the user interface is “ported” to KDE, the only things that needs some work is the system tray. It currently uses KDE icons, but it’s still a QSystemTrayIcon which isn’t that bad, the only thing is that it doesn’t honor the notification settings KDE has.

I guess the most notable changes for KDE users are to be found in the menu bar, the dialogs and in general the icons used throughout the application.

P.S. KDE support in QtMPC is 100% *optional*

As a Christmas present for all the Windows users out in the world that want to run QtMPC (Hi dad!) I have created a nice .msi file so you do not have to install the whole Qt toolkit and build it yourself. It was a bitch to get SVG support but everything works now!

Grab the msi file for version 0.4.1 here.

So now there is absolutely no reason not to use QtMPC when you are running windows!
I have created a new component in the trac so problems with the installer can be reported.

Enjoy!

So we got a request for a dir view in QtMPC. We already had it on the todo-list since January 2008. So it was about time I got myself to write the actual code. The timing could not be much better since Sander just finished the new design so adding a new tab for the Dir View was a piece of cake.

The code is (like always) available in svn. Ready for you to test!

Right now drag/drop does not yet work in the dir view. Also no searching. No custom sorting. So a lot can still be done. But the basics are working! So enjoy playing directories on Christmas.

Hi everyone,

I’ve been working on improving the layout/design of QtMPC and currently I’m quite satisfied with the result. Basically we’ve moved to a more Amarok style look, with a tabbed dialog at the left which we’ll use to display context information about the song being played (currently only an album cover), the music library and in the future we plan to add a directory view.

It’s in the current source code, so grab a fresh check out and please give feedback if you find something that could be improved.

We have just released version 0.4.1 of QtMPC. For a complete list of changes see the changelog. Yes we finally have a changelog!

For those of you that just want the highlights:

• We have converted the mpdstats and mpdstatus to singletons which allow us to make easy use of it trough the whole program.
• Some GUI improvements, at least we like to think so
• Some small performance gains

As always we have a nice tarball for you:
http://files.lowblog.nl/qtmpc/QtMPC-0.4.1.tar.bz2

As always please provide us with wishes or report bugs:
http://qtmpc.lowblog.nl/newticket

Now go grab the tarball while it is still hot!

Hi everyone,

As probably is clear when you read the title: QtMPC 0.4.0 has just been released!
So what’s new? Actually quite a lot, but I’ll summarize the most significant changes. For instance, a lot of work has been put into caching, especially the fact that the whole music library is now cached locally using an XML file results in a quite nice and noticeable speed-up. Also album covers are cached and thus will display instantly. Another major thing is drag-and-drop, items from the music library can be dragged to the playlist and items in the playlist can be re-ordered using the drag-and-drop. Finally, it’s now possible to use your mouse wheel to adjust the volume while either hovering over the volume slider or the tray icon.

But, for the complete list, take a look in here: http://qtmpc.lowblog.nl/query?status=closed&milestone=0.4

Most important though, you can download the release here: http://files.lowblog.nl/qtmpc/QtMPC-0.4.0.tar.bz2

Better start listening some music now! ;)

As Roeland made clear, we’re back to business with regard to QtMPC. So let me tell you something about the stuff I finished today.

• Adjust volume with mouse wheel
• Album cover caching

I guess both items speak for themselves and don’t need much explanation. Anyway, you can now hover over the volume slider and adjust the volume with your mouse wheel. As for the cover caching thing, when covers are downloaded from Amazon, they’re now automatically stored locally as well (on hard disk) to make loading them again next time faster. The images are stored in $HOMEDIR/.QtMPC/ , so if want to delete them for any reasons, that’s the location to sweep.

The whole album cover thing is a bit hacky at the moment and I’d like to make a cleaner interface for it in the future with well defined functionality, but for now it works pretty well, if you don’t look at the code that is… ;)

Anyway, let’s see if we can roll a new release any time soon…

Since I started working on QtMPC again I have been working on ticket #25 which in a nutshell is saving the music library to disk and reading it from disk. This of course is only done when the music library is still the same.

The file is saved as an XML file. This is mainly because then it will work on all operating systems supported by Qt and we won’t have to think about a binary format. However this means we need to create a nice DTD file.

Now I have tested it on my own running setup. And at least it does not show a drop in start-up time. Although it is hard to measure. However over at my folks where the mpd database contains over 250 gigabytes of musics the normal start up time is over 8 seconds. So there I will be able to measure the result. In the mean time feel free to report any experiences.

Right now the file is saved to :homedir:/QtMPC/database.xml. This is not yet adjustable but it will be some day :) But until that day update to the latest revision and compile it!

Don’t forget to report any experiences or add tickets with wishes so we know how to improve this app.