This is the first maintenance release for the 3.4 branch. Along with minor cosmetic bugfixes it corrects some charset related issues found in the 3.4 release. Anyone experiencing issues with non-ascii characters being imported correctly should
upgrade to 3.4.1. It also corrects an issue with the translations in the 3.4 release. Due to an incorrectly configured script every single translation was german.
Development has started on the 3.5.x branch. I hope to provide more detailed information about the features I would like to squeeze into the next release, however I'm still finalizing the list. The general goal of the 3.5.x release is to implement features that allow you to more easily find the music you are looking for in your current collection as well as provide an interface for discovering new artists. I hope to leverage sites such as
Jamendo,
Last.FM and
Magnatunes. If you are aware of other similar websites please let me know.
The new T-shirts are proving to be slightly more complicated to get created than I had originally anticipated. I hope to have more information on them early next week as well.
As some of you may have noticed the SVN Repository was down from 12h00 GMT -7 till around 15h00 GMT -7. This was due to a routing issue with my hosting companies ISP. I apologize for any inconvenience. Just as a sidenote, development has already started on 3.5 and there have been a few minor bugs found in the 3.4 stable release, as such I expect to release 3.4.1 sometime in the next month to fix the few cosmetic issues.
Better late then never, the stable release of 3.4 has been released. You can download it
here. This release is a little over year in the making. It involved a complete rewrite of Ampache into native PHP5 code in addition to a completely new interface created by Spocky. All 3.3.x themes are incompatible with the 3.4 branch. However it ships with two themes shown below and there are already two user created themes available from the
themes section
Classic (Official)
| Greysme (Official)
|
BlueFlower (User)
| Vegas (User)
|
New Logo
Along with the 3.4 Release I'd like to introduce a new Logo.
Fraz has served me well for the last few years, but it's time for something new. The logo I've chosen was created by
Agnès Champavier. I will be shutting down the Cafepress store that contains all of the old logos and getting new shirts printed locally. Once they've been done I will post more information. Thanks again to everyone who e-mailed me a potential logo. As I stated in the forum post the top 3 people will receive a free shirt with the new logo. I will also be working the new logo in to various parts of the site over the next few weeks.
As promised 3.4-Beta2 has been released,
get it while it's hot. Beta2 has some sweeping charset related changes. In order to generate valid XML files the charset of the filenames and song fields are now strictly enforced. A helper script,
fix_filenames.inc, is now included in /bin. This script will by default look for filenames that do not match your charset defined in ampache and prompt you to rename them. Democratic play has been flushed out and is now feature complete. There are still some UI enhancements to be made in regards to the democratic play functions but everything should work. Speed improvements were made across the board. There is still a lot of optimization to do before the stable release. The XML API has a large number of additional fields and valid queries to accommodate the needs to some of the users of the API.
There will be a 3rd Beta of 3.4..The hopeful release date of Beta3 is sometime mid April. After that I plan on releasing the stable of 3.4 on May 5th, on the day Ampache turns 7 years old. We will see if I can pull it off. I will be taking vacation from March 22nd through the 28th but hopefully I can cram enough Ampache work around that to meet these deadlines.
I would like to get a simplified version of the current
Ampache Logo done. If any graphic artists would like to take a swing and creating a new 'Fraz' for ampache please submit a low and high-rez photo to the
Make a new Fraz Logo forum post. The top three submissions will receive a free shirt with the new design (International Shipping not a problem).
Progress is being made again on the next beta of 3.4. I hope to have a release this weekend. Beta2 will have all of the major functionality I plan for the stable release in it's final form, minus future bug-fixes.
There have been a lot of additions to the XML API and a lot of new applications using the API. Although these applications may not have a stable release below is the quick and short list
Hopefully sometime in the next week or so I'll be adding an additional page that lists all of the known applications that can use Ampache's API. That's it for now, keep an eye out for a release this weekend.
Hello all, It's been a long time since I've posted or made any substantial progress on Ampache. I've got quite a few things at work keeping me busy, thankfully most of them should be resolved by the first week or so of March. In the mean time I've got a few announcements, First off thanks to Flashk who has contributed a good bit of work to Ampache recently. Second I'm going to tentatively set a goal of the 3.4 Stable release on Ampache's seven year birthday, only 3 more years and Ampache will have been around for a decade!
As always thanks to everyone who has submitted bug reports and patches they are very helpful, keep them coming. When reporting a bug for the development version please always make sure that you upgrade to the latest version as it's likely it's been fixed. Thanks!
I've just added data from the
Ampache Last.FM Group to the rightbar. The data is only updated once a week but it gives you some idea of what Ampache users are scrobbling. The data is parsed by a quick little PHP class I wrote,
LastFmXml.class.phps, it requires PHP5 and is far from perfect but it will take a LastFM group XML document and parse it into a nice PHP Named Array. Now back to Ampache!
Tuesday, December 25. 2007
Exactly one month since the last release here is
Beta1. There are too many fixes/feature adds to describe them all. All features from 3.3.x should be back into 3.4 along with a host of new features. For a full list check out the
Changelog. There are still a log of
bugs/features. to work on but the 3.4 branch is pretty feature complete and pretty stable. Check it out, and if you find a bug report it!
This is the second release of Ampache with a working
XML API, the only client initially was
Amarok 2, however now there is a second. Kevin Purdy wrote a very simple Python interface called
Quickplay that uses mplayer as it's player. Check it out!
Sunday, December 16. 2007
As many of you may have noticed there have been a large number of changes to the applications I'm using to support Ampache development. After a long a good history with
Bountysource I've decided to move off of their service. I've since replaced The
Wiki and
Bug Reports with a Trac Instance. The News is now pulled from an
Ampache Blog. All in all I've gotten a lot of positive feedback from these changes, however if you see something weird/missing/broken let me know.
With the new
Wiki I went through almost all of the documents and cleaned them up. I also restricted Wiki Editing to approved users in an attempt to get a little more reliable data in it (as I found some semi-marketing slogan stuff in the old one). In attempt to get these new Wiki Articles a little more exposure I'm going to try to post a few I've recently updated with every news item.
Speaking of Marking stuff, I've created a
Ampache Facebook page as well as a
Ampache Last.FM Group. Once the Last.FM group has it's own Chart I will be adding it to the Ampache main page so people can see what Ampache users are scrobbling!
Wiki Documents
XML API Documentation
Configuring MPD
Enabling Logging (Getting Support)
Monday, November 26. 2007
Better late then never, or at least that’s how the saying goes. I’ve released Alpha3 of the 3.4 branch. This version is another giant leap forward from the Alpha2. Not only are there many new features as described in the changelog but many bug fixes and speed improvements as well. Now that basically all of the features from 3.3.x have been re-introduced to 3.4 I can get back to actually adding new ones!
I’d like to put another call out for help with the documentation. It’s definitely a very weak point in Ampache. I’m going to try to at least get some articles started, but again if anyone willing to help is welcome to it. Last but not least I’ve started looking into upgrading the box that ampache.org runs on. As such there may be a short outage as we move between servers, however I will do everything I can to minimize any downtime.
Thursday, November 22. 2007
This has been an exciting week for Ampache. Thanks to Nikolaj Hald Nielsen of Amarok you can now add an Ampache server as a
collection in Amarok 2. In order to achieve this I created an API for Ampache that provides XML result sets of the Ampache catalog. You can find documentation on the
Wiki. Also this week a patch was added to SVN that allows you to use Ampache with it's integrated Flash Player on your Wii. You do need a newer browser in order to get it to work, see the
Forums for more information.
These additions in conjunction with a few other major bug fixes over the last days means we are very close to an Alpha3 release!
Wednesday, November 14. 2007
Sorry for the delay in the release of Alpha3. I didn’t have it at the point I wanted before I left for France. Now that I’m back in the states I’ve been playing catch up at work so Ampache time is limited. For real this time, hopefully very soon. Spocky has made some amazing progress on the Interface and the new theme (Greysme). As of this moment there is only a little more work on Democratic play and XML-RPC left, then I can get back to adding the new features. Once I get those done I will release Alpha3. By the way things are looking I’m most likely going to do one more alpha so that I can get in all the new features I’ve been wanting before shifting to a Beta stage where I’ll mostly be doing bug fixes.
As with many Open Source Projects, Documentation on Ampache is very lacking. There is a Wiki however not a lot has been written on it. If someone who’s got decent witting skills feels up to the challenge please contact me (vollmer at ampache dot org) and I can provide ‘moderator’ level access and answer any specific questions you might have. Thanks!
Donation money. First of all thanks to everyone who continues to donate to Ampache, I may have a full time job so money isn’t as much of an issue anymore but it is always nice to get a little extra something. Just so you know what your donations are paying for. First and foremost all developers or major contributors are given a piece of swag of their choice from the cafepress store. Second it helps pay for the Co-lo server that Ampache.org runs on. Which on that note I have to thank the other people I’m splitting the cost with as even though I use a vast majority of the server resources they have me pay the same amount as everyone else, a passive donation if you will. Thanks everyone for your support, I’d write Ampache either way, but the donations mean a lot.
Monday, October 8. 2007
I know there hasn’t been much progress on Alpha3 recently, however I hope to get a decent amount done, and release it this week. The only missing feature from this newest version will be Democratic Play. The Alpah3 will also include a new theme called Greysme created by Spocky, as an alternative to the Classic Theme.
Development over the next few weeks will be slow as I will be on vacation in France from 10/16 – 10/27. I plan to attend JDLL 2007 in Lyon, FR. When I return from France I hope to get a large amount done. The goal is to get 3.4 into Beta stages by the end of the year, with a stable release early next year.
Tuesday, September 4. 2007
This release includes all features from 3.3.x except for Localplay/Democratic play. The Classic theme is significantly improved from the Alpha1 thanks to Spocky. Major improvements to the Now Playing code, and LastFM submissions should increase reliability, and correctly handle most any player. Limited Album disk support has been added along with an improved paging system that should lead to a noticeable performance increase.
There will be a third Alpha, and maybe even a fourth (depending on how much I jam into the next Alpha). The next push is to get Localplay and Democratic Play back in place. Then back on to new features. Just a heads up development might slow down over the next two months. It’s crunch time at work, and I’m visiting friends in France between October 16th and the 27th so I have to get ahead before leaving. But once I get back from Vacation, I’ll jump right back on the bandwagon.
Monday, August 20. 2007
This is hopefully, baring any more major bugs being found, the last release of the 3.3.x branch of Ampache. This release includes a few minor security fixes as well as a completely revamped LastFM scrobbling method. Current users of the LastFM plugin will have to upgrade their plugin by going to Admin -> Config -> Modules. This release also corrects some playback issues with Foobar and WMP. It also implements a stop-gap fix for Audacious 1.3.x’s sloppy stream type detection that results in a very large number of repetitive requests. 3.4-Alpha2 has a permanent fix for Audacious 1.3.x
3.4-Alpha2 is coming alongl, depending on work I hope to release it sometime this week. Alpha2 will include all major features from 3.3.x except Localplay,Democratic Play & XML-RPC.
