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.
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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!
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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!
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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.
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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.
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I’ve decided to go ahead and switch the demo over to the 3.4 Branch code. This means there are a few more dead ends, then there were with the old demo, but at the same time it gives you a chance to see the new code without having to make the leap personally. I’m waiting on some other people for information before releasing the Alpha2 of 3.4. Worst case I hope to release it at the end of this week. The Alpha2 represents a lot of hard work by Xgizzmo & Spocky to whip the HTML & CSS into shape.
MyStrands recommendation and, find missing tracks support has been added in the latest SVN, and will exist in the Alpha2 release of 3.4. This is just the tip of the iceberg for additional meta-data in Ampache. At the same time I am taking great care that these additional sources of meta data are not only optional, but not automatically run so that Ampache remains the lean mean audio streaming machine that it is.
Many people have been complaining that Audacious 1.3.x makes a mess of the Now Playing, and statistics in 3.3.x. The next stable release will include a Office Space style fix for it. The 3.4-Alpha2 release will include a true fix for the problem. It is caused by Audacious 1.3.x not looking at the passed mime type and connecting to the webserver 3 * (# of plugins) until it guesses the right one. This can be even worse if you load mime information on playlist load (for all objects), wherein it will be (3 * # of plugins) * # of items in playlist. Audacious 1.2.x does not have this problem and I’ve been told by the Audacious developers that 1.4.x will do a ‘best guess’ based on the passed mime type.
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I’ve just released what I hope to be the last ‘patch’ release for the 3.3.3 branch. This release includes an addition of LastFM album art searching as well as improved Folder album art gathering. There are also numerous bug fixes. I strongly recommend anyone using earlier versions to upgrade.
3.4 Is still coming along well. There are only a few more major components to fix before I can release Alpha1. Following the philosophy of release early, release often the initial 3.4 Alpha1 release will not have Democratic Play or Localplay support. Never fear they will be added back in after the Alpha1 release, however I’d like to get people using trunk again so that I can get feedback on the changes before I’ve gone very far.
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For those of you pulling from SVN you’ll notice that the IP address for svn.ampache.org changed today. I’ve been needing to change the IP for sometime now and took advantage of some server maintenance and a cert renew to do everything at once. The new IP is 64.34.213.35.
On the subject of SVN versions /trunk is starting to shape up. The two remaining major features that I still need to fix are User management and Preference management. Once I’ve fixed those two it should be mostly usable, however there are a large number of secondary features that are currently not working in it. I’m working as fast as I can to get it back up and running.
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Ampache 3.3.3.1 have been packaged for the Mandriva Linux distribution by Erwan Velu. Ampache will be available in the “contrib” rpm repository for cooker & 2008.0 release of Mandriva.
People must first add the contrib/backport rpm repository by using the easyurpmi website (http://easyurpmi.zarb.org/). Select your distribution (Mandriva 2007.0 or 2007.1), your arch (x86 or x86_64) then select the “Contrib/Backport” item an at least choose your closest mirror. Once it’s done, just use your favorite rpm installer (urpmi or drakrpm) to install ampache : i.e “urpmi ampache”.
Progress has started on 3.4 and I everyone who’s seen the new browsing methods loves them. I have one more major section to create, the playlist management, before I can get back to fixing everything I’ve broken in the current SVN trunk. This new version is a little heavier on the AJAX/Javascript but I am doing everything I can to maintain the lightweight and simple feel of Ampache.
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Many of you may have noticed that there hasn’t been very much development in the last few weeks. It has come time for a pretty heavy re-write of Ampache to bring it up to date with the latest versions of PHP. This need for a re-write has given me an opportunity to investigate other languages as a base for Ampache, specifically Ruby (using the Ruby on Rails framework). I have some major reservations about moving away from PHP, mostly because its worked so well for me, and I haven’t found anything that compares to the getid3() library. Regardless if I stay with PHP, I will be making the min requirements PHP 5.0, which is included in Debian Etch.
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