GSoC: biased dynamic playlists in Amarok 2 = love

I think it is time to introduce my SoC student to Planet KDE 😉
I blogged about dynamic playlists some time ago. Thanks to Google Summer of Code Daniel is going to do some magic work on dynamic playlists in Amarok 2 this summer and make them even more nifty. But let’s hear what he has to say:

My name is Daniel Jones. I study math and computer science at Western Washington University in Bellingham, WA. This summer I will be working on expanding the idea of dynamic playlists in Amarok to allow any number or weights or biases to be applied. This will allow you to set up a random playlist that prefers tracks you haven’t heard in a while, or prefers certain bands or genres. For parties you can set up more complicated biases to get exactly the right mix of fast songs, slow songs, novelty rap, obnoxious dance remixes, and, just to avoid offending him, a couple of tracks from your coworkers awful death metal band.

And from his proposal:

An example of this would be the condition the track is longer than 3 minutes with a weight of 0.6. Such a constraint would enforce that there is a 0.6 (60%) probability that a given track in the list is longer that 3 minutes.

As far as we know Amarok 2 will be the first player with a feature like this. Rock Daniel!

Everyone please welcome Daniel to our community. I want to see KDE-hugs! 🙂

I am also very happy about Moncef, Tobias, Nicholas and Teo who applied for SoC, could not be chosen due to the limited number of slots and who want to work on their projects as part of Season of KDE now. You guys rock! But more about that later.

Gimme your events!

A few of you might have noticed it already. We now have events served by eventy on the dot thanks to some scripting by danimo \o/

We revived events.kde.org a little during the last few days and started by bringing the calendar back to life (which was 2 years out of date 🙁 ) and integrating it into the dot. This calendar should list all events where KDE will be present be it with a booth, talk or something else.

We already added a few events but of course we cannot know about them all. So please ping me, Claudia or Danimo with name, date, a short description and a link for the KDE related events you will be at.

If you think you should have edit rights on this calendar please ping me as well and I can give them to you.

Let’s make it easier for everyone who wants to get in touch with our community in real life.

And now all together: Thank you, danimo! 😉

While we are on the topic of events:
I will be having a busy May. You can find me and other gearheads at FOSSCamp, Ladyfest, OpenSourceExpo and Linuxtag (I’ll be giving talks at some of them). If you are at one of these events say hello and we can have a cup of coffee.