There should be a new version of Mussorgsky available in Extras-devel.

Changes mainly in the album-art part of the program:

• Allowed to choose manually the album art for a specific album
• Moved “Automatic retrieval” of album art to a menu option
• Better information in the automatic download dialog
• Changed the first screen layout/buttons and added a window for the album art.

On the technical side, more things are asynchronous and i discovered how elegant is the code using the “yield” statement. As usual, feedback is welcome.

Back in Helsinki, after a week in Gran Canaria Desktop Summit. This year it was great, and i enjoyed it a lot probably because i am more involved in the community.

It was a pretty active week, starting with my talk on Sunday in the cross-desktop track (slides). I explained there what did we do in tracker 0.6 , and what do we plan for tracker 0.7. This can be interesting for maemo-fans, as far as tracker 0.6.9x is the version available in Fremantle, and 0.7 is in the roadmap for Harmattan.

During the week, i was talking with some of the Zeitgeist project people. In few words, Zeitgeist will monitor and store the activity of the user, analyze it and extract relations between documents, applications, tags, etc. (E.G. “every time i edit doc1, i read webpage2″). Tracker has already the information about documents and applications, so instead of building their own database, they can set the “relations” directly into it. Zeitgeist is one of the hype projects now in GNOME and i am very happy to see Tracker participating in such an ambitious idea. [Note for hackers: if the things work fine, be ready to write a maemo UI for it!]

Taking advantage of the Akademy-GUADEC co-location, we (tracker team) also had an informal meeting with Sebastian Trueg, from the Nepomuk-KDE project. We are sharing ontologies and we agreed on how to distribute them and organize the documentation. The idea is to have a shared-desktop-ontologies package for all desktops and platforms with the nepomuk core ontologies, allowing applications to install extensions.

And finally after some parties and more talk with developers, i had another presentation in the Spanish GUADEC, explaining again tracker (slides in spanish), but this time showing the tools, code and examples.

I expect to see some results (i.e. more information into tracker from different apps) sooner than later. Stay tuned!

MussOrgsky is a music organizer (i.e a metadata editor) for maemo5 that allows the user to edit the basic information inside the music files.

In fremantle/maemo5 we have tracker to retrieve the information of the music files and make the life of Music Player developers easier. It is really cute to browser your music “by artist”  but in my case (and i guess i am not the only one) the metadata of my music files is far from perfect and unified (songs without title, without album, misspellings in artists names, no album art at all and so on). There are a lot of programs out there to fix this problem (e.g easytag) but they all require a PC, and i want to edit this stuff directly on the tablet!

So, here comes my pet project “MussOrgsky”: a small application to set the basic metadata of the music files (title, artist, album and album art) directly on the device.

This is the edition window (the main window can be seen here ):

It is an python program that uses:

• the new hildon widgets for maemo5 (there is a really helpful tutorial!)
• tracker to query the availabe music data (or absence of it),
• mutagen to write the information back into the files (i uploaded the package myself to extras-devel few days ago)
• gstreamer to play the files (yes, there is a “play” button to help you to know what damn song “gtkpod0123123.mp3″ is)
• Some online search engines to retrieve the album art
• It follows the media art storage spec (using Urho’s implementation), so UKMP, MAFW, and this editor share the same album art

You can find the source code in garage.maemo and the package to install in extras-devel. I have still some ideas pending to implement, but it should be usable. As usual, feedback is welcome!

To package a python program for maemo, you just need to do in scratchbox the same as you would do on your desktop [using distutils and CDBS]. You add a simple setup.py file to the project, a minimal debian/rules, a couple of details in the debian/control file, run “dpkg-buildpackage”…. and it is done. Right?

No. it won’t work.

For some reason, inside scratchbox some paths are modified and the final .deb package install the files under “/scratchbox/tools/bin” and “/scratchbox/tools/share” (instead of the usual “/usr/bin” and “/usr/share”), so the package is somehow installable in scratchbox but useless for the real devices

I didn’t find any solution on the net, and It took me quite some time to figure out how to solve it. After a hundred tests with different CDBS rules and combinations, it was so easy as add a setup.cfg file on the root of my project with this content:

[install_scripts]
install_dir=debian/<package>/usr/bin

[install_data]
install_dir=debian/<package>/usr/

After that, “dpkg-buildpackage -rfakeroot” generates a correct package, that can be uploaded to extras!

Yes, now tracker is in the gnome git repository. Martyn sent an email to the tracker mailing list with the details and all the commands you may need to checkout the code. You can also use the web-interface to know what is going on.

The next step will be to move our work for the new tracker (SparQL, signals,…) from the codethink git to the gnome repository. Then we can work on the merge of both branches to make 0.7.x the main development line with as few regressions as possible.

The plan is to use the 0.7.x numbers for unstable (soon and often) releases and 0.8.0 for the next stable release.

While still improving the 0.6.9x version of tracker for Fremantle (last week we released 0.6.91 with tons of bugfixing), we are also working on the 0.7.x plans. Philip has already described in detail what are we doing, and i think the most exciting feature is going to be the “observe changes about resources”.

The problem is easy to explain: you write your application (e.g. email viewer), populate its views with data from tracker (e.g. “last 10 emails”), and then… how does your app know when is a new email has been received? It does so because maybe evolution has already pushed a new one into tracker!

Obviously “polling” tracker every n minutes is not a solution, and the nice live queries are very complex and hard to implement properly. BUT we have come up with an easy solution that can help.

The applications will subscribe to an object (or more) in DBus (one object = one class in nepomuk), and then they will receive a signal when something happens in that category with the relevant URIs (e.g. an email is deleted in Emails category, a music file is added in Music class, a document updated, and so on). With this information, the app can decide what to do (e.g. deprecate the view, ignore it because now it is showing other info, query tracker about the relevant metadata, …) .

In coding terms: your email viewer will ask “last 10 emails” and subscribe to signals from “/org/freedesktop/Tracker/Resources/Classes/nmo/Email”. Then when a new mail enters the mailbox, the app will receive a signal “ChangeAdded ([list of tracker uris added])”. Here are some more details of the design.

Once we have this mechanism in place, it will be easier to use tracker as backend for user data in the applications: a nice query language + update notifications! It will also allow us to switch into a model where providers (e.g. a feeds monitor, browsers) push info into tracker, and completely independient applications just query it from there… and then to write a mashup app would we soooo easy… and….

P.D. Philip told me: “before you blog about this, it will be implemented”. Well… if i waited one more day…

After more than a year of heavy work in tracker, here is the brand new tracker release, 0.6.90!! If you are still wondering what tracker is: it is a daemon monitoring the filesystem, extracting metadata from your files and indexing them (and the contents of text files) so that you can search fast and efficiently for [...]

Maybe i am the last one to discover this but… to hear BBC Radio 3 (the classical and jazz music channel of the BBC) on the tablet add this link in the media player.

For me, the lightning talks are one of the best things in GUADECs. These 5-minutes presentations are very dynamic and you can get all the relevant information about the projects (what we have done, what we plan to do). The usual presentation is done by developers showing their code and prototypes, showing what has been [...]