It’s been GSoC season for over a month now and I haven’t blogged, so now I’m going to try to fix that. After last year’s Multilevel playlist sorting project, one of my proposals has been accepted again for GSoC 2010: I’m going to implement on-the-fly transcoding in Amarok.

Amarok is a music player and manager built around very general concepts of tracks and media sources. The collection tries to decouple the format from the data itself and presents the music as tracks (with metadata) rather than files. In other cases, music isn’t even stored in local files. These concepts, and others, allow one to truly rediscover music through seamless internet sources and media devices integration, and the user in fact doesn’t have to care where the actual data comes from. The many sources at one’s fingertips are accessible in a consistent way and playable from the playlist.

However, even in this day and age of stuff in the cloud, there are situations in which the user still has to worry about media formats, e.g. when acquiring new music, or copying existing music from one collection to another or from the collection to a portable music player. That’s where transcoding kicks in.

For example, one might have a quantity of Windows Media Audio files that should be transcoded to a more Free format in order to be usable in the future, or a quantity of Monkey’s Audio files, which, while lossless, are not well supported everywhere, especially in PMPs. And then of course, even if someone has a collection full of FLAC files, which is a reliable and Free codec, a conversion into a lossy format such as Ogg Vorbis or MP3 might be necessary for use with a PMP simply for reasons of storage capacity.

So my idea is this: whenever the user can copy files, give him or her the choice to either just copy, just transcode or transcode with custom options. That way, we cover both of the following use cases:

“I’m running late for a 4 hour train ride and I haven’t updated the music collection on my portable player, I need to quickly copy over my tunes while making sure they will compatible with the portable player”

“if I tweak the quality rating of the Vorbis encoder exactly the way I want it I’m going to save 1% of the space on my portable music player and still get the audio quality my sensitive ears deserve”.

The current situation is that the transcoding operation (in the strictest possible sense) works, so the next thing I have to do is integrate it nicely with Amarok’s existing collections framework. The current implementation uses FFmpeg, but I’ve placed FFmpeg-specific stuff in a wrapper class so something else could quite easily be used in the future if need arises.

The following screenshot represents the current state of the still quite unfinished transcoding GUI.

On a somewhat unrelated note, I’ve been to the KDE Multimedia+Edu sprint in Randa, Switzerland.

It was a lot of fun and very productive too. I wish to thank the whole organizers team. Special thanks go to Mario Fux for his mad organizational skills, to the cooking team which I had the pleasure to share the kitchen with while preparing vegan stuff and to Knut Yrvin for arranging a much needed meeting with the Brisbane office of Nokia, Qt Development Frameworks regarding QtMultimedia and the future of Phonon. Finally, thanks Anne-Marie Mahfouf for a gift she gave me which allowed me to taste again something I like very much but haven’t been able to eat because of nickel allergy.