SoundMania

Latest release highlights (ver 3.90):
-------------------------------------
- KDE 4 support!
- Serbian translations thanks to
Mladen Pejaković

This is a beta release for KDE 4 players (amarok 2 is not supported but amarok 1.4.x is). Please report bugs. PyKDE support is completely dropped due to the fact that KDE4 uses dbus.

If you want to contribute to translations, please do the following:

- a) If you want to do a new translation:
Open the file: --theme directory--/soundmania.pot in lokalize (part of kdesdk as of KDE 4.1, formerly known as kaider)

b) If you want to fix an existing translation:
Open the file --theme directory--/locale/--your language--/LC_MESSAGES/soundmania.po in lokalize (part of kdesdk as of KDE 4.1, formerly known as kaider)

- Do your translations. Please leave no 'fuzzy' translations.

- Go to edit --> edit header , in kbabel. Change the encoding to your proper encoding in the line "Content-Type: text/plain; charset=xxxxxx" (set xxxxxx to your own encoding)

- Save as 'soundmania.po'

- Send the soundmania.po file to me (my email address can be found in any py file inside the theme, also in the README)


Please have a look at the README file first if you have problems.

Introduction:
-------------------
This is a desktop applet designed for the purpose of displaying information and control of known media players.

It supports amaroK, XMMS, rhythmbox, KsCD, kaffeine, JuK.

For XMMS support you need to install the xmmsctrl package (which depends on xmms-devel):
http://user.it.uu.se/~adavid/utils/

Different backgrounds to make the theme compatible with most popular ones.

Soundmania requires:
- PyQt
- Imagemagick or PIL (Python Imaging Library)

Features:
--------------
- Displays artist name, song title, remaining time, bitrate(for amaroK, juk & rhythmbox only) of the playing song.
- Displays the album cover, if available (Look at the screenshots!). Rounded edges and/or shadow option.
- Supported languages: English, Finnish, French, German, Hungarian, Norwegian, Polish, Serbian, Turkish.
- Interactive progress bar: You can browse through the song by clicking on the progress bar.
- Control buttons
- Mouse wheel over the applet controls the volume.
- Configuration choice to switch between the players.
- Auto-select player feature.
- Configuration choices to display the album cover, shadow text, change the text and progressbar colors, the background and buttons.
- Customizable the text color.
- Customizable layout (limited)
- Condiguration window
- Optional 'Fetch albumcover for the currently playing track from internet' function. This saves the albumcovers in the ~/.albumcovers directory. When using amarok this function first asks amarok for the albumcover. In order to download an albumcover from internet, the artist and album name infos must be correctly entered in the id3 tag of the track.

TO DO:
----------
- Self-update function
- Add new themes& backgrounds

Known issues:
--------------------
- Only the font title and font size are effective in the font selection dialog

Troubleshooting:
---------------------------
Please have a look at the README file first if you have problems.
Before reporting any problems, it would be helpful to enable debug mode by modifying soundmania.py line ~50 to:
debug_mode = 2
, then start soundmania from a shell and post the output here.

Acknowledgement:
----------------------------
Thanks to:
- superkaramba, amarok, xmms, Juk, noatun, Kaboodle, KsCD, Kaffeine and rhythmbox teams
- "crystal" (Skeezo), "kubicaramba" (hds), "cynapses" (gladiac), "kpost-it, kavolo" (PitocheUrla),
"aero-g, aero-aio" (AdrienV), "TDE" (chip2003), "Krystal_Clear" (timere969), "jiin-crystal-clean, jiin-blue-crystal-clean" (jiin04), "DebiaNFO", (Noisemaker), "newramba2" (pootie), "newramba+" (s3m10s), "MetCheck" (etheri) theme authors for the backgrounds
- "k-skin" (toonmuylkens) , "rhythm" (maxime0810), "crystal" (nuka) buttonset authors
- "liquid XMMS" (baraquda), "amaroker" (Lechio) authors for the idea
- "Multiplayer" (ziuchkov) for PyKDE implementation
- "Liquid Weather ++" (matti) for translations engine. His themes rock!
- Anthony Thyssen, for round albumcovers edges code (URL: http://www.cit.gu.edu.au/~anthony/graphics/imagick6/thumbnails/)
- Ya'ir Aizenman, for 'fetching albumcovers from internet' idea. I adapted his perl script to python.
- Alastair Tse, for pytagger. This is used to fetch info from mp3's which is further used to fetch albumcover images from internet (URL: http://www-lce.eng.cam.ac.uk/~acnt2/code/pytagger/)
- Batiste FOLLET, for French translation. Eirik A. Rotevatn, for Norwegian translation. Tuomas Nurmi, for Finnish translation. Bernd Weigelt, for fixes in the German translation. Sylwester Gruszka, for Polish translation, Zsolt, for Hungarian translation, Mladen Pejakovic, for Serbian translations.
- everybody who pointed the bugs and possible improvements on the theme for testing

sorry for those whom I forget to mention who provided help for creating this theme.


Please leave your suggestions and comments.

3.90:
- New feature: PyQt4/KDE4 support and requirement
- Cleanup: Dropped PyKDE support, noatun and kaboodle players support
- New feature: Added Serbian translations
- Bugfix: Theme doesn't initialize when progressbar is not displayed.
- Bugfix: Bitrate hiding/reappearing mechanism doesn't work consistent.

3.0:
- Disabled text-scrolling for 64 bit systems because it caused a crash due to a bug in superkaramba

2.9:
- Bugfix: Cover from the track dir is not displayed if "download cover" option is unchecked.
- Bugfix: Config window does not open if the keyboard shortcuts cannot be assigned.
- Bugfix: Textshifts don't work properly. (still some work needs to be done)
- Bugfix: Next track info doesn't update correctly.
- Cleanup: Standardized button positions
- New feature: Option for keeping the aspect ratio of the album cover image.
- Cleanup: Upgraded to pytagger 0.5
- New feature: Introducing "Soundmania Grandeur"
- Bugfix: Exception function is called before it is defined, when PIL is not installed.
- Cleanup: Moved player modules to the "modules" directory.

2.8:
- Big cleanup in the code. More than half of it is rewritten. Got rid of a major number of global variables.
- Config window is reorganized.
- User can now determine the hierarchy of the players in the auto-select player mode.
- PyQt is required from now on.
- PIL or Imagemagick (one or the other) required from now on.
- Added new text and cover vanishing/reappearing effects.
- Configuration options are stored only in ~/.superkaramba/soundmania/config
- 2 different debug modes
- Upgraded the license to GPLv3


2.7.6:
- Bugfix: artist and title continuously checked when the player is idle, causing cpu spikes.
- Missing albumcover retrieval fixed.
- Text sizes are determined via pixel size rather than number of characters.
- Dropped BMP support.
- Added new background: MetCheck


See inside the package for the full Changelog