Amarok

From APIDesign

Amarok is a fancy music player for KDE.

Due to unfamous KDE's policy to rewrite the whole system from scratch every few years, there is a currious situation - after each upgrade you find out that new versions of your favourite applications are missing some functionality that you were using a lot. The same situation happened to me with Amarok 2 and I reported it as a bug 203727.

I was missing an easy way to randomize the playlist. It is essential, I always pick few albums drag'n'drop them to the playlist, then randomize all the songs, look at the order, polish it a bit and then play them all.

It turned out (while discussing 203727), that some sort of randomize functionality is there (but hidden by some extra complex and secret UI). I was using it for few months, but never was really satisfied (I could not do the manual polishing after the re-shuffling). Today I told myself - enough and wrote an extension in Javascript that adds the shuffle action to the Tools menu.

If you ever missed the shuffle functionality, don't wait anymore and download the extension from here and install it into $HOME/.kde/share/apps/amarok/scripts/.

As the extension had to be written in JavaScript, it took me a while to write it. The whole process felt to me like a browser based programming - editor opened on one side, browser on the other. Whenever I wanted to call a method on a object, I needed to seek in the browser. There was no connection between the editor and the documentation. Oh, those stone age days of programming!