What do I have to do to find a graphic artist in the OSS community? Where do projects like Gnome, KDE, etc find these people? In the few projects I’ve worked on, there’s been no shortage of people that are willing to submit a few lines of code in a patch, or actually become a developer on the project by submitting more than a few lines, but graphic artists are few and far between. In Exaile’s history, there have been 2 or 3 people that have submitted art, but only a few pieces. The rest of the art is derived from these few pieces; put together by other users and contributed as a set. I’ve looked for artists, and found some, and even offered to pay others, but it’s hard to get anyone to follow through.

If you’re following me on Twitter, you’ll know that recently installed Windows Vista so that I could stream Netflix to my Xbox 360. That venture didn’t quite work out, apparently Microsoft is working with Netflix and the new Xbox update due on November 19th will have built in Netflix support. Updates to the Netflix interface have caused the vmcNetflix extender for Vista Media Player to stop working. So really, I never needed to install Vista in the first place.

This week we’ve worked on the following:

This week I’ve been focusing on album art support. It was actually Aren’s idea that, from the beginning, we should create pluggable interfaces for things like dynamic playlists, album art, lyrics, devices, and etc. This means that album art support wouldn’t be hard coded to one place like Amazon, but anyone could add a plugin to support album art from anywhere. Currently, there are three album art plugins: local search, which checks local directories for image names like ‘cover.jpg’ and etc., Amazon, and Last.FM. The idea is that each plugin will be searched in order until something is found. Also Aren’s idea: the order that each plugin is searched should be user definable …

Ok, so I posted the weekly tarball a little early, because it’s got lots of cool new stuff. Here are the things that have been completed since the last roundup:

Exaile 0.3.0a now has a working install target in the Makefile, so I’ve decided to start posting automated weekly tarballs for those who don’t want to use bzr snapshots. The first of these is located at http://www.exaile.org/files/weekly. They will be posted every Wednesday at 5:00pm.

It’s been longer than a week since the last roundup, so I figured it was time. Since the first 0.3 alpha release, the following items have been implemented:

I noticed that every time Clint Savage makes a blog update, he posts the URL to Twitter twice (yeah, that’s you herlo :P). The URLs for each Twitter post are different, so I figured it must be some sort of automated Wordpress script with a bug in it …

Some of you might have noticed that the Shoutcast plugin hasn’t worked for a while, and wasn’t fixed with the 0.2.14 update. This is because they changed the way that their site looks, and so the plugin wasn’t able to parse it …

Exaile 0.2.14 and 0.3 alpha have been released!

My Eee Box (model B202) arrived today. I actually plan on using this machine to run Windows (I have a very short list of things that I require the blasted OS to run)...

Yeah. I guess messing around with the syndication part of my blog system ended up causing openclue.org to repull all of my old blog posts all at once. Sorry …

So, according to the comments I’ve been getting on the Exaile 0.3 roundup article, people actually read this blog.

DropBox goes public

A nice fellow emailed and asked me if I could post a monthly (possibly weekly) roundup on Exaile 0.3 so that people can follow what’s going on. It sounded like a good idea to me, so here’s the first one.

Django 1.0 is finally here!!!

I recently purchased an EeePC 1000h, and I’m going to give a quick review here …

I downloaded the new iPhone software last Friday after my coworker informed me that there was a “Pandora Radio” application available on the AppStore. Internet radio on your phone? No brainer, had to have it …

Exaile is currently undergoing an almost complete rewrite. Why? Because the codebase could be better. Recently, thanks to Aren Olson, the 0.3 branch has been taking off. Already the code is a lot better, and will be a lot easier to add things to in the future.

As of this writing, you can create a collection, based on different libraries (directories). For each one of these directories, you can set a rescan interval, and/or have the library be watched by pyinotify for changes. You can create playlists, smart playlists, play these playlists in order or shuffle and/or on repeat. I am currently using it as my default player.

However: none of this can be done using a gui yet. This can all be done easily by using Exaile 0.3’s pretty good looking internal API. Here is an example …

A few versions ago, Exaile had Last.FM streaming support using LastFMSource, a pygst plugin created by Philippe Normand of Elisa. It worked … sort of. Every other time you tried to connect to LastFM station, Gstreamer would lock up entirely, taking Exaile out with it. Not being able to fix this problem, it was eventually removed from Exaile entirely.

Enter: LastFM Proxy…