Hi Folks,

after years of beeing an kde enthusiast, it's time for me write a kde application myself.

since my music collection is pretty messed up, i came up with the idea of writing an interactive id3-tag straightener which interacts with musicbrainz, CDDB and other resources to rebuild the tags from no matter how little information is available (filenames, existing tags, folder name, etc.)

i want to do this as a standalone application and maybe integrate it later to amarok.

so, with no experience on writing kde application but with the background of beeing a .net-developer i ask for good material for total beginners (although i do have basic knowledge of c++). i know, there is a lot of information on the web, but at the beginning, it's just to much to find the right starting point...

could provide me with a helping hand, tutorials and so forth?


thanks!

alex

You may wish to look at http://doc.trolltech.com and http://api.kde.org which provide the documentation for Qt and KDELibs.

For network access, KDE applications should use KIO.

TechBase is your friend. I also have some links in this blog post that you might find useful.

Thanks so far. This was exactly what I was looking for! I investigated the beginners tutorials on techbase, which helped me a lot.

i also hat a glimpse at the api references, but i haven't found anything related reading and editing mp3-metadata(id3-tags). any ideas?

gracias!

alex

You can use TagLib from KDESupport to do that. I do not know where its API documentation is, but it may also be at api.kde.org.

Thanks! Just figured that out today.

On the taglib homepage there is also a complete API documentation.

BUT, since I'm not so familiar with C++ anymore, i really have trouble including it to my project. On the taglib homepage they say:

"Instructions for installing TagLib vary per platform, but generally speaking on UNIX standard configure and make commands are provided. TagLib installs a taglib-config and package-config file to make it easier to integrate into various build systems. Note that TagLib's include install directory must be included in the header include path. Simply adding <taglib/tag.h> will not work."

Does this mean, I have to get the sources and include them using CMake? I already have taglib on my system and I simply want to use the library. How can I do that. Simply including the headers really didn't work out:

"experiment.cpp:45: undefined reference to `TagLib::FileRef::FileRef(char const*, bool, TagLib::AudioProperties::ReadStyle)'"

Man, learning a language a second time is pretty tough, I'm always tempted to use something more familiar...

You need to change the target_link_libraries() command in your CMakeLists.txt file to include taglib.
This can be done by adding ${TAGLIB_LIBRARIES} for standard TagLib, and ${TAGLIB-EXTRAS_LIBRARIES} for TagLib-Extras from KDESupport.

You could look at Pinky Tagger. It is Qt soft, but not KDE and on my Machine it didn't work.

One way of find out how to support an external library is to look for an application already using this library and check how it is doing it in its CMakeLists.txt file.

Since this is about working with metadata you should also have a look at KFileItem and KFileMetaInfo classes.

On the original question of getting started, the templates from KAppTemplate (an app from KDESDK) are usually quite useful for that.

Cheers,
_