rockmarble: how to follow your favourite artists tour with Marble
Posted by Flavio in C++, KDE, ProgrammingDuring the last weekend I wanted to have some fun with QJson. So I came out with this idea: retrieve from last.fm the tour dates of my favourite artists and display the locations using Marble.
After some hacking I created this small application: rockmarble…
If you have a last.fm account rockmarble will import your favourite artist list. Otherwise you can add one artists at a time.
The tour location will be displayed inside Marble, using openstreetmap.
Requirements
In order to build/run it you will need:
Installation
You can grab the source code of rockmarble here.
If you are an openSUSE user you can use 1click install:
Issues
Geolocalization
The geolocalization data are given by last.fm, so if you discover that Metallica are going to give a concert in the middle of the Pacific Ocean please don’t bother me 
Special names
It seems that QJson doesn’t handle properly special characters. Maybe you will some artist with a blank name. I’m going to fix this issue asap.
More details
Visit rockmarble website
Future
Who wants to integrate it into amarok’s context view? 
Entries (RSS)
It seems too cool to be true!!! A late april fool?
Extremely cool app.!
My opensuse yells that it cannot find libqjson. A soft link from /usr/lib64 pointing to /usr/lib64/libqjson.so solved the problem.
If I may place a first request: Could you make the column-sizes adjustable? Now a lot of space is occupied by the artist names, and I have to scroll in the map and in the tour dates sections.
Also (not sure how easy this is, not a KDE programmer) is it possible to filter automatically when changing artist? As in: I select a filter first (Say: Los Angeles) and by clicking on every artist, I see quickly when they play in LA.
Thanks for the feedback.
Sorry for the packaging error, I’m a newbie packager
Talking about the code changes you suggested: it will be pretty easy to implement them.
Dude, as far as I’m concerned Metallica can play under the Pacific Ocean without diving equipment
They can’t make good music anymore, they can only sue fans and earn more money with their crappy new albums.
On i586 I needed to do ‘ln -s /usr/lib/qjson/libqjson.so /usr/lib/libqjson.so’ but other than that flawless. great work Flavio
This is cool, Flavio. Now if you could have marble plot out the path of the tour, that would be really cool.
I like Thijs’ idea, but even better would be to be able to set your home town and be able to get a list of which bands are coming to your town rather than having to click on every artist. Expanding on that, and probably much harder to implement would be setting a distance from your town that you’re willing to drive to see a show. For example, I live in Austin, TX, USA and many of the biggest groups do not play here because they already play in two or three of the bigger cities in Texas. So to see some bands I have to drive to San Antonio, Houston or Dallas. Maybe easier than setting a radius would be to set more than one city as a home town and showing all the shows in any of these.
Thanks for rockmarble, it rocks.
Jim
Thanks for finding the time to share this with us, just loved it.