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Amarok 2.0 releasedAmarok 2.0 releasedPosted Dec 10, 2008 18:14 UTC (Wed) by az (guest, #46701)Parent article: Amarok 2.0 released Amarok 2.0 is a beginning, not an end. Because of the major changes required, not all features from the 1.4 are in Amarok 2. Many of these missing features, like queueing and filtering in the playlist, will return within a few releases. Other features, such as visualizations and support for portable media players, require improvements in the underlying KDE infrastructure. They will return as KDE4's support improves. Translation: We did a rewrite on a whim and removed all the features that made our player great. Now it lacks playlist filtering or a shuffle button but hey, here's a shiny lyrics widget and an online store! Amarok 2 is the epitome of everything that went wrong with the KDE 4 rewrite. It abandons the key strengths that made KDE 3 great - usability and configurability - and replaces them with incomplete features that are useless to most people. Doubly disappointing since, as always, KDE's foundation is rock solid.
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And your point is? Posted Dec 10, 2008 19:06 UTC (Wed) by pr1268 (subscriber, #24648) [Link] What, exactly, is your point? There are 39 comments on that page (as of when I'm posting this one), and I simply lack the attention span to read all of them. The gist of what I did read seemed to be that many are dissatisfied with the wholesale changes made between KDE 3.x and 4.x. As for Amarok, well, I did give it a try about 1 1/2 years ago, and wasn't all that impressed with the bloat. Sure, the features are great, but getting it to cooperate with a shell script I wrote to play songs on demand was an exercise in futility1. 1 My script reads $ARGS (removing spaces from $IFS), storing $* into $TITLE, replacing spaces in $TITLE with underscores, and then reading a file with artist|title|path sorted, grepping for a match with $TITLE, and then invoking $PLAYER with $PATH of corresponding $TITLE. If I listen to the first eight bars of one song, then decide I want to listen to something else, Amarok enqueues the song in a playlist, rather than stopping the currently-playing song and playing the new song. XMMS and Audacious don't do this, but rather do it the way I want. Never mind that I have a bad case of Adult ADHD and it's quite often that I grow bored of a song after only hearing the first 10 seconds or so. And, I have over 9700 Ogg Vorbis files from over 630 artists, so trying to navigate via mouse and click in Amarok is agonizing.
And your point is? Posted Dec 11, 2008 8:21 UTC (Thu) by muwlgr (guest, #35359) [Link]
Amarok 1.4 (at least in my Kubuntu 8.04) is pretty heavy at start, and sometimes it likes to chew CPU time (and battery) forever. Don't know about 2.0. Prefer to use Xine instead.
Amarok 2.0 released Posted Dec 10, 2008 18:34 UTC (Wed) by martinfick (subscriber, #4455) [Link]
Wow, your comment is the epitome of what went wrong with KDE4. Users who expect 100% on the first release despite the announcement clearly stating it will not be!
Mind you I have not used amarok 2.x, but it does look like a great improvement over 1.x in the layout. I look forward to using it and understand that it may not be 100% feature complete with 1.x. When it meets enough of my needs I will migrate to it. In the meantime I can be happy with 1.x and have lost nothing. What have you lost that you are so bitter?
Amarok 2.0 released Posted Dec 10, 2008 20:31 UTC (Wed) by kerick (subscriber, #53036) [Link]
Personally, I can't stand the loss of being able to queue songs. I will use Songbird until Amarok regains some of the simple features that help me enjoy my music.
Amarok 2.0 released Posted Dec 10, 2008 22:54 UTC (Wed) by oblio (guest, #33465) [Link]
So it doesn't shuffle or queue songs or filter playlists? For such an advanced player, if these features are missing, it's pretty strange, IMHO.
Amarok 2.0 released Posted Dec 10, 2008 23:32 UTC (Wed) by xorbe (subscriber, #3165) [Link]
Because it seems that KDE4 is never going to catch up with KDE3 in usable features, yet KDE4 is already significantly slower. Sluggish pointless enhancements appear to be the goal.
Someone should fork KDE3 and bring in any decent parts of 4.
Amarok 2.0 released Posted Dec 11, 2008 0:08 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
Um, generally when one is working on a new framework one gets the
framework working, *then* optimizes it.
It is not beyond the bounds of possibility that KDE will speed up in
Amarok 2.0 released Posted Dec 11, 2008 19:39 UTC (Thu) by xorbe (subscriber, #3165) [Link]
Yeah, Konsole in KDE4 is one of my frustrations. It's just a lot slower, visibly using shift + left/right. I use KDE and Emacs all day.
It's been a year already (well on Jan 4th, 2009). kwin still crashes and restarts regularly. My faster desktop feels slower than my "slower" laptop with KDE3.
No, I didn't use KDE1/KDE2, I was on OSF/1 + twm in those days...
My apology, it wasn't a troll, but I don't always communicate my thoughts well. Yeah I was venting some frustration though, I feel like KDE has gone backwards in ways.
Amarok 2.0 released Posted Dec 12, 2008 0:09 UTC (Fri) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
Konsole in KDE4 is even *slower* than the Konsole in KDE3 for you?
Interesting: it's enormously faster for me (at least at scrolling under load, the only thing for which it was dog slow in KDE3).
Maybe I screwed up my KDE3 somehow...
Amarok 2.0 released Posted Dec 12, 2008 17:37 UTC (Fri) by robertknight (subscriber, #42536) [Link]
> Yeah, Konsole in KDE4 is one of my frustrations.
> It's just a lot slower, visibly using shift + left/right. > I use KDE and Emacs all day.
It isn't universally slower. In particular with a 'friendly' set of hardware (Intel graphics) it should be much faster than in KDE 3.5 for general usage, in particular scrolling and working with large windows of text. There were problems with very poor performance under NVidia or when using bitmap fonts. I believe the NVidia problems are fixed with the latest drivers but the bitmap font bug remains.
Either way, if you're using the terminal heavily then please do take a few minutes to report the bug on bugs.kde.org or email konsole-devel@kde.org.
Amarok 2.0 released Posted Dec 11, 2008 0:20 UTC (Thu) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
what makes you say that "KDE4 is never going to catch up with KDE3 in usable features"
'never' is a very strong statement.
Amarok 2.0 released Posted Dec 11, 2008 9:41 UTC (Thu) by pointwood (guest, #2814) [Link]
Dear troll, please return to Slashdot or even better, create your own blog and post your useless comments there.
Amarok 2.0 released Posted Dec 11, 2008 14:30 UTC (Thu) by robert_s (subscriber, #42402) [Link]
Let me guess. You weren't around for the KDE 2->3 transition, were you?
If I'm wrong and you were, you don't appear to be very good at spotting patterns.
Amarok 2.0 released Posted Dec 11, 2008 15:54 UTC (Thu) by rsidd (subscriber, #2582) [Link]
KDE 2->3 was comparatively an insignificant transition: the major version bump was only because Qt increased by a major version. You must be thinking of KDE 1->2.
Amarok 2.0 released Posted Dec 10, 2008 23:39 UTC (Wed) by aseigo (guest, #18394) [Link]
So, I'm using Amarok 2 right now and I have a filter line for the
collection with a button next to it that launches an "advanced search" dialog. From there I can easily create playlists. What it doesn't have is the ability to take a playlist and filter out sounds in it without creating a new playlist. Not exactly a deal breaker for me, though.
Shuffle? There's random play, by track or album, and allows one to have it
Other than that, I count a number of features that were missing in
... and it's a "dot-oh" release.
Whatever you want to think about and however grouchy you wish to be, I'm
Amarok 2.0 released despite missing features Posted Dec 12, 2008 16:48 UTC (Fri) by rvfh (subscriber, #31018) [Link] ... and it's a "dot-oh" release. The KDE/Amarok guys want us to get used to a new fashion, that .0 releases are meant to be incomplete. I have always considered that a .0 release should be feature-complete, and only have bugs in corner cases for which regression tests don't exist yet, and that developers don't use. Sorry for the noise
Amarok 2.0 released despite missing features Posted Dec 12, 2008 17:03 UTC (Fri) by kragil (subscriber, #34373) [Link]
OSX 10.0 and others started that trend long ago.
community more important than certain users Posted Dec 12, 2008 13:49 UTC (Fri) by sebas (subscriber, #51660) [Link]
It's kind is disappointing that people still haven't learned to just refer to the announcement. The team is very clear in that Amarok 2.0 is a first working basis, and that features that are missing right now will be added later in this release cycle, which, thanks to the new technologies and the cleaner code should be quite a bit accelerated compared to 2.0.
I've talked with some of the Amarok developers about the lack of some apparently important features, and that it's likely to cause a backlash from the armchair users (those that don't read announcements, that are interested in slinging mud and those that are mostly out to vent frustrations in any possible way).
A simple fact is that the Amarok crowd needed a release not to lose momentum in their community, developers wanted to get their code out, wanted to collect more feedback. On top of that, there's now a very stable base released with Amarok 2.0 that will start to shine in more 2.x releases.
If that's not your your kind of thing, there are gazillion of MP3 players around, among them Amarok 1.4, if that's what you like. No reason to throw shit at people that are actively thinking how the 'listening to music' experience can be improved and extended.
I fully understand the Amarok community putting their own needs above that of their users, and that's exactly what they did.
Now I'm not much of a MP3 person, but I did use Amarok for some time. It looks like a fine music player to me, and I didn't see any functionality really missing, apart from my iPod touch not being recognized (which I would say is hardly Amarok's fault, given the closed nature of that product). Otherwise, it works fast, the interface is streamlined and relatively easy to understand. Sure, it could use some more polish, more of those smart features, but it's a very decent beginning. If this sets the tone for the whole Amarok2 series, there are good times ahead.
One bit of practical information to finish off: If things like resizing or scrolling are sluggish and you're using the nvidia binary driver, update to the latest beta. It makes Qt4-based apps fly on the hardware I've tested.
community more important than certain users Posted Dec 12, 2008 17:01 UTC (Fri) by rvfh (subscriber, #31018) [Link] I think what these KDE/Amarok developers are really meaning with N.0 is N.-1, meaning it's (in the present case) a 2.P release (from an architecture, look and feel, etc POW), but it's not quite finished yet. So thanks Amarok devs for this nice 2.-1 release!
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