Amarok 2.5 released Posted Dec 21, 2011 15:21 UTC (Wed) by kragilkragil2 (guest, #76172) [Link] (17 responses) Previous versions were so big, slow, bloated and awkward to use that I am not even going to bother trying this one. Sorry, but Amarok lost all its magic with the new 4.0 redesign. I am not the target audience anymore anyways, I must want to have a fast and simple interface to listen to my music. But the great thing about FOSS is that others can take you work and do something else with it. So we have Clementine, which I also don't use ;-) When I made the decision to only have my own favourite music on my computer my music life became a lot simpler. Instead of 190GBs (all deleted) of music I only have six, which I recently uploaded to a big new cloud hosting platform and it gives my access to all my music on all my devices free of charge. I couldn't be happier. One application less to worry about (and update and maintain and backup and hope the devs don't go wander off to totally different UI etc.) Amarok 2.5 released Posted Dec 21, 2011 16:19 UTC (Wed) by nye (guest, #51576) [Link] (4 responses) >a big new cloud hosting platform and it gives my access to all my music on all my devices free of charge What platform? Amarok 2.5 released Posted Dec 21, 2011 17:30 UTC (Wed) by kragilkragil2 (guest, #76172) [Link] (3 responses) I thought that was obvious: Google Music. Or is there another platform that offers 6GB+ for free? Amarok 2.5 released Posted Dec 21, 2011 17:37 UTC (Wed) by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784) [Link] (1 responses) I didn't know Google Music existed until you mentioned it. Amarok 2.5 released Posted Dec 22, 2011 10:30 UTC (Thu) by zdzichu (subscriber, #17118) [Link] It's largely irrelevant, visiting music.google.com gives: We're sorry. Google Music is currently only available in the United States Cloud Music Posted Dec 22, 2011 15:23 UTC (Thu) by rfunk (subscriber, #4054) [Link] Amazon Cloud Drive? Oh wait, actually I think it's 5GB free, and 20GB free with purchase of an MP3 album. I actually prefer Subsonic, which lets me have my music on my own server anywhere, and listen via web or mobile app. Amarok 2.5 released Posted Dec 21, 2011 18:38 UTC (Wed) by Del- (guest, #72641) [Link] (9 responses) Amarok is feature rich, and takes advantage of the resources available on newer hardware. Calling it bloated is in my opinion misleading, leading people to think the added functionality is useless. I enjoy many of the fearures in amarok, and see it as one of the master pieces of free software. You are of course free to enjoy openbox, while some of us enjoy KDE4. I am very glad that KDE is tailored to users with juicy hardware and ability to enjoy functionality abundance. There are enough DE's around for the minimalistic crowd. What I find sad, is how some in the minimalistic camp seem to enjoy bashing KDE. Have you even seen what you are missing out on? Probably not. Enjoy the cloud. I prefer to have my own data on my own computers. Amarok 2.5 released Posted Dec 22, 2011 7:32 UTC (Thu) by kragilkragil2 (guest, #76172) [Link] I still have one copy of my music on my computer + a backup. Amarok 2.5 released Posted Dec 22, 2011 11:40 UTC (Thu) by nye (guest, #51576) [Link] (7 responses) >Amarok is feature rich, and takes advantage of the resources available on newer hardware. Calling it bloated is in my opinion misleading, leading people to think the added functionality is useless. I enjoy many of the fearures in amarok, and see it as one of the master pieces of free software. ... >What I find sad, is how some in the minimalistic camp seem to enjoy bashing KDE Your point is valid, but Amarok is a bad example to pick - because it *really is* bloated and slow. Try using it on a machine with a weak processor; it's almost impossible to drag files from the collection browser into the playlist for example because it turns into a slideshow. All the plasma widgets which attempt to replicate the functionality of the builtin features in 1.4 (lyrics, for example) use enormously more processing power (I'd say a factor of probably a hundred to a thousand) to provide exactly the same feature. In fact, a couple of years back my investigation into why the collection browser is so slow revealed that the data model was misdesigned so that common operations were O(n^2) in the size of your collection, and would have required *substantial* rewriting to fix. Maybe they've actually done that since - I haven't checked - but this was what they came up with when they decided to rewrite from scratch? No thank you. Take a look at the Amarok 2 code some time - unless things have improved considerably since I last checked, it's, shall we say, less than excellent. Amarok 2.5 released Posted Dec 22, 2011 18:08 UTC (Thu) by Del- (guest, #72641) [Link] (6 responses) >Try using it on a machine with a weak processor; The weakest CPU I currently have access to is my oldest laptop with a 2.0GHz Core2 T7200. Dragging files from the collection browser to the playlist is smooth as silk on it. Exactly how weak do you want it to be? >All the plasma widgets which attempt to replicate the functionality of the >builtin features in 1.4 (lyrics, for example) use enormously more >processing power (I'd say a factor of probably a hundred to a thousand) to >provide exactly the same feature. The lyrics applet does more than in 1.4, it scrolls through the song. But you have a point of course. Just as a Python widget typically drains more resources than one implemented in C++. This does not only affect KDE4, even startup of all GNU/Linux distros were script based until the recent addition of systemd. Optimization comes with time, and KDE in general goes a long way to enable that. Plasma in particular have received numerous performance improvements. I believe the current focus on plumbing in KDE is well balanced. Being too religious about it will slow down development. Make no mistake, Amarok is a real memory hog. Amarok consumes 400MB here, so I wouldn't mind seeing that number go down. However, with 4-8GB available on my main desktops and 32GB on my workstation, it is no show stopper. With 2GB systems it is a serious concern, with 1GB systems it is a show stopper, but frankly, 1GB is not enough for Gnome these days either. Amarok 2.5 released Posted Dec 22, 2011 20:34 UTC (Thu) by freggy (guest, #37477) [Link] (4 responses) with 1GB systems it is a show stopper, but frankly, 1GB is not enough for Gnome these days either. I beg to differ. I run GNOME 2.32 on a 1GB netbook (with some zram swap) and this works perfectly fine. OK, if I start LibreOffice, Firefox with 10 open tabs and Evolution at the same time, it will start swapping heavily, but if you don't exaggerate in multitasking, it's definitely not slow. Amarok 2.5 released Posted Dec 22, 2011 21:17 UTC (Thu) by Del- (guest, #72641) [Link] (3 responses) Let me see if I get this right. You religiously stick to GTK apps and the old Gnome release stripped down. Even then with office-app, web-browser and mail-client running your are out of memory. I rest my case. Amarok 2.5 released Posted Dec 22, 2011 21:47 UTC (Thu) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link] (2 responses) Neither Firefox nor Openoffice.org are really GTK apps. That kinda invalidates your argument quite a bit. Amarok 2.5 released Posted Dec 22, 2011 22:05 UTC (Thu) by Del- (guest, #72641) [Link] (1 responses) Care to elaborate on gui tool-kits used for LibreOffice and Firefox? Amarok 2.5 released Posted Dec 22, 2011 22:48 UTC (Thu) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link] Sure. Libreoffice uses VCL, or Visual Components Library with native desktop integration and has both GTK and Qt frontends. Firefox uses XUL with GTK integration. Neither are pure GTK apps and have occasional regressions on look and feel that doesn't match the rest of the GTK apps as a result. Amarok 2.5 released Posted Jan 3, 2012 15:00 UTC (Tue) by nye (guest, #51576) [Link] >>Try using it on a machine with a weak processor; > The weakest CPU I currently have access to is my oldest laptop with a 2.0GHz Core2 T7200. Dragging files from the collection browser to the playlist is smooth as silk on it. Exactly how weak do you want it to be? An Atom running at 1.66GHz, because that's the processor in my main desktop machine. It's happily capable of my other non-demanding activities like web browsing and playing 1080p H264 video, which one might expect to be a more difficult task than smooth drag-and-drop. (NB: I don't really care though, since I switched to Clementine as soon as I heard about it, and I'm extremely happy with it; just wanted to point out that not all slowness can be attributed to additional features.) Amarok 2.5 released Posted Dec 21, 2011 21:44 UTC (Wed) by job (guest, #670) [Link] (1 responses) Don't you normally have access to your music library free of charge? What kind of devices is that? Amarok 2.5 released Posted Dec 22, 2011 7:40 UTC (Thu) by kragilkragil2 (guest, #76172) [Link] 20000 songs are free to store and stream. GM is great at adding cover art. Devices are desktops, laptops and phones. I have all my songs encoded the way I like it (fairly low bitrate) and that helps making streaming fast. Amarok 2.5 released Posted Dec 21, 2011 16:43 UTC (Wed) by theophrastus (guest, #80847) [Link] (with apologies, copied from a slashdot (boo..hiss..) thread that i initiated) /tmp/amarok-2.5/$ grep -ir "amazon" * | wc -l 4661 to this some folks'll say: "so what?!" and i'll bow to their tender sensibilities. but for me, it indicates an interesting trend. Amarok 2.5 released Posted Dec 21, 2011 19:09 UTC (Wed) by jackb (guest, #41909) [Link] (1 responses) Sadly the headline features do not include the ability to handle a song existing in more than one format. Amarok 2.5 released Posted Dec 21, 2011 21:19 UTC (Wed) by knobunc (guest, #4678) [Link] Perhaps try Subsonic? http://www.subsonic.org/pages/index.jsp Amarok 2.5 released Posted Dec 22, 2011 0:04 UTC (Thu) by leifbk (guest, #35665) [Link] (5 responses) I support Clementine, an Amarok 1.4 replacement that's approaching its 1.0 release, and I've been using it since version 0.3. I hope that LWN will cover the 1.0 release of Clementine in an appropriate manner. I was a very satisfied user of Amarok 1.4, but the weird interface of 2.x put me completely off. FWIW, I've been a KDE user since 2003, but I can't see that I'm using any feature that wasn't already there in 3.x. KDE 4 has been a lot of bloat so far. Amarok 2.5 released Posted Dec 22, 2011 1:32 UTC (Thu) by malefic (subscriber, #37306) [Link] (1 responses) I never knew Clementine existed. I hate Amarok 2.x as much as I loved 1.x: the interface is bloated, it has hard dependency on MySQL and the overall stability leaves a lot to wish for. Unfortunately, I couldn't find a decent replacement that wouldn't be alien to KDE before. I'll give Clementine a try now. Amarok 2.5 released Posted Dec 22, 2011 18:26 UTC (Thu) by Del- (guest, #72641) [Link] Amarok is stable on my setup, i.e., Kubuntu 11.10 with the kubuntu-ppa enabled (note I enabled the ppa for more stable Akonadi and Nepomuk, not for Amarok). The dependence on Mysql is an educated choice. The Sqlite in 1.4 was useless for medium to large music collections, and changing to Mysql was a hassle. KDE4 has chosen Mysql as the standard db for the desktop, so it is a shared resource, hence changing Amarok to use, e.g,. Postgresql would introduce bloat with no tangible benefit. One may question the choice of Mysql of course, but that is another discussion. The stability issues that have bothered me significantly in Amarok are due to Pulseaudio integration. Finally, that also seems quite stable (cross fingers). Amarok 2.5 released Posted Dec 25, 2011 13:48 UTC (Sun) by lab (guest, #51153) [Link] (1 responses) Thanks for the tip on Clementine! Using it now, very happy, Amarok uninstalled. It's fast and lean. Only complaint so far is that the last.fm buttons are inactive for some reason. Amarok 2.5 released Posted Dec 25, 2011 13:59 UTC (Sun) by lab (guest, #51153) [Link] > Only complaint so far is that the last.fm buttons are inactive for some reason. Ah, figured it out. The buttons are only active when scobling is turned on. Happy now! Amarok 2.5 released Posted Dec 28, 2011 4:47 UTC (Wed) by rodgerd (guest, #58896) [Link] I found Clementine earlier this year and fell in love. Classic Amarok was the only KDE app I used in my generally-GNOME desktop because it was so good; I loathed the 2.x series heartily (slower, missing features from 1.4, hideous layout), and was delighted to discover someone had forked-and-continued. Too late, moved on Posted Dec 28, 2011 17:06 UTC (Wed) by blujay (guest, #39961) [Link] I was a big fan of Amarok 1.4. Sadly the devs went the way of KDE 4 and GNOME 3 and decided to do a fun rewrite instead of what was best for the users. Amarok 2 has been an awkward dog compared to 1.4. Once I found Clementine I haven't looked back: the spirit of Amarok 1.4 lives on. What puzzles me is the apparently sudden change in attitude of developers of Amarok, KDE, and GNOME: it's like they were all infected with a virus that made them ignore users and usefulness and turn their software into a theoretical playground. They basically ignore pleas from formerly-loyal users. No, they have no obligation to users--but it's a stark change in attitude and development goals.
Posted Dec 21, 2011 15:21 UTC (Wed) by kragilkragil2 (guest, #76172) [Link] (17 responses)
Amarok 2.5 released Posted Dec 21, 2011 16:19 UTC (Wed) by nye (guest, #51576) [Link] (4 responses) >a big new cloud hosting platform and it gives my access to all my music on all my devices free of charge What platform? Amarok 2.5 released Posted Dec 21, 2011 17:30 UTC (Wed) by kragilkragil2 (guest, #76172) [Link] (3 responses) I thought that was obvious: Google Music. Or is there another platform that offers 6GB+ for free? Amarok 2.5 released Posted Dec 21, 2011 17:37 UTC (Wed) by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784) [Link] (1 responses) I didn't know Google Music existed until you mentioned it. Amarok 2.5 released Posted Dec 22, 2011 10:30 UTC (Thu) by zdzichu (subscriber, #17118) [Link] It's largely irrelevant, visiting music.google.com gives: We're sorry. Google Music is currently only available in the United States Cloud Music Posted Dec 22, 2011 15:23 UTC (Thu) by rfunk (subscriber, #4054) [Link] Amazon Cloud Drive? Oh wait, actually I think it's 5GB free, and 20GB free with purchase of an MP3 album. I actually prefer Subsonic, which lets me have my music on my own server anywhere, and listen via web or mobile app. Amarok 2.5 released Posted Dec 21, 2011 18:38 UTC (Wed) by Del- (guest, #72641) [Link] (9 responses) Amarok is feature rich, and takes advantage of the resources available on newer hardware. Calling it bloated is in my opinion misleading, leading people to think the added functionality is useless. I enjoy many of the fearures in amarok, and see it as one of the master pieces of free software. You are of course free to enjoy openbox, while some of us enjoy KDE4. I am very glad that KDE is tailored to users with juicy hardware and ability to enjoy functionality abundance. There are enough DE's around for the minimalistic crowd. What I find sad, is how some in the minimalistic camp seem to enjoy bashing KDE. Have you even seen what you are missing out on? Probably not. Enjoy the cloud. I prefer to have my own data on my own computers. Amarok 2.5 released Posted Dec 22, 2011 7:32 UTC (Thu) by kragilkragil2 (guest, #76172) [Link] I still have one copy of my music on my computer + a backup. Amarok 2.5 released Posted Dec 22, 2011 11:40 UTC (Thu) by nye (guest, #51576) [Link] (7 responses) >Amarok is feature rich, and takes advantage of the resources available on newer hardware. Calling it bloated is in my opinion misleading, leading people to think the added functionality is useless. I enjoy many of the fearures in amarok, and see it as one of the master pieces of free software. ... >What I find sad, is how some in the minimalistic camp seem to enjoy bashing KDE Your point is valid, but Amarok is a bad example to pick - because it *really is* bloated and slow. Try using it on a machine with a weak processor; it's almost impossible to drag files from the collection browser into the playlist for example because it turns into a slideshow. All the plasma widgets which attempt to replicate the functionality of the builtin features in 1.4 (lyrics, for example) use enormously more processing power (I'd say a factor of probably a hundred to a thousand) to provide exactly the same feature. In fact, a couple of years back my investigation into why the collection browser is so slow revealed that the data model was misdesigned so that common operations were O(n^2) in the size of your collection, and would have required *substantial* rewriting to fix. Maybe they've actually done that since - I haven't checked - but this was what they came up with when they decided to rewrite from scratch? No thank you. Take a look at the Amarok 2 code some time - unless things have improved considerably since I last checked, it's, shall we say, less than excellent. Amarok 2.5 released Posted Dec 22, 2011 18:08 UTC (Thu) by Del- (guest, #72641) [Link] (6 responses) >Try using it on a machine with a weak processor; The weakest CPU I currently have access to is my oldest laptop with a 2.0GHz Core2 T7200. Dragging files from the collection browser to the playlist is smooth as silk on it. Exactly how weak do you want it to be? >All the plasma widgets which attempt to replicate the functionality of the >builtin features in 1.4 (lyrics, for example) use enormously more >processing power (I'd say a factor of probably a hundred to a thousand) to >provide exactly the same feature. The lyrics applet does more than in 1.4, it scrolls through the song. But you have a point of course. Just as a Python widget typically drains more resources than one implemented in C++. This does not only affect KDE4, even startup of all GNU/Linux distros were script based until the recent addition of systemd. Optimization comes with time, and KDE in general goes a long way to enable that. Plasma in particular have received numerous performance improvements. I believe the current focus on plumbing in KDE is well balanced. Being too religious about it will slow down development. Make no mistake, Amarok is a real memory hog. Amarok consumes 400MB here, so I wouldn't mind seeing that number go down. However, with 4-8GB available on my main desktops and 32GB on my workstation, it is no show stopper. With 2GB systems it is a serious concern, with 1GB systems it is a show stopper, but frankly, 1GB is not enough for Gnome these days either. Amarok 2.5 released Posted Dec 22, 2011 20:34 UTC (Thu) by freggy (guest, #37477) [Link] (4 responses) with 1GB systems it is a show stopper, but frankly, 1GB is not enough for Gnome these days either. I beg to differ. I run GNOME 2.32 on a 1GB netbook (with some zram swap) and this works perfectly fine. OK, if I start LibreOffice, Firefox with 10 open tabs and Evolution at the same time, it will start swapping heavily, but if you don't exaggerate in multitasking, it's definitely not slow. Amarok 2.5 released Posted Dec 22, 2011 21:17 UTC (Thu) by Del- (guest, #72641) [Link] (3 responses) Let me see if I get this right. You religiously stick to GTK apps and the old Gnome release stripped down. Even then with office-app, web-browser and mail-client running your are out of memory. I rest my case. Amarok 2.5 released Posted Dec 22, 2011 21:47 UTC (Thu) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link] (2 responses) Neither Firefox nor Openoffice.org are really GTK apps. That kinda invalidates your argument quite a bit. Amarok 2.5 released Posted Dec 22, 2011 22:05 UTC (Thu) by Del- (guest, #72641) [Link] (1 responses) Care to elaborate on gui tool-kits used for LibreOffice and Firefox? Amarok 2.5 released Posted Dec 22, 2011 22:48 UTC (Thu) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link] Sure. Libreoffice uses VCL, or Visual Components Library with native desktop integration and has both GTK and Qt frontends. Firefox uses XUL with GTK integration. Neither are pure GTK apps and have occasional regressions on look and feel that doesn't match the rest of the GTK apps as a result. Amarok 2.5 released Posted Jan 3, 2012 15:00 UTC (Tue) by nye (guest, #51576) [Link] >>Try using it on a machine with a weak processor; > The weakest CPU I currently have access to is my oldest laptop with a 2.0GHz Core2 T7200. Dragging files from the collection browser to the playlist is smooth as silk on it. Exactly how weak do you want it to be? An Atom running at 1.66GHz, because that's the processor in my main desktop machine. It's happily capable of my other non-demanding activities like web browsing and playing 1080p H264 video, which one might expect to be a more difficult task than smooth drag-and-drop. (NB: I don't really care though, since I switched to Clementine as soon as I heard about it, and I'm extremely happy with it; just wanted to point out that not all slowness can be attributed to additional features.) Amarok 2.5 released Posted Dec 21, 2011 21:44 UTC (Wed) by job (guest, #670) [Link] (1 responses) Don't you normally have access to your music library free of charge? What kind of devices is that? Amarok 2.5 released Posted Dec 22, 2011 7:40 UTC (Thu) by kragilkragil2 (guest, #76172) [Link] 20000 songs are free to store and stream. GM is great at adding cover art. Devices are desktops, laptops and phones. I have all my songs encoded the way I like it (fairly low bitrate) and that helps making streaming fast.
Posted Dec 21, 2011 16:19 UTC (Wed) by nye (guest, #51576) [Link] (4 responses)
What platform?
Amarok 2.5 released Posted Dec 21, 2011 17:30 UTC (Wed) by kragilkragil2 (guest, #76172) [Link] (3 responses) I thought that was obvious: Google Music. Or is there another platform that offers 6GB+ for free? Amarok 2.5 released Posted Dec 21, 2011 17:37 UTC (Wed) by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784) [Link] (1 responses) I didn't know Google Music existed until you mentioned it. Amarok 2.5 released Posted Dec 22, 2011 10:30 UTC (Thu) by zdzichu (subscriber, #17118) [Link] It's largely irrelevant, visiting music.google.com gives: We're sorry. Google Music is currently only available in the United States Cloud Music Posted Dec 22, 2011 15:23 UTC (Thu) by rfunk (subscriber, #4054) [Link] Amazon Cloud Drive? Oh wait, actually I think it's 5GB free, and 20GB free with purchase of an MP3 album. I actually prefer Subsonic, which lets me have my music on my own server anywhere, and listen via web or mobile app.
Posted Dec 21, 2011 17:30 UTC (Wed) by kragilkragil2 (guest, #76172) [Link] (3 responses)
Amarok 2.5 released Posted Dec 21, 2011 17:37 UTC (Wed) by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784) [Link] (1 responses) I didn't know Google Music existed until you mentioned it. Amarok 2.5 released Posted Dec 22, 2011 10:30 UTC (Thu) by zdzichu (subscriber, #17118) [Link] It's largely irrelevant, visiting music.google.com gives: We're sorry. Google Music is currently only available in the United States Cloud Music Posted Dec 22, 2011 15:23 UTC (Thu) by rfunk (subscriber, #4054) [Link] Amazon Cloud Drive? Oh wait, actually I think it's 5GB free, and 20GB free with purchase of an MP3 album. I actually prefer Subsonic, which lets me have my music on my own server anywhere, and listen via web or mobile app.
Posted Dec 21, 2011 17:37 UTC (Wed) by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784) [Link] (1 responses)
Amarok 2.5 released Posted Dec 22, 2011 10:30 UTC (Thu) by zdzichu (subscriber, #17118) [Link] It's largely irrelevant, visiting music.google.com gives: We're sorry. Google Music is currently only available in the United States
Posted Dec 22, 2011 10:30 UTC (Thu) by zdzichu (subscriber, #17118) [Link]
We're sorry. Google Music is currently only available in the United States
Posted Dec 22, 2011 15:23 UTC (Thu) by rfunk (subscriber, #4054) [Link]
I actually prefer Subsonic, which lets me have my music on my own server anywhere, and listen via web or mobile app.
Posted Dec 21, 2011 18:38 UTC (Wed) by Del- (guest, #72641) [Link] (9 responses)
You are of course free to enjoy openbox, while some of us enjoy KDE4. I am very glad that KDE is tailored to users with juicy hardware and ability to enjoy functionality abundance. There are enough DE's around for the minimalistic crowd. What I find sad, is how some in the minimalistic camp seem to enjoy bashing KDE. Have you even seen what you are missing out on? Probably not.
Enjoy the cloud. I prefer to have my own data on my own computers.
Amarok 2.5 released Posted Dec 22, 2011 7:32 UTC (Thu) by kragilkragil2 (guest, #76172) [Link] I still have one copy of my music on my computer + a backup. Amarok 2.5 released Posted Dec 22, 2011 11:40 UTC (Thu) by nye (guest, #51576) [Link] (7 responses) >Amarok is feature rich, and takes advantage of the resources available on newer hardware. Calling it bloated is in my opinion misleading, leading people to think the added functionality is useless. I enjoy many of the fearures in amarok, and see it as one of the master pieces of free software. ... >What I find sad, is how some in the minimalistic camp seem to enjoy bashing KDE Your point is valid, but Amarok is a bad example to pick - because it *really is* bloated and slow. Try using it on a machine with a weak processor; it's almost impossible to drag files from the collection browser into the playlist for example because it turns into a slideshow. All the plasma widgets which attempt to replicate the functionality of the builtin features in 1.4 (lyrics, for example) use enormously more processing power (I'd say a factor of probably a hundred to a thousand) to provide exactly the same feature. In fact, a couple of years back my investigation into why the collection browser is so slow revealed that the data model was misdesigned so that common operations were O(n^2) in the size of your collection, and would have required *substantial* rewriting to fix. Maybe they've actually done that since - I haven't checked - but this was what they came up with when they decided to rewrite from scratch? No thank you. Take a look at the Amarok 2 code some time - unless things have improved considerably since I last checked, it's, shall we say, less than excellent. Amarok 2.5 released Posted Dec 22, 2011 18:08 UTC (Thu) by Del- (guest, #72641) [Link] (6 responses) >Try using it on a machine with a weak processor; The weakest CPU I currently have access to is my oldest laptop with a 2.0GHz Core2 T7200. Dragging files from the collection browser to the playlist is smooth as silk on it. Exactly how weak do you want it to be? >All the plasma widgets which attempt to replicate the functionality of the >builtin features in 1.4 (lyrics, for example) use enormously more >processing power (I'd say a factor of probably a hundred to a thousand) to >provide exactly the same feature. The lyrics applet does more than in 1.4, it scrolls through the song. But you have a point of course. Just as a Python widget typically drains more resources than one implemented in C++. This does not only affect KDE4, even startup of all GNU/Linux distros were script based until the recent addition of systemd. Optimization comes with time, and KDE in general goes a long way to enable that. Plasma in particular have received numerous performance improvements. I believe the current focus on plumbing in KDE is well balanced. Being too religious about it will slow down development. Make no mistake, Amarok is a real memory hog. Amarok consumes 400MB here, so I wouldn't mind seeing that number go down. However, with 4-8GB available on my main desktops and 32GB on my workstation, it is no show stopper. With 2GB systems it is a serious concern, with 1GB systems it is a show stopper, but frankly, 1GB is not enough for Gnome these days either. Amarok 2.5 released Posted Dec 22, 2011 20:34 UTC (Thu) by freggy (guest, #37477) [Link] (4 responses) with 1GB systems it is a show stopper, but frankly, 1GB is not enough for Gnome these days either. I beg to differ. I run GNOME 2.32 on a 1GB netbook (with some zram swap) and this works perfectly fine. OK, if I start LibreOffice, Firefox with 10 open tabs and Evolution at the same time, it will start swapping heavily, but if you don't exaggerate in multitasking, it's definitely not slow. Amarok 2.5 released Posted Dec 22, 2011 21:17 UTC (Thu) by Del- (guest, #72641) [Link] (3 responses) Let me see if I get this right. You religiously stick to GTK apps and the old Gnome release stripped down. Even then with office-app, web-browser and mail-client running your are out of memory. I rest my case. Amarok 2.5 released Posted Dec 22, 2011 21:47 UTC (Thu) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link] (2 responses) Neither Firefox nor Openoffice.org are really GTK apps. That kinda invalidates your argument quite a bit. Amarok 2.5 released Posted Dec 22, 2011 22:05 UTC (Thu) by Del- (guest, #72641) [Link] (1 responses) Care to elaborate on gui tool-kits used for LibreOffice and Firefox? Amarok 2.5 released Posted Dec 22, 2011 22:48 UTC (Thu) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link] Sure. Libreoffice uses VCL, or Visual Components Library with native desktop integration and has both GTK and Qt frontends. Firefox uses XUL with GTK integration. Neither are pure GTK apps and have occasional regressions on look and feel that doesn't match the rest of the GTK apps as a result. Amarok 2.5 released Posted Jan 3, 2012 15:00 UTC (Tue) by nye (guest, #51576) [Link] >>Try using it on a machine with a weak processor; > The weakest CPU I currently have access to is my oldest laptop with a 2.0GHz Core2 T7200. Dragging files from the collection browser to the playlist is smooth as silk on it. Exactly how weak do you want it to be? An Atom running at 1.66GHz, because that's the processor in my main desktop machine. It's happily capable of my other non-demanding activities like web browsing and playing 1080p H264 video, which one might expect to be a more difficult task than smooth drag-and-drop. (NB: I don't really care though, since I switched to Clementine as soon as I heard about it, and I'm extremely happy with it; just wanted to point out that not all slowness can be attributed to additional features.)
Posted Dec 22, 2011 7:32 UTC (Thu) by kragilkragil2 (guest, #76172) [Link]
Posted Dec 22, 2011 11:40 UTC (Thu) by nye (guest, #51576) [Link] (7 responses)
Your point is valid, but Amarok is a bad example to pick - because it *really is* bloated and slow.
Try using it on a machine with a weak processor; it's almost impossible to drag files from the collection browser into the playlist for example because it turns into a slideshow. All the plasma widgets which attempt to replicate the functionality of the builtin features in 1.4 (lyrics, for example) use enormously more processing power (I'd say a factor of probably a hundred to a thousand) to provide exactly the same feature.
In fact, a couple of years back my investigation into why the collection browser is so slow revealed that the data model was misdesigned so that common operations were O(n^2) in the size of your collection, and would have required *substantial* rewriting to fix. Maybe they've actually done that since - I haven't checked - but this was what they came up with when they decided to rewrite from scratch? No thank you.
Take a look at the Amarok 2 code some time - unless things have improved considerably since I last checked, it's, shall we say, less than excellent.
Amarok 2.5 released Posted Dec 22, 2011 18:08 UTC (Thu) by Del- (guest, #72641) [Link] (6 responses) >Try using it on a machine with a weak processor; The weakest CPU I currently have access to is my oldest laptop with a 2.0GHz Core2 T7200. Dragging files from the collection browser to the playlist is smooth as silk on it. Exactly how weak do you want it to be? >All the plasma widgets which attempt to replicate the functionality of the >builtin features in 1.4 (lyrics, for example) use enormously more >processing power (I'd say a factor of probably a hundred to a thousand) to >provide exactly the same feature. The lyrics applet does more than in 1.4, it scrolls through the song. But you have a point of course. Just as a Python widget typically drains more resources than one implemented in C++. This does not only affect KDE4, even startup of all GNU/Linux distros were script based until the recent addition of systemd. Optimization comes with time, and KDE in general goes a long way to enable that. Plasma in particular have received numerous performance improvements. I believe the current focus on plumbing in KDE is well balanced. Being too religious about it will slow down development. Make no mistake, Amarok is a real memory hog. Amarok consumes 400MB here, so I wouldn't mind seeing that number go down. However, with 4-8GB available on my main desktops and 32GB on my workstation, it is no show stopper. With 2GB systems it is a serious concern, with 1GB systems it is a show stopper, but frankly, 1GB is not enough for Gnome these days either. Amarok 2.5 released Posted Dec 22, 2011 20:34 UTC (Thu) by freggy (guest, #37477) [Link] (4 responses) with 1GB systems it is a show stopper, but frankly, 1GB is not enough for Gnome these days either. I beg to differ. I run GNOME 2.32 on a 1GB netbook (with some zram swap) and this works perfectly fine. OK, if I start LibreOffice, Firefox with 10 open tabs and Evolution at the same time, it will start swapping heavily, but if you don't exaggerate in multitasking, it's definitely not slow. Amarok 2.5 released Posted Dec 22, 2011 21:17 UTC (Thu) by Del- (guest, #72641) [Link] (3 responses) Let me see if I get this right. You religiously stick to GTK apps and the old Gnome release stripped down. Even then with office-app, web-browser and mail-client running your are out of memory. I rest my case. Amarok 2.5 released Posted Dec 22, 2011 21:47 UTC (Thu) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link] (2 responses) Neither Firefox nor Openoffice.org are really GTK apps. That kinda invalidates your argument quite a bit. Amarok 2.5 released Posted Dec 22, 2011 22:05 UTC (Thu) by Del- (guest, #72641) [Link] (1 responses) Care to elaborate on gui tool-kits used for LibreOffice and Firefox? Amarok 2.5 released Posted Dec 22, 2011 22:48 UTC (Thu) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link] Sure. Libreoffice uses VCL, or Visual Components Library with native desktop integration and has both GTK and Qt frontends. Firefox uses XUL with GTK integration. Neither are pure GTK apps and have occasional regressions on look and feel that doesn't match the rest of the GTK apps as a result. Amarok 2.5 released Posted Jan 3, 2012 15:00 UTC (Tue) by nye (guest, #51576) [Link] >>Try using it on a machine with a weak processor; > The weakest CPU I currently have access to is my oldest laptop with a 2.0GHz Core2 T7200. Dragging files from the collection browser to the playlist is smooth as silk on it. Exactly how weak do you want it to be? An Atom running at 1.66GHz, because that's the processor in my main desktop machine. It's happily capable of my other non-demanding activities like web browsing and playing 1080p H264 video, which one might expect to be a more difficult task than smooth drag-and-drop. (NB: I don't really care though, since I switched to Clementine as soon as I heard about it, and I'm extremely happy with it; just wanted to point out that not all slowness can be attributed to additional features.)
Posted Dec 22, 2011 18:08 UTC (Thu) by Del- (guest, #72641) [Link] (6 responses)
The weakest CPU I currently have access to is my oldest laptop with a 2.0GHz Core2 T7200. Dragging files from the collection browser to the playlist is smooth as silk on it. Exactly how weak do you want it to be?
>All the plasma widgets which attempt to replicate the functionality of the >builtin features in 1.4 (lyrics, for example) use enormously more >processing power (I'd say a factor of probably a hundred to a thousand) to >provide exactly the same feature.
The lyrics applet does more than in 1.4, it scrolls through the song. But you have a point of course. Just as a Python widget typically drains more resources than one implemented in C++. This does not only affect KDE4, even startup of all GNU/Linux distros were script based until the recent addition of systemd. Optimization comes with time, and KDE in general goes a long way to enable that. Plasma in particular have received numerous performance improvements. I believe the current focus on plumbing in KDE is well balanced. Being too religious about it will slow down development.
Make no mistake, Amarok is a real memory hog. Amarok consumes 400MB here, so I wouldn't mind seeing that number go down. However, with 4-8GB available on my main desktops and 32GB on my workstation, it is no show stopper. With 2GB systems it is a serious concern, with 1GB systems it is a show stopper, but frankly, 1GB is not enough for Gnome these days either.
Amarok 2.5 released Posted Dec 22, 2011 20:34 UTC (Thu) by freggy (guest, #37477) [Link] (4 responses) with 1GB systems it is a show stopper, but frankly, 1GB is not enough for Gnome these days either. I beg to differ. I run GNOME 2.32 on a 1GB netbook (with some zram swap) and this works perfectly fine. OK, if I start LibreOffice, Firefox with 10 open tabs and Evolution at the same time, it will start swapping heavily, but if you don't exaggerate in multitasking, it's definitely not slow. Amarok 2.5 released Posted Dec 22, 2011 21:17 UTC (Thu) by Del- (guest, #72641) [Link] (3 responses) Let me see if I get this right. You religiously stick to GTK apps and the old Gnome release stripped down. Even then with office-app, web-browser and mail-client running your are out of memory. I rest my case. Amarok 2.5 released Posted Dec 22, 2011 21:47 UTC (Thu) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link] (2 responses) Neither Firefox nor Openoffice.org are really GTK apps. That kinda invalidates your argument quite a bit. Amarok 2.5 released Posted Dec 22, 2011 22:05 UTC (Thu) by Del- (guest, #72641) [Link] (1 responses) Care to elaborate on gui tool-kits used for LibreOffice and Firefox? Amarok 2.5 released Posted Dec 22, 2011 22:48 UTC (Thu) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link] Sure. Libreoffice uses VCL, or Visual Components Library with native desktop integration and has both GTK and Qt frontends. Firefox uses XUL with GTK integration. Neither are pure GTK apps and have occasional regressions on look and feel that doesn't match the rest of the GTK apps as a result. Amarok 2.5 released Posted Jan 3, 2012 15:00 UTC (Tue) by nye (guest, #51576) [Link] >>Try using it on a machine with a weak processor; > The weakest CPU I currently have access to is my oldest laptop with a 2.0GHz Core2 T7200. Dragging files from the collection browser to the playlist is smooth as silk on it. Exactly how weak do you want it to be? An Atom running at 1.66GHz, because that's the processor in my main desktop machine. It's happily capable of my other non-demanding activities like web browsing and playing 1080p H264 video, which one might expect to be a more difficult task than smooth drag-and-drop. (NB: I don't really care though, since I switched to Clementine as soon as I heard about it, and I'm extremely happy with it; just wanted to point out that not all slowness can be attributed to additional features.)
Posted Dec 22, 2011 20:34 UTC (Thu) by freggy (guest, #37477) [Link] (4 responses)
with 1GB systems it is a show stopper, but frankly, 1GB is not enough for Gnome these days either.
Amarok 2.5 released Posted Dec 22, 2011 21:17 UTC (Thu) by Del- (guest, #72641) [Link] (3 responses) Let me see if I get this right. You religiously stick to GTK apps and the old Gnome release stripped down. Even then with office-app, web-browser and mail-client running your are out of memory. I rest my case. Amarok 2.5 released Posted Dec 22, 2011 21:47 UTC (Thu) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link] (2 responses) Neither Firefox nor Openoffice.org are really GTK apps. That kinda invalidates your argument quite a bit. Amarok 2.5 released Posted Dec 22, 2011 22:05 UTC (Thu) by Del- (guest, #72641) [Link] (1 responses) Care to elaborate on gui tool-kits used for LibreOffice and Firefox? Amarok 2.5 released Posted Dec 22, 2011 22:48 UTC (Thu) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link] Sure. Libreoffice uses VCL, or Visual Components Library with native desktop integration and has both GTK and Qt frontends. Firefox uses XUL with GTK integration. Neither are pure GTK apps and have occasional regressions on look and feel that doesn't match the rest of the GTK apps as a result.
Posted Dec 22, 2011 21:17 UTC (Thu) by Del- (guest, #72641) [Link] (3 responses)
Amarok 2.5 released Posted Dec 22, 2011 21:47 UTC (Thu) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link] (2 responses) Neither Firefox nor Openoffice.org are really GTK apps. That kinda invalidates your argument quite a bit. Amarok 2.5 released Posted Dec 22, 2011 22:05 UTC (Thu) by Del- (guest, #72641) [Link] (1 responses) Care to elaborate on gui tool-kits used for LibreOffice and Firefox? Amarok 2.5 released Posted Dec 22, 2011 22:48 UTC (Thu) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link] Sure. Libreoffice uses VCL, or Visual Components Library with native desktop integration and has both GTK and Qt frontends. Firefox uses XUL with GTK integration. Neither are pure GTK apps and have occasional regressions on look and feel that doesn't match the rest of the GTK apps as a result.
Posted Dec 22, 2011 21:47 UTC (Thu) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link] (2 responses)
Amarok 2.5 released Posted Dec 22, 2011 22:05 UTC (Thu) by Del- (guest, #72641) [Link] (1 responses) Care to elaborate on gui tool-kits used for LibreOffice and Firefox? Amarok 2.5 released Posted Dec 22, 2011 22:48 UTC (Thu) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link] Sure. Libreoffice uses VCL, or Visual Components Library with native desktop integration and has both GTK and Qt frontends. Firefox uses XUL with GTK integration. Neither are pure GTK apps and have occasional regressions on look and feel that doesn't match the rest of the GTK apps as a result.
Posted Dec 22, 2011 22:05 UTC (Thu) by Del- (guest, #72641) [Link] (1 responses)
Amarok 2.5 released Posted Dec 22, 2011 22:48 UTC (Thu) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link] Sure. Libreoffice uses VCL, or Visual Components Library with native desktop integration and has both GTK and Qt frontends. Firefox uses XUL with GTK integration. Neither are pure GTK apps and have occasional regressions on look and feel that doesn't match the rest of the GTK apps as a result.
Posted Dec 22, 2011 22:48 UTC (Thu) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]
Posted Jan 3, 2012 15:00 UTC (Tue) by nye (guest, #51576) [Link]
> The weakest CPU I currently have access to is my oldest laptop with a 2.0GHz Core2 T7200. Dragging files from the collection browser to the playlist is smooth as silk on it. Exactly how weak do you want it to be?
An Atom running at 1.66GHz, because that's the processor in my main desktop machine.
It's happily capable of my other non-demanding activities like web browsing and playing 1080p H264 video, which one might expect to be a more difficult task than smooth drag-and-drop.
(NB: I don't really care though, since I switched to Clementine as soon as I heard about it, and I'm extremely happy with it; just wanted to point out that not all slowness can be attributed to additional features.)
Posted Dec 21, 2011 21:44 UTC (Wed) by job (guest, #670) [Link] (1 responses)
Amarok 2.5 released Posted Dec 22, 2011 7:40 UTC (Thu) by kragilkragil2 (guest, #76172) [Link] 20000 songs are free to store and stream. GM is great at adding cover art. Devices are desktops, laptops and phones. I have all my songs encoded the way I like it (fairly low bitrate) and that helps making streaming fast.
Posted Dec 22, 2011 7:40 UTC (Thu) by kragilkragil2 (guest, #76172) [Link]
Posted Dec 21, 2011 16:43 UTC (Wed) by theophrastus (guest, #80847) [Link]
/tmp/amarok-2.5/$ grep -ir "amazon" * | wc -l 4661
to this some folks'll say: "so what?!" and i'll bow to their tender sensibilities. but for me, it indicates an interesting trend.
Posted Dec 21, 2011 19:09 UTC (Wed) by jackb (guest, #41909) [Link] (1 responses)
Sadly the headline features do not include the ability to handle a song existing in more than one format.
Amarok 2.5 released Posted Dec 21, 2011 21:19 UTC (Wed) by knobunc (guest, #4678) [Link] Perhaps try Subsonic? http://www.subsonic.org/pages/index.jsp
Posted Dec 21, 2011 21:19 UTC (Wed) by knobunc (guest, #4678) [Link]
http://www.subsonic.org/pages/index.jsp
Posted Dec 22, 2011 0:04 UTC (Thu) by leifbk (guest, #35665) [Link] (5 responses)
FWIW, I've been a KDE user since 2003, but I can't see that I'm using any feature that wasn't already there in 3.x. KDE 4 has been a lot of bloat so far.
Amarok 2.5 released Posted Dec 22, 2011 1:32 UTC (Thu) by malefic (subscriber, #37306) [Link] (1 responses) I never knew Clementine existed. I hate Amarok 2.x as much as I loved 1.x: the interface is bloated, it has hard dependency on MySQL and the overall stability leaves a lot to wish for. Unfortunately, I couldn't find a decent replacement that wouldn't be alien to KDE before. I'll give Clementine a try now. Amarok 2.5 released Posted Dec 22, 2011 18:26 UTC (Thu) by Del- (guest, #72641) [Link] Amarok is stable on my setup, i.e., Kubuntu 11.10 with the kubuntu-ppa enabled (note I enabled the ppa for more stable Akonadi and Nepomuk, not for Amarok). The dependence on Mysql is an educated choice. The Sqlite in 1.4 was useless for medium to large music collections, and changing to Mysql was a hassle. KDE4 has chosen Mysql as the standard db for the desktop, so it is a shared resource, hence changing Amarok to use, e.g,. Postgresql would introduce bloat with no tangible benefit. One may question the choice of Mysql of course, but that is another discussion. The stability issues that have bothered me significantly in Amarok are due to Pulseaudio integration. Finally, that also seems quite stable (cross fingers). Amarok 2.5 released Posted Dec 25, 2011 13:48 UTC (Sun) by lab (guest, #51153) [Link] (1 responses) Thanks for the tip on Clementine! Using it now, very happy, Amarok uninstalled. It's fast and lean. Only complaint so far is that the last.fm buttons are inactive for some reason. Amarok 2.5 released Posted Dec 25, 2011 13:59 UTC (Sun) by lab (guest, #51153) [Link] > Only complaint so far is that the last.fm buttons are inactive for some reason. Ah, figured it out. The buttons are only active when scobling is turned on. Happy now! Amarok 2.5 released Posted Dec 28, 2011 4:47 UTC (Wed) by rodgerd (guest, #58896) [Link] I found Clementine earlier this year and fell in love. Classic Amarok was the only KDE app I used in my generally-GNOME desktop because it was so good; I loathed the 2.x series heartily (slower, missing features from 1.4, hideous layout), and was delighted to discover someone had forked-and-continued.
Posted Dec 22, 2011 1:32 UTC (Thu) by malefic (subscriber, #37306) [Link] (1 responses)
Amarok 2.5 released Posted Dec 22, 2011 18:26 UTC (Thu) by Del- (guest, #72641) [Link] Amarok is stable on my setup, i.e., Kubuntu 11.10 with the kubuntu-ppa enabled (note I enabled the ppa for more stable Akonadi and Nepomuk, not for Amarok). The dependence on Mysql is an educated choice. The Sqlite in 1.4 was useless for medium to large music collections, and changing to Mysql was a hassle. KDE4 has chosen Mysql as the standard db for the desktop, so it is a shared resource, hence changing Amarok to use, e.g,. Postgresql would introduce bloat with no tangible benefit. One may question the choice of Mysql of course, but that is another discussion. The stability issues that have bothered me significantly in Amarok are due to Pulseaudio integration. Finally, that also seems quite stable (cross fingers).
Posted Dec 22, 2011 18:26 UTC (Thu) by Del- (guest, #72641) [Link]
The stability issues that have bothered me significantly in Amarok are due to Pulseaudio integration. Finally, that also seems quite stable (cross fingers).
Posted Dec 25, 2011 13:48 UTC (Sun) by lab (guest, #51153) [Link] (1 responses)
Amarok 2.5 released Posted Dec 25, 2011 13:59 UTC (Sun) by lab (guest, #51153) [Link] > Only complaint so far is that the last.fm buttons are inactive for some reason. Ah, figured it out. The buttons are only active when scobling is turned on. Happy now!
Posted Dec 25, 2011 13:59 UTC (Sun) by lab (guest, #51153) [Link]
Ah, figured it out. The buttons are only active when scobling is turned on. Happy now!
Posted Dec 28, 2011 4:47 UTC (Wed) by rodgerd (guest, #58896) [Link]
Posted Dec 28, 2011 17:06 UTC (Wed) by blujay (guest, #39961) [Link]
What puzzles me is the apparently sudden change in attitude of developers of Amarok, KDE, and GNOME: it's like they were all infected with a virus that made them ignore users and usefulness and turn their software into a theoretical playground. They basically ignore pleas from formerly-loyal users. No, they have no obligation to users--but it's a stark change in attitude and development goals.
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