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Music Player Amarok 2.5 Released
jrepin writes with this quote from an article at The H:
"The Amarok development team has released version 2.5 of its open source music player and organizer, code-named 'Earth Moving.' Among the changes highlighted by the developers are re-written support for USB mass storage devices, GPodder.net podcast synchronization and an integrated Amazon MP3 store. The GPodder.net support includes the ability to browse directly from Amarok through the list of recommended podcasts on GPodder.net. Users of playlists on Amarok will find the new playlist functionality in 2.5 such as the ability to use formatted strings in Playlist layout items as prefixes and suffixes, dragging and dropping tracks in an empty area in the list of playlists to create a new playlist, and, in that same empty area, the addition of a new 'create new playlist' action."
Amarok 2.0 came out and I ditched it. Up until then, it had been for me the best music player I've ever used. The redesign really screwed it up.
I really loved using Amarok back in the day, before the big UI revamp in the 2.x releases... this unfortunately seems like it hasn't evolved yet into something I'd like to use. I hope that it will find a lot of happy users, as the team is very dedicated, but I'll be sticking with Clementine over here. It's an Amarok 1.4 fork that's been the product of a lot of time, effort and love, and I highly recommend it to anyone looking for a quality library-based player. Still cross-platform, too! Check it out: http://code.google.com/p/clementine-player/
Have they put dynamic playlists back yet?
I still hold onto the hope that perhaps one day, Amarok 2.x might have the feature set that Amarok 1.4 had.
And chew up the same amount of memory or less.
But maybe crash less often.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
...it really whips the llama's ass!
in the amarok 2.5 source tree?
I found the description a bit confusing but it *sounds* like they have improved the playlist creation and editing - that was what pushed me away fro Amarok 2.x, creating and editing a playlist was incredibly awkward involving multiple swicthes between various panes. Not to mention very buggy. The bugs were mostly fixed, but the actual process remained a usability nightmare.
Will check it again once it reaches the kubuntu repos.
Am I the only one who is still using old school players? :/
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
I won't ask the obvious. But following that, what can be done to get people to 1) manage their projects well, so that others will want to contribute to their project instead of reimplementing functionality, mostly badly, and 2) get more people to contribute to established projects instead of starting over.
I understand that we've got a Catch-22 situation. Need better approach!
They should change the name to Kamarok, so it would be easer to find in a search.
That was a terrible album.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
I'm *still* looking for the perfect, low-resource consuming CURSES mode mp3 player (or for that matter, just terminal mode)
I don't think I'll ever find one until there's a standard database LDAP-like (or XML-like) protocol of mp3 metadata storage & retrieval. How come all these mp3 players need their own specific version of a database? (and why are the ones with databases GUI's)
I use something like:
mplayer `grep -i "steely dan" mp3-catalog.txt`
(although, now I have a script wrapped around it)
but was buggy as hell and crashed all the time. 2.x is much more stable but it counter-intuitive to use and downright cryptic when it comes to simple functions. Random? How do I set random play? dig, dig, dig, help, OH? Ok. Random.
The preceding post was not a Slashvertisement.
I use Banshee with the Mirage extention which works reasonably well as an automatic "shuffle by similar" system (analyzes the files and determines acoustic similarity). It's not excellent (a bit too narrow a definition of what is "similar" I think), but it is very good.
Does Amarok have a similar feature?
And that's not XMMS 2 nor Audacious just to be clear.
I can't stand anything more complex.
Am I old fashioned?
Amarok was named after the Mike Oldfield album by the same name (an amazing album!). The code name of this release, "Earth Moving", is also the name of an album by Mike Oldfield.
This happens just days after I finally ditched Amarok and switched to Guayadeque http://guayadeque.org/ : I'll never look back, give it a try. If nothing else, at least for the marvelous smart mode (http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2011/03/review-guayadeque-0-2-9-the-lightweight-music-app/)
moc with filesystem-based metadata using symlinks.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
Have you tried mpd? I use a GUI client (ario) and an Android client (mpdroid), and sometimes the basic terminal client (mpc), mpc; flatmates/visitors have used Windows/OSX/iPhone clients too. There's a curses client, but I've not used it: http://mpd.wikia.com/wiki/Clients
They don't have as many features as Amarok (which I use at work), but I wanted something that runs on the desktop, which I can control from my phone or laptop. (The desktop is plugged into the amplifier.)
Hey, people don't click this, it's not real goatse!
I use streamtuner + streamripper + audacious . Mostly listen to streams from http://somafm.com/ , because I otherwise don't like music enough to bother creating my own playlist / collection. Streamripper saves the stream to a big directory, so I can time-shift it into the car / subway later, while proxying the stream to audacious.
Every once in a while I'll drop them a donation, and buy a few tracks that I really like on Amazon. Which is much more than the music industry would get from me if I didn't listen to music at all... it has that weird effect, the more you hear a song, the more you want it.
also known as the Amarok user interface... (its the platypus of UIs, you're left wondering how the **** did that happen?)
It plays your music, and plays it decently. Grow up.
This is something that happens way too often. KDE4, Amarok 2, Python 3, there are too many systems that were good and became fucked up in a new version.
It would be better if they tried to follow the example of people like Donald Ervin Knuth, who made TeX converge asymptotically to version pi. Or Nicklaus Wirth who created an entirely new language, Modula, when he wished to extend Pascal.
Let's cut the crap and get down to the nitty gritty. What bog standard music player features, that used to work in the 1.x version still doesn't work in the new version, but will surely be available in the next? Is cross fading back in it yet? Does it still require a RDMS and 2 gigs of dependencies?
The Windows version is an 88MB install. That's bigger than iTunes FFS!
It plays music. It stays out of the way.
The big deal breaker with Amarok 2 for me is local metadata handling. I have tagged all of my files with (correct) artwork and (correct) lyrics. With a couple of extensions, Amarok 1.4 would use the local metadata and only use an online source for that information if the file didn't have it in the tags. The last few times I tried Amarok 2, it still insisted on searching online for things I specifically put in the tag.
The sin isn't unique to Amarok. I've only found Songbird/Nightgale (with some extensions) and Guayadeque do the correct thing in this regard.
It's called a USLT tag. That should be parsed before searching some lyrics site. Look for embedded artwork before searching Amazon. Libraries exist for all this. It shouldn't be super hard to implement such basic functionality but almost no players do.
replicating what the built in file manager already provides?
Does the built-in file manager already provide support for playlists, other than as a folder of shortcuts? Does it provide for sorting by featured artist, BPM, or other metadata?
I might give it a try, I liked 1.4...the 2.* versions have sucked powerfully. A music player that can't play CDs? Seriously?
I really hate to criticize things people are making for the common good, but Amarok is pretty bad. It's super-bloated, but with basic functionality lacking or broken. It seems that as versions advance, more and more is broken. The interface becomes more and more cluttered and less and less usable, and the display elements that they ostensibly changed the whole thing over so they'd work in KDE 4 have been perpetually screwed-up too. The most used part of a media player, the controls, almost seem like an afterthought.
Sometimes, the time comes in a product's development cycle where maybe the folks working on it should just realize it took a very wrong turn and scrap it.
It's music. Just listen to it.
It's possible to be in the mood for one kind of music and not another. For example, I find walking or running for exercise more enjoyable if the tempo matches my stride rate. Or perhaps I have children under 18 in the house and don't want shuffle to land on a swear-heavy track like "Starfuckers Inc." by Nine Inch Nails (well over a dozen fucks) or "Hollaback Girl" by Gwen Stefani (38 shits) or "Filthy Words" by George Carlin (shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker, and tits). Or perhaps I'm getting ready to write music of my own and want to clear my mind by listening to an hour of pre-1923 compositions so that someone else's copyright doesn't slip into my own work.
...for me, is that I can quickly rate my music with key shortcuts (5 bindings, 10 values) without even looking at the song popup (though there's a handful shortcut to show it on demand too), and that all the data is on a right and proper database, to play with to my heart's content.
What can be annoying, however is when I'm *forced* to play with the DB to save my metadata, whenever they change the file identification or something goes wrong, which has happened a few times. This would be alleviated if Amarok wrote the metadata back to the file, an important missing feature.
As for the interface, I do miss the power of a spreadsheet, though the advanced search makes up for that for most practical purposes. Other than that, it's entirely functional, if a bit unresponsive
In short, even with it's shortcomings it's the best player I've ever used, helping me with what matters most to me: finding and playing the tracks I like
with the least possible effort: rating with bindings, and playing dynamic playlists (i.e. 1/3 I like, 1/2 unrated, 1/10 added last mont, 1/10 podcasts/study stuff). That said, I would be really pissed off at it if I didn't made regular backups of the DB, or was not capable of rescuing my data.
Here are a few good command-line tools for managing and playing your music:
dnuos, a list-generating script which you could use to create something like your catalog.txt file. It's pretty nice, and it can do things like read the metadata of the files if you want, as well as the file names.
morituri, a command line CD ripper with error correction support and metadata fetching
beets, a command line music manager which includes an MPD server and so can be interacted with using any number of command line MPD clients
I think beets + [some command line MPD client] would be best for you. I'm a happy Amarok user, but I've got a large collection that is partially hosted on a little Samba server that was for a long time headless, so I've played with command line management tools and I found beets and morituri to be very impressive. I hope one of those links is useful to you. :-)
No, then people will think it's a camera-related application.
You're right though: "Clementine" is a little out there. Some other play on the name "amarok" would be nice.
You don't need to prefix Amarok with "music player".