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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
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.
compiles easily. and it's only heard not seen. it does exactly what a music player ought to do and no more.
blessings upon the maintainers.
That was a terrible album.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
http://xmms2.org/wiki/Clients
Audacious
http://audacious-media-player.org/
I agree, simple is better.
Why should a music player take full screen, or waste precious screen real estate replicating what the built in file manager already provides? All of them seem to be in an arms race with itunes to have te most complex and least well behaved interface. I just want to listen, I don't ned to know every fact about the music, the album cover, or even who played drums. Its music people. Not a spreadsheet or a rocket launch. Just listen. Stop making it complex. Just listen.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Have you tried foobar2000? It's simple and minimal like Winamp used to be, but still extensible with plugins if you need functionality not built-in.
Try gmusicbrowser. It's the best foobar2000 equivalent for Linux, and its handling of huge libraries is the best I've seen. Very customizable too, it works just as well in minimalistic modes as it does in fullscreen layouts.
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.
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.