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Amarok 2.6 Music Player Released

Posted by Soulskill on from the onward-and-upward dept.

jrepin writes "KDE is proud to announce version 2.6 of Amarok music player. While it brings a reasonable set of new features, the focus of this release was on bug fixing and improving the overall stability. The new features are a complete overhaul of the iPod, iPad and iPhone support including solid support for device playlists; transcoding for iPod-like and USB Mass Storage devices; the Free Music Chart service is now activated by default; embedded cover support for Ogg and FLAC files; and album art support for tracks on the filesystem and USB Mass Storage devices."

21 of 100 comments (clear)

  1. Slow news day? by LordLucless · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I'm a Linux and Amarok user, but do I really need a slashdot article about a primarily bugfix and stability point-release of a media player?

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    Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
    1. Re:Slow news day? by oakgrove · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I'm a Linux and Amarok user, but do I really need a slashdot article about a primarily bugfix and stability point-release of a media player?

      Yes for one simple reason. Many Linux users fondly recall Amarok 1.4 and have been waiting on the edge of our seats for years waiting for the 2.x series to live up to the former glory*. It hasn't happened yet so new releases are always something to pay attention to if only for the inevitable let down.

      *Clementine and friends while good are not Amarok 1.4.

      --
      The soylentnews experiment has been a dismal failure.
    2. Re:Slow news day? by LordLucless · · Score: 3, Informative

      I dunno, I'm still using the old version. But, to summarize the summary:
      - Bugfixes
      - Stability Increase (really, bugfixes by another name - instability is a bug)
      - Improved iDevice support (which I don't use - I'm on Android)
      - Change in default settings (which I could have changed anyway if I'd wanted)
      - Improved album cover support (which I don't really care about - I listen to music when my eyes are otherwise occupied)

      Granted, some people will probably find it's support of iDevices useful, and someone may care about album cover art, but there doesn't seem to be any major changes here.

      --
      Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
    3. Re:Slow news day? by marcansoft · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Actually, I'm of the opposite opinion for the same reason. I gave up on Amarok ever since 2.0, and I'm much more interested in Clementine releases. As soon as Clementine gets arbitrary labels ("tags" in the "web 2.0" sense) and fixes up their device support a bit (I'm particularly looking forward to the day MTP works smoothly with Android devices), it'll pretty much have covered all Amarok 1.4 features I cared for.

    4. Re:Slow news day? by hobarrera · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Don't forget better support for close propietary hardware on an open source music player, because that's what we all want in our free software!

    5. Re:Slow news day? by TheWanderingHermit · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Amarok has been crap since 2.0. It was a great example of a FOSS project producing good software. Then, just when there was a program that everyone loved, they broke everything users liked and said, "Well, if you don't like it, that's tough, this is better and if you don't see it, you're a fool." Posts on boards where this was discussed were self-righteous from the developer end and users were angered by that.

      I checked out many feature requests and saw the same kind of developer arrogance: We're not doing that because it's not a good feature. (Or because we can't without doing tons of work or because we don't want to or other self-important reasons.)

      And that's when Amarok became an example of the worst of FOSS. Developers fell back on the old saw of, "We're not getting paid, this is volunteer work, and you're lucky we've done any of this for you." Yes, that's true, in part, but the other side to the story is that it's clear developers WANT people to use it. If they didn't, there would not have been a story submitted to Slashdot about this.

      So if you want users to use and love your program, listen to them. If you want to do what you want, then do it - but don't wonder why users don't like it or why there's fewer downloads of later versions people don't like.

      I used Amarok on Linux, hated it once it got to 2.0, but couldn't find one that was as good as the earlier version (and didn't find out about Clementine until much later). Eventually I switched to OS X, and found other Linux music players ported, but Amarok is still not ported - it relies on MacPorts, which is notorious for being unstable and problematical when updated. Developing an OS X port would be easier than developing a Windows port, yet after years it hasn't been done.

      All this has proved that Amarok developers just want to do their own thing and don't give a damn about what users want - yet they still want users to download and use it.

      And until they catch on to this, Amarok, in any version, will still suck and will never reach the usefulness it had in version 1.3 and 1.4.

    6. Re:Slow news day? by ustolemyname · · Score: 2

      "Transcoding for iPod-like and USB Mass Storage devices that complements transcoding for Local Collection"

      AKA when I use it to copy music to my android phone, it automatically transcodes everything to a preconfigured format. I consider that a small, but very handy feature (as I keep all my music in FLAC).

  2. Wake me up when they release a new 1.x by Tyler+Eaves · · Score: 4, Insightful

    You know, the version that was actually a good media library and something unique? The one that didn't totally blow chunks?

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    TODO: Something witty here...
    1. Re:Wake me up when they release a new 1.x by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

      Clementine is what you want.

    2. Re:Wake me up when they release a new 1.x by cronot · · Score: 5, Informative

      Ask and ye shall receive: http://www.clementine-player.org/

      The nice thing is that it's multi-platform, and it actually looks and works nice on other OSs - it's particularly nice on OS X, for those like me that hate iTunes.

    3. Re:Wake me up when they release a new 1.x by skeletal · · Score: 2

      Amarok 2.0 was the reason I stopped using Linux for a while, because with the KDE 4 upgrade there was no usable music player. Now Amarok works somehow, but does all kinds of useless shit. I will never buy any songs through my music player, I don't really care abot seeing album art or the lyrics in the music player. I just want to listen to my mp3/ogg files! The developers have turned it into some monster, like how Winamp 2.x was nice and did one thing well, and then in the next versions they added a toaster and a kitchen sink. I just want to see my song collection, with different views (sorted by author/album or as a directory tree) and be able to add songs to a playlist. None of the other shit is needed I was very happy when I found out about Clementine

  3. Re:GUI by cruff · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Yeah, I ditched Amarok for Clementine also. I found it did the simpler stuff I wanted from a music player in a straight forward manner.

  4. why is this better than the client/server MPD? by TheGratefulNet · · Score: 2

    with mpd, you pick any number of front-ends, android, web, local, ncurses, pure cli! whatever you want.

    lots of plugins for sound arch. it connects to alsa just fine, of course.

    it has a decent enough api.

    it even 'tunes' in most streams ('internet radio'). I use it daily for that.

    uhm, what else do you guys want? why isn't mpd and its various front-ends more ubiquitous?

    (current system I use is based on voyage linux and mpd. fanless mini-itx box and with UAC2 usb audio and a good dac, it supports up to 24/192k music.)

    --

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    "It is now safe to switch off your computer."
  5. What do you want? by GoJays · · Score: 2
    Not sure what many of you want, I hear so much negativity about Amarok.

    What I like about Amarok...

    It plays all of my music formats, .flac, .mp3, .ogg

    It has customizable layouts and sorting options. This cancels out any haters of the Amarok 2.X default layout, saying 1.4 was superior. If you read a little, you would realize you can make it look and act just like 1.4.

    MYSQL backend. I can backup/restore my database with ease.

    Lyrics, tabs, wiki articles, pictures it is all there if I am curious about a track

    Last.fm support

    Doesn't bog down your system with large playlists. I can have a playlist of 10 000 songs and it still runs smooth, do that with iTunes and it is sucking system resources like a new born.

    In the end it is just a music player, but what do people really want that makes it so horrible and not what it use to be?

    1. Re:What do you want? by domatic · · Score: 5, Interesting

      I haven't tried it in about a year and half but the killer for me is complete support for LOCAL metadata embedded in tags. I've taken the trouble to find high quality artwork and lyrics for as much of my collection as possible. I've embedded this in id3 tags and for the bit of vorbis in my collection the tags they have. If a media player I'm trying to use goes searching the net first for this information and disregarding the tags that are RIGHT IN THE FUCKING MUSIC FILE then I don't have a use for it. Amarok 1.4 could be fixed with plugins but these plugins of course didn't work in 2.x. What's more, 2.x has extensively rich functionality for pulling this information from the net and sticking it in it's database (pray it does so correctly) but neither reads or (fully) writes the tags I put considerable effort into putting correct information into.

      It should also be possible to display the artwork and lyrics along with the rest of the application's interface in a usable way. No four clicks to get to the lyrics.

      Yes, yes, yes, Amarok does use the tags for Artist, Album, Track Name, etc. But like MANY players it doesn't (or least didn't?) even attempt to look in the metadata tags for artwork and lyrics. Guayadeque gets this right and Songbird/Nightingale also get this right if the excellent MLyrics plug-in is installed. I haven't found much else in Linux/BSD that does. Incidentally, someone else mentioned MPD. That doesn't handle this either.

    2. Re:What do you want? by collet · · Score: 2

      I'm not sure if you're talking about iTunes on OSX or Windows, but for my Windows-using friends it does seem to have a noticeable impact on performance when it's running.

      Although I have my thousands of fancy FLAC files, my friends iTunes libraries are just crappy mp3s they downloaded and there's barely ever more than a thousand of them.

      I've heard that iTunes performance problems are due to the libraries it uses. Is that true?

  6. Re:Worst UI ever. by Fallingcow · · Score: 4, Funny

    Wow... I have never seen a more bizarre, confusing, cantankerous user interface. I couldn't figure out how to do anything, and I couldn't figure out what Amarok was trying to do.

    Huh, sounds like the UI "designers" from The GIMP finally moved on to another project. Must be why it's (slowly) getting better.

  7. Does Amarok have any advantages over VLC? by ffflala · · Score: 2

    I used to use Amarok as a music player until the 2.x series. I suppose they had a vision, but I certainly don't understand what it was, exactly. I want a music player that (1) plays as many formats as possible, (2) on as many different OSes as possible, for which (3) adjusting playback controls, eq, and playlists, etc are as simple as possible.

    Amarok used to seem like a good candidate for that criteria. I gave 2.x a fair try, but didn't understand what the point of the design changes were, and it seemed to become a pretty buggy application. I soon moved to VLC for playback and haven't bothered to look back at Amarok sense. Does it actually offer any advantages over VLC?

    1. Re:Does Amarok have any advantages over VLC? by Hatta · · Score: 2

      Amarok's main advantage is its SQL backed library. You can load hundreds of thousands of tracks in it and it can search through them without breaking a sweat. Complementing this is great metadata support. So if I want to listen to all the classic rock albums I have from 1979, that's easy to do.

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  8. ncmpcpp + mpd by jampola · · Score: 2

    All I need is a terminal and we're in business!

  9. XMMS by Nahooda · · Score: 2

    I still use the Winamp-style XMMS 1.2.x. It's fast, slick, easy-to-use and intuitive. However, it seems to be from another era. Since the rise of iTunes, many audio players tend to become huge software packages with library functionality and dozens of other unnecessary functions like showing covers. All of them support that "You-don't-have-to-know-where-you're-files-are-we-will-find-them-for-you" thinking which is aimed at totally inexperienced computer users who don't get the concept of files being organised in folders.

    Another more modern Winamp-style player is Audacious but it doesn't seem to work properly on my workstation. Luckily, there always seems to be someone who creates XMMS 1.2.x packages for current Linux distributions.

    -nahooda

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