Slashdot Mirror
Amarok 2.8 "Return To the Origin" Released
jrepin writes "Music player Amarok 2.8 has been released and it brings a fancy audio analyzer visualization applet, smooth fade-out when pausing music, many UI improvements and visual tweaks including better support for alternate color themes, significantly enhanced MusicBrainz tagger, power management awareness with a pair of new configuration options, and performance optimizations and responsiveness tuning all over Amarok."
Irony: every major version after 1.4 has been worse than it
I ditched Amarok over a year ago. Once they lost the option to make it a small interface similar to xmms I got rid of it. Even on a quad core with 8gb of ram the thing froze, couldn't handle large play lists and just sucked.
it's must be the fact that i'm over 30 and no longer take LSD.
I've been quite happy using Audacious in Lubuntu compared to say in the past when i've tried Clementine and Amarok and I found they both felt bloated almost like iTunes for windows.
You must master your joystick like a fisherman masters bait! - Gimpy
Not until the entire audio layer in Linux works better with more hardware, including pro stuff like Avid, Focusrite, MOTU, etc.
It's still too fussy to get good audio out of Linux. Though I realize it's not entirely the fault of Linux.
It's great for streaming samples, rendering, etc, but not for actually playing or producing audio, without a whole lot of fiddling.
Really? My lubuntu install plays audio just fine with no problems. Just because you have issues doesn't mean everyone does.
You must master your joystick like a fisherman masters bait! - Gimpy
Am I the only one who stuck with Foobar2000 back in the day, once Winamp self destructed?
I mean I have the rather... shoddy... Google Play Music on my Android Tablet, but on the PC, Foobar2000 does everything I thought I needed. Is there a compelling reason to try Clementine / Amarok?
With all the Amarok 2.x haters that show up to complain any time it's mentioned, you'd think Amarok 2 is the worst thing ever, on par with iTunes, but it's not. It's still a damn good client, and I prefer it over the 1.4 series (or Clementine) for varous reasons.
Amarok's smart playlist functionality has improved a lot since 1.4, and is miles ahead of Clementine, for example, allowing you to set up complex rule chains for creating random playlists that continually trim old entries and add new as you listen. Clementine finally got Amarok 1.4's smart playlists back, but they're completely overshadowed by the Amarok 2 series version.
UI flexibility is another thing I prefer; Amarok uses KDE's dockable panels model, so you can modify the interface to have as many or as few panels as you want, and even add and remove tabs to each frame. The default is a three-panel setup that works fine on widescreen, but I trim it down to a two panel layout with various tabs on the left panel. Meanwhile, Clementine offers very little flexibility in appearance, staying true to Amarok 1.4, so it's "my way or the highway". Great fit for the GNOME folks, I guess.
It also has some interesting features for finding lyrics, artist info, etc., though I use them infrequently and can't say much about them, other than they seem to work and would be useful to someone that uses them more.
People complain about the extra features and the flexibility, but that's sort of the point of Amarok. If you don't want that, stick with Foobar or mpd (which I also use, they have their places as does Amarok).
I've found Gmusicbrowser and it suits my needs much better than any player I've seen. Fast with a huge library, random rules, cuztomiable interface and great popup window to control it.
That's probably a KDElibs issue (which I suspect is the one demanding Nepomuk, not Amarok), and solvable through configuration.
They introduced the possibility of using Nepomuk as your library database in 2.7, though it's a plugin (ergo, optional) you still can use the (default) SQLite database, or MySQL, like Amarok has been doing since 1.4.
I'm currently running the Amarok 2.7 packaged in Debian testing, and the Nepomuk plugin isn't even present.
In the near future, since the KDElibs will get all modularized after the switch to Qt 5 (plus hopefully all distros taking a few cues from the KlyDE guys), the Nepomuk as a dependency issue will (hopefully/probably) disappear.
http://getnightingale.org/ seems to be coming along nicely. I'm a bit biased but it really is a nice multiplatform player. We've even got feature/bug bounties setup now (we don't handle the money, it's through this site, which tracks our github issues:https://www.bountysource.com/trackers/230233-nightingale-media-player-nightingale-hacking).
We almost have gstreamer 1.0 and xulrunner 9 working with it...from there it's upgrading some other stuff and getting it stable, and we'll be golden. All of you are free to join and help us develop!
Well just because you can't get it working... Jack is one of the most powerful tools you can have at your disposal for audio production.
Why cant any one make a freaking working music player for linux just like winamp classic is?
No player that I have tried can handle more than 500 tracks, Amarok doesn't even have a freaking shuffle button(just shuffle the playlist and be like that for ever), craps and crashes every minute.
WTF!!!
Am I the only one who saw the headline and thought wow has Mike released another 60 minute masterpiece, but sadly its just a new version of a music player :(
You need to set -semantic-desktop for kdelibs and systemsettings
solves the problem and even keeps strigi off the build.
Mod me up/Mod me down: I wont frown as I've no crown
I guess I wasn't clear. I've had "-semantic-desktop" set globally (in make.conf) all along. I dumped Amarok when it started insisting it wanted kedlibs(+semantic-desktop), and nepomuk (which I refuse to install) as well.
ui improvements and visualizations, what is this? 1996?
here is what I want a music player to do, play music and get the fuck out of the way, there is like 5 controls and they are already on everyone's keyboard, why even HAVE a UI anymore?
I would like consumer stuff to work properly too, like the Xonar DX.
Also found Amarok to be buggy, now listen using Audacious with a winamp skin I've used since the 90's (tubeamp).
Hope they fixed the bug with the playlist that I submitted on their bugtracker.. now afair 2 years ago -_-.
My Mageia installation auto updated to 2.8 a couple of days ago. Reading this prompted me to fire it up.
Main Problem: I have this dialog box entitled "Updating System Configuration" (whatever that means) The progress bar has been chugging away for the last 22 MINUTES and is still only at 60%. (note: on this laptop I have about 1GB of music)
No idea what it's doing, but thus far I'm less than impressed. What on earth is it doing? Why on earth is taking so long? Who on earth thinks this a 25 minute startup is acceptable?
(second note: As I was typing the dialog box reached 100% of "updating system configuration" and then restarted again at 5% - what a useless application!)
* A fancy audio analyzer visualization applet
* Smooth fade-out when pausing music
* Many UI improvements and visual tweaks including better support for alternate color themes
With priorities like this, we can expect a decent application in about two decades I guess.
I feel so sig.
I read the release name and thought for a moment they'd realised the error of their ways since 1.4. Sadly no. I will continue to use Clementine.
soylentnews.org
Is it just me who thinks Amarok is a ridiculous piece of software which is bloated to the max, yet misses basic features or makes them hard to use ? For me, the previous version was an example of everything that can be wrong with audio players. Let's see what this one has to offer.
Well just because you can't get it working... Jack is one of the most powerful tools you can have at your disposal for audio production.
Now if only the tools used to control it weren't complete and utter unmitigated shit, you might really have something there. Trying to figure out why JACK won't do what I want it to do which it claims to do is an exercise in frustration which exceeds even pulseaudio.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
KDE4 started out on the wrong foot but quickly went back to sanity, and KDE4 today is an excellent desktop environment.
Amarok never recovered after 2.0.
I prefer moc. It doesn't waste CPU time with silly and useless animations, and it works from the console.
Knowledge is power; knowledge shared is power lost.
Does it have it finally? Or the developers are still too dumb to implement it?
Nah, you just suck at pro-audio... The toolset around JACK is excellent. JACK has it's limitations, but for what it is, it's as good as it can be, and it's still much, much better than what you get in other OSes. I use it to earn a living.
I don't get the PulseAudio hate either, I've never had problems with it. It even releases the soundcard automatically when I load JACK and loads it's JACK I/O module.
I just want one that can handle fixing my collection, preferably on multi-platform since I'm on Win7. MP3Tag works fairly well but I'd rather have something that can handle anything thrown at it without a lot of manual intervention. When the length of songs are known, it should be able to auto match to the version of the album I've got, including extra tracks. - HEX
Horror & SciFi Erotic Nudes
What would be so hard about analyzing the FFT every 1/10 sec for the power specturn in pitch frequency and attempting to assign a note name to the pitches? Make that the visualization, sheet music of a sort, and I don't mean just a piano roll kind of thing. There have been attempts to do this since at least 1970. One doesn't have to be perfectionistic and determine meter, two triplets is good enough for 6/8 time and so what if measures aren't drawn?
I was lost for years after they abandoned amarok 1.4 (along with kde 3.x). Tried just about every linux music player you can name. Finally I gave mpd a shot, and discovered the perfect solution (mpd + client of your choice). Using a server process to handle my music seemed kind of odd at first, but ultimately it proved more flexible, more robust, and more lightweight than any standalone music player I've ever tried. You can choose between different clients -- remote or local, graphical or command line, android clients -- you can even use them simultaneously, because the server does the real work. You can script it as well.
My only regret is not trying mpd sooner. If I had known back then, I would have even dumped amarok 1.4 for it.
will it stop crashing in kubuntu?
I guess I wasn't clear. I've had "-semantic-desktop" set globally (in make.conf) all along. I dumped Amarok when it started insisting it wanted kedlibs(+semantic-desktop), and nepomuk (which I refuse to install) as well.
That's broken packaging on Gentoo's side. File a Gentoo bug report.
Amarok never recovered after 2.0.
If Amarok was so bad, why is it so popular?
According to https://www.ohloh.net/p/amarok it has a rating of 4.5/5.0 and "High Activity" with 56 current contributors (400 overall; not even counting translations as they are in another repo (SVN not git)). That's a lot for only a music player.
Argumentum ad populum is a fallacy. It needs no rebuttal to dismiss.