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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."

58 of 99 comments (clear)

  1. Twice as good as 1.4 by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Irony: every major version after 1.4 has been worse than it

    1. Re:Twice as good as 1.4 by vilanye · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Agree I dealt with it until about a year ago when it started up and immediately grabbed about 600MB of RAM. Ditched it and been happy with Clementine ever since.

      It is a shame that they ruined what was once the best music player you could get.

    2. Re:Twice as good as 1.4 by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

      Just tried no play a CD with Amarok on Fedora - it just segfaulted. What a fancy audio visualization :(

    3. Re:Twice as good as 1.4 by swaq · · Score: 1, Insightful

      I ditched Amarok for Clementine a while back as well. It just works better. I don't see how adding a bunch of new features is a "Return to the Origin"...

    4. Re:Twice as good as 1.4 by bill_mcgonigle · · Score: 1

      I don't see how adding a bunch of new features is a "Return to the Origin"...

      It triggers a reset of The Matrix, which is just the next version of the same trap, none of it reflecting reality.

      --
      My God, it's Full of Source!
      OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
    5. Re:Twice as good as 1.4 by Darkness404 · · Score: 1

      Yeah, I remember loving Amarok before the 2.X releases. Once 2.X hit it started being a buggy mess.

      --
      Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
    6. Re:Twice as good as 1.4 by icebike · · Score: 1

      The most recent version prior to this one was fairly usable, but you are right its been a long road to stability. They keep adding stuff till its designed and releasing stuff till its debugged.

      And any suggestions are met with surly put-downs and childish insults.
      I almost hesitate to upgrade because I've been so often disappointed.

      --
      Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
    7. Re:Twice as good as 1.4 by aliquis · · Score: 1

      Maybe any of these work:
      https://github.com/Razor-qt/razor-qt/wiki/3rd-party-applications

      Now to find a distribution which actually have them all packaged...

    8. Re:Twice as good as 1.4 by aliquis · · Score: 1

      I don't see how adding a bunch of new features is a "Return to the Origin"...

      Same old bloat.

    9. Re:Twice as good as 1.4 by pwizard2 · · Score: 1

      That article gave me hope for a moment-- until I read TFA I thought they had reverted Amarok to its classic apprearance.

      --
      "It is a denial of justice not to stretch out a helping hand to the fallen; that is the common right of humanity."
    10. Re:Twice as good as 1.4 by richlv · · Score: 2

      hah, exactly the same for me :)
      was a user of amarok 1.4, tried to use amarok 2 for several months... moved to clementine eventually.
      too bad clem isn't as good as amarok 1.4 was (for example, editing tags of a track does not update that in the collection db, and some other slight annoyances)

      --
      Rich
    11. Re:Twice as good as 1.4 by goose-incarnated · · Score: 1

      If it's lack of bloat you want, then I have just the thing. I wrote up a little Tcl/Tk script (less than a screenful long) that simply displays all the songs it finds on my PC using locatedb and has a small search box that lets you narrow the search down. Takes less than a second to start, finds all my music without me having to add it to some special folder or import it, and uses almost no resources cause it plays the music with mpg123.

      Feel free to email me for it - my website hoster is having trouble with their billing system and so, sadly, I can't provide a download.

      --
      I'm a minority race. Save your vitriol for white people.
  2. Bah by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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.

  3. people still care about visualization? by kcmastrpc · · Score: 4, Insightful

    it's must be the fact that i'm over 30 and no longer take LSD.

    1. Re:people still care about visualization? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      I was wondering the same thing. I listen to music from on my smartphone quite often, but rarely on my PC. When I do play audio tracks on my PC, my player of choice these days is VLC. I really don't give a damn what it -looks- like. I'm -listening-.

    2. Re:people still care about visualization? by aliquis · · Score: 1

      lol :)

      i think a nice looking visualiser is a plus :)

      I imagine one can do pretty insane things with todays hardware :)

      As for "heavily-stimulating dept." it got me thinking of:

      "The isolated, the decisive, victory stimulated
      The non-simulated patterns of flight originated
      Now I'm a carnivore on a tour of duty
      My band of brothers in full metal jackets establish cruelty
      Black magic conjurer, attack through the monitor
      Destruction of assumption, one thing I can promise ya
      Impact, crash, with cold shards of glass
      Ritualistic annihilators -- murder your cast"
      http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7lgM-NyaPO0

      No perfect match and as such maybe that wasn't what they was thinking off. Just caffeine junkies? =P

    3. Re:people still care about visualization? by UltraZelda64 · · Score: 1

      Hey, back in the 90s I loved Winamp's visualizations, especially Milkdrop's (which was later made an official part of the program). At that point, probably the only "drugs" I had taken were caffeine, cold/flu/pain medicine, and (if you consider them drugs) vaccinations. Years have gone by, and while I haven't been able to properly use Winamp since 2006 (since I switched full-time from Windows to Linux), the only additions you can really add to the list are good ol' marijuana and alcohol. But if I still used Windows... hell yeah I would still be using some of its visualization plug-ins! No acid required (which I have never done to begin with).

    4. Re:people still care about visualization? by marsu_k · · Score: 1

      Protip: XBMC + projectM (Milkdrop clone/port, not sure which). Should come built-in with latest versions, requires some GPU but even a lowly ION2 handles 1080p just fine. And yes, it reduces the need for acid ;)

  4. Not for me by xQuarkDS9x · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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
    1. Re:Not for me by MMC+Monster · · Score: 1

      I like these articles about Amarok because they inevitably lead to people discussing the alternatives, and sometimes I'll give one of them a try.

      Personally I've been on Banshee for the last year or so. It's got a simple UI that reminds me of an early version of iTunes. Not too many frills, but I can pick the columns I want, and it can sync with music players. Playlist modification is simple enough as well. I personally don't need much more than that.

      I just hope they don't screw it up.

      --
      Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
    2. Re:Not for me by TeknoHog · · Score: 2

      I like these articles about Amarok because they inevitably lead to people discussing the alternatives, and sometimes I'll give one of them a try.

      One of my favourite players is Herrie. Playlist management is simple enough to do in text mode.

      OTOH, I still maintain my textmode frontend to Audacious, because the Python code makes it easy to add custom functions. As a theatre sound guy, I don't want to futz around with a mouse in the midst of a play.

      Text-mode players such as these are also convenient over ssh - it's quite neat to manage the player with a phone/tablet from the dance floor...

      --
      Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
  5. Huh. by _KiTA_ · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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?

    1. Re:Huh. by Unkl_Shvelven · · Score: 1

      If you're disappointed with GPM on android you should try an app called PowerAmp. PowerAmp is to the android music player what foobar is to WMP, as far as formats and configurability.

      --
      regular man whom love computer (Also, fuck beta).
    2. Re:Huh. by aliquis · · Score: 1, Informative

      Foobar2000 alternative for Linux would be deadbeef.

      http://deadbeef.sourceforge.net/

    3. Re:Huh. by aliquis · · Score: 1

      I prefer Aqualung.

      http://aqualung.factorial.hu/

      Looks old-school.

    4. Re:Huh. by _KiTA_ · · Score: 1

      Foobar2000 alternative for Linux would be deadbeef.

      Simply incredible. They take a bad name and make it even worse.

      It's probably a reference to DEADBEEF, the coding term. To quote Wikipedia:

      "0xDEADBEEF ("dead beef") is frequently used to indicate a software crash or deadlock in embedded systems. DEADBEEF was originally used to mark newly allocated areas of memory that had not yet been initialized -- when scanning a memory dump, it is easy to see the DEADBEEF. It is used by IBM RS/6000 systems, Mac OS on 32-bit PowerPC processors and the Commodore Amiga as a magic debug value. On Sun Microsystems' Solaris, it marks freed kernel memory. On OpenVMS running on Alpha processors, DEAD_BEEF can be seen by pressing CTRL-T. The DEC Alpha SRM console has a background process that traps memory errors, identified by PS as "BeefEater waiting on 0xdeadbeef".[16]"

      Basically it's one of those words you can write in HEX and has come to mean "This software has crashed in a way that we know is absolutely NOT hardware related."

    5. Re:Huh. by readingaccount · · Score: 1

      I should probably ask, what's wrong with modern versions of Winamp? It's my premier player in Windows because it's brimming with functionality, various bits of which I do use from time to time.

    6. Re:Huh. by jones_supa · · Score: 1

      The name still sucks. :)

    7. Re:Huh. by vlueboy · · Score: 1

      Funny thing happened last night. I tried to use the convert option to output spc chiptunes to wav files. My goal was to convert this to an mp3 ringtone for android.

      I usually go to a place called output plugins in the complicated gui but I have forgotten how to use the program over time. So I saw a convert option and felt surprised it had ogg and mp3 support!

      What is bad about this apparent improvement? The old option is probably there, but the new one asked me to BUY pro if I want any stream output to the hard drive. I think that is when I recalled that AOL bought them and started messing with the GUI as a way to pimp their music store after v2.0

      Who pays for a music program anyways?

    8. Re:Huh. by readingaccount · · Score: 1

      *raises hand*

      It's $20 for a perpetual license and I had the money. *shrug*

  6. Amarok - still my favourite player by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    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).

    1. Re:Amarok - still my favourite player by Bill,+Shooter+of+Bul · · Score: 2

      Yeah, I don't get the hate either. I love the 2.x series. And with MTP support, its brain dead easy to transfer music between my computer and phone. It just works.

      --
      Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
  7. This is why I use and contribute to Nightingale by ilikenwf · · Score: 3, Informative

    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!

  8. Re: Not yet by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    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.

  9. Oldfield by rossdee · · Score: 1, Offtopic

    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 :(

    1. Re:Oldfield by Prune · · Score: 1

      You and me, brother.

      --
      "Politicians and diapers must be changed often, and for the same reason."
  10. Re:Sorry, not interested by fast+turtle · · Score: 1

    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
  11. Re:Crappy players by fast+turtle · · Score: 1

    there is one and it's called QMMP that uses QT4 and is a clone of xmmp and is what I use as clementine failed on me, amarok 2 stinks, nitghtengale fails to build along with a rash of others that simply don't do what I want and that's play my music.

    --
    Mod me up/Mod me down: I wont frown as I've no crown
  12. Re: Crappy players by Bill,+Shooter+of+Bul · · Score: 1

    I have over 4000 tracks in amorok On shuffle right now...

    --
    Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
  13. Re:Sorry, not interested by NoNonAlphaCharsHere · · Score: 1

    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.

  14. Re:Not yet by Blaskowicz · · Score: 1

    I would like consumer stuff to work properly too, like the Xonar DX.

  15. Re:Crappy players by Blaskowicz · · Score: 1

    To me, the Winamp clone was Audacious (down to the winamp 2.x UI clone compatible with skins, like winamp 5.x). Then I got fed up with it. I still recommend it if your window manager doesn't have the bug with the sub windows in winamp 2 mode (developers says it's the window managers's fault and wontfix, and they appear to be technically right but it sucks on Mate or LXDE or at least last times I tried it). The worst stuff is what they pay attention to, the gtk3 interface, (non skinnable) looks good but sucks donkey balls : you can't resize the columns. They wontfix either and think we'll have to like it, but this mean you can't even have a file manager and the playlist side by side on a 1280 wide display, and be able to read shit!

    tl;dr : I now use deadbeef which is like a clone of Audacious gtk3 but with more usability.
    Slight weird thing, shuffle is under "playback" drop-down menu and "order" rather than click on a shuffle button.

  16. Re:Crappy players by Psicopatico · · Score: 1

    +1 for QMMP.
    While it's still a < 1.0 release, it gets the job done (it plays :p ).
    Also, there are a fair amount of skins for it, as it accepts skins for Audacity or XMMS.
    At the moment I use one which replicates exactly the good old WinAmp 1.0. Hell, it even has the WinAmp name on each window... For the curious, here it is

    --
    Mastering the English language is fucking easy: all you have to do is to put an f* word in every fucking sentence.
  17. Re: Not yet by NonFerrousBueller · · Score: 1
    Well, I've spent over ten hours on three different distros trying to get Jack to work, I've given up. I know I'm not alone.

    Also found Amarok to be buggy, now listen using Audacious with a winamp skin I've used since the 90's (tubeamp).

  18. Re:Crappy players by Burz · · Score: 1

    Why cant any one make a freaking working music player for linux just like winamp classic is?

    I have enough karma, so I'll go ahead and say it: People with proper creative vision are repelled by the whole "Linux desktop" morass. I have to wonder if anyone who worked on Amarok 1.x felt they had been undermined; I know a lot of KDE users did.

  19. Re:Crappy players by Nertskull · · Score: 1

    Guayadeque can handle that many. I have over 20k in there right now and it works just fine.

  20. Re:Bugfixing ... by jones_supa · · Score: 1

    What bug? Can you find it still in the bug tracker? Have you tested 2.8 to see if it's fixed?

  21. And the key improvements are? by bankman · · Score: 1

    * 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.
  22. "Return to the Origin" How they taunt us! by umafuckit · · Score: 1

    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.

  23. Amarok: Full-screen or unusable by Foske · · Score: 1

    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.

  24. Re: Not yet by drinkypoo · · Score: 1

    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.'"
  25. Re:Crappy players by drinkypoo · · Score: 1

    Why don't you just try xmms2? It does all that shit.

    Personally I use rhythmbox. It's my answer to banshee, because it does all the same crap and doesn't give your system Mono.

    I assure you that it can handle more than 500 tracks. I can literally just shuffle play through my entire music collection. It has literally never crashed on me.

    I've tried amarok, songbird, banshee, lots of others. All sucked. Rhythmbox sucks least

    --
    "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
  26. No thanks! by SigmundFloyd · · Score: 1

    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.
  27. Library Management and auto tag/filename by Jonah+Hex · · Score: 1

    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

  28. Literally, the sheet music :-) by bbsalem · · Score: 1

    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?

  29. Re:gawd by Stuarticus · · Score: 1

    I imagine that works great when you're trying to play your copy of Jonathon Coulter's greatest hits, some people have music collections that actually need some kind of management.

    --
    If you think someone isn't free to have a different definition of "freedom" you may be a tyrant.
  30. Re:Sorry, not interested by KugelKurt · · Score: 1

    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.

  31. Re:KDE 4 + Amaraok 2 were terrible ideas. by KugelKurt · · Score: 1

    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.