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Amarok 2.8 "Return To the Origin" Released

Posted by timothy on from the heavily-stimulating dept.

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."

11 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 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
  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.

  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 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?

  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!