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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."

4 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. 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.

  3. 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).