Amarok 2.7 Fixes 470+ Bugs, 15+ New Features

[Staffan]

Frankly, if you are happy with that running mplayer from a shell window solution, then Amarok was never supposed to be the player for you.

There's nothing wrong with that - many people like you only want a minimal player.

Amarok is not that kind of minimal player, and was never meant to be.

True, my usage pattern has probably changed since then, but that is probably at least in part due to me getting tired of the increasing bloat in Amarok. I got sick of constant issues with ruby and what not, I don't remember all the grievances anymore and I have since realized I don't need all that crap.

[smitty3268]

I pretty much have the same experience. I used to love Amarok, but then they kept adding a ton of bloat, dependencies on ruby and databases and whatever so I lost interest. Today I just run mplayer in a shell window, that provides me with everything I want from a media player.

Frankly, if you are happy with that running mplayer from a shell window solution, then Amarok was never supposed to be the player for you.

There's nothing wrong with that - many people like you only want a minimal player.

Amarok is not that kind of minimal player, and was never meant to be.

[Staffan]

I was once a proud user of Amarok 1.x back in the day. It was great.

Then, after the extreme success of KDE 4.0 (if you want to consider emulating Windows Vista as "success"), the KDE developers decided to re-write Amarok from scratch, and thus came the 2.0 release.

It was a pile of crap. The UI was re-designed for the worse. It crashed all the time and was buggier than a cheap NY motel mattress. Many features were removed.

The KDE developers handled the situation by covering their ears and deleting any critical postings on their message boards.

I assume it's all some kind of theme that OS developers want to have the largest user-base possible, by going after the few non-users left out there: The idiots who can't handle the complexity of a two-button mouse. Thus, we have stunning successes like KDE 4, Gnome 3, and Windows 8. Mac OSX, the most "friendly"/dumbed-down OS of them all has even somehow gotten even "friendlier"/dumber over the last few years with releases 10.7 and 10.8. It's like a big race to be "grandma's OS of choice".

I don't even know where I was going with all of this. I just know that they took a great product and then pulled a WinAmp3, and that makes me sad.

I pretty much have the same experience. I used to love Amarok, but then they kept adding a ton of bloat, dependencies on ruby and databases and whatever so I lost interest. Today I just run mplayer in a shell window, that provides me with everything I want from a media player.

[Awesomeness]

Then, after the extreme success of KDE 4.0 (if you want to consider emulating Windows Vista as "success"), the KDE developers decided to re-write Amarok from scratch, and thus came the 2.0 release.

It was a pile of crap. The UI was re-designed for the worse. It crashed all the time and was buggier than a cheap NY motel mattress. Many features were removed.

The KDE developers handled the situation by covering their ears

One question: Do you actually believe what you wrote?

The Amarok 2.0 release announcement clearly stated:
?It is important to note that Amarok 2.0 is a beginning, not an end. Because of the major changes required, not all features from the 1.4 are in Amarok 2. Many of these missing features, like queueing and filtering in the playlist, will return within a few releases. Other features, such as visualizations and support for portable media players, require improvements in the underlying KDE infrastructure. They will return as KDE4's support improves.?

http://amarok.kde.org/en/releases/2.0

[TurbulentToothpick]

I was once a proud user of Amarok 1.x back in the day. It was great.

Then, after the extreme success of KDE 4.0 (if you want to consider emulating Windows Vista as "success"), the KDE developers decided to re-write Amarok from scratch, and thus came the 2.0 release.

It was a pile of crap. The UI was re-designed for the worse. It crashed all the time and was buggier than a cheap NY motel mattress. Many features were removed.

The KDE developers handled the situation by covering their ears and deleting any critical postings on their message boards.

I assume it's all some kind of theme that OS developers want to have the largest user-base possible, by going after the few non-users left out there: The idiots who can't handle the complexity of a two-button mouse. Thus, we have stunning successes like KDE 4, Gnome 3, and Windows 8. Mac OSX, the most "friendly"/dumbed-down OS of them all has even somehow gotten even "friendlier"/dumber over the last few years with releases 10.7 and 10.8. It's like a big race to be "grandma's OS of choice".

I don't even know where I was going with all of this. I just know that they took a great product and then pulled a WinAmp3, and that makes me sad.

[GreatEmerald]

Depending how he configured KWallet. If he set it up in a way that KWallet closes immediately then it obviously opens again when username and password have to be send again to the server?

I have set it to close every 30 minutes, and Amarok never asks me for the password aside from launch time. A different story is with the Firefox KWallet addon, though.

[Awesomeness]

No clue about what you mean. The only thing that uses KWallet is custom addons, like the Last.fm scrobbler. But even that asks for the password only once...

Depending how he configured KWallet. If he set it up in a way that KWallet closes immediately then it obviously opens again when username and password have to be send again to the server?

[GreatEmerald]

how about stupid dependency of kwallet? that turns on every 5 minutes and turn off ?

No clue about what you mean. The only thing that uses KWallet is custom addons, like the Last.fm scrobbler. But even that asks for the password only once...

[NomadDemon]

how about stupid dependency of kwallet? that turns on every 5 minutes and turn off ?

[Awesomeness]

Yesterday I installed Amarok on a machine, but now with gstreamer as a beckend; a first for me. xine has been dropped and vlc doesn't support an equalizer.

Sure VLC supports an equalizer. Maybe the Phonon wrapper for VLC does not but VLC itself does (same with Audio CD playback).