Yep — I put embedded cover art support back in. The original author of the (problematic) patch disappeared for several months, and then when prodded said he didn’t have time, so I buckled down and got it done. There are still a few rough edges; Ralf Engels is currently working to clean it up and put in backwards compatibility so people don’t need to end up redownloading their covers. The algorithm/logic is there, though. If you’re interested, there were scripts to embed covers into files from within Amarok 1.4; it may not be too difficult to port them over. (We can’t build that into Amarok due to legal concerns.) Also, right now the embedded support is only for MP3s, as I have no files of other types to find out where they are storing their cover images. But the algorithm is the same, so support could be expanded relatively easily in the future.

Dynamic collection is next up on my hit list, but I’m just totally swamped right now. We’ll see when I get to it.

I’m not sure about the list refreshing itself issue — but let me know.

lame

I’ve seen one of the things I needed is back, at least there has been some evolution in the bug report – support for embedded covers.
Well, I’ll see if I can explain how I used amarok 1.4 and easytag to manage my music collection, and it seems now that most stuff is getting into place maybe I can use it again the same way, so this is probably out of date.
I ripped a cd using ABCDE, then went into amarok, opened the files, adjusted the tags, and added the album to the collection, telling amarok to rename the files in the process. Then I would download the covers, if I could find them using the cover manager or I’d scan them from the CD. I’d use one of the amarok scripts to save the cover as folder.jpg, if I had downloaded it, and I’d add the cover to the files using easytag.
I understand that now I can finally do all this, so, as I said, this rant is almost out of date, now that amarok will be able to see the embedded covers, the cover manager works very well, all I am missing is a script to either embedd the covers in the files or save them as cover.jpg (or some other name) in the album directory.
I don’t know if the list still refreshes itself when I rename a artist or tag a album as “Various artists” in the irritating way it did in 2.0, making me lose a lot of time to identify the collection albums I have; but that is because after ripping my whole collection, with 1.4, I have rarely had the need to tag and edit 10-15 albums a day…
So, in the end, most stuff I needed now works after 2.3 and most of what is left is about to be fixed. Possibly I’ll start using amarok to manage my music collection again – as soon as the problems with the dynamic collection have been fixed.
As for building from git… Well, I could do that, but I really don’t have the time. I’d rather look at getting the new IEGD gma500 drivers out of meego and into ubuntu in the limited time I have free.

lame

Sorry for the delay in replying, things have been crazy since OSCON ended.

Replies:

I can’t speak authoritatively for the person that told you that your use case was in the minority and wouldn’t be considered, but I’m guessing that this was probably poor wording on their part (we have several very laconic Germans on our team ). In the context of getting features from Amarok 1.4 into Amarok 2, this probably meant that it wasn’t being considered at that time since we were trying first to get the “90% functionality” in — 90% of the features that 90% of the people use. If you look at more recent ChangeLogs you’ll see a lot of the more “power” or “random” features coming back, along with bugfixes. Out of curiosity, do you remember what this use/feature was?

Thanks for explaining your setup in more detail. It does sound like you’re getting hit by a regression. One of our developers did a lot of work getting Dynamic Collection (which is what handled this situation in Amarok 1.4) ported to 2, and it was working — many of us tried it out. It seems that there was a regression in 2.3.1, and this is definitely high on my personal fix list (now to just get time…)

I’m glad the layout tip was useful. We definitely need to get more visibility. One thing we’re discussing is the possibility to have a pre-set layouts that a user can easily switch between, similarly to the presets for playlist layout. I think this, in combination with resurrecting the idea of a “First Run/What’s Changed” tutorial, would work wonders for new users, or to alert existing users to new important features (since most won’t read our ChangeLog, but simply update from distro packages).

As for the volume control being unintuitive — I’ve heard a lot of trash talk about the volume control, but so far not that Yes — we know that a lot of people don’t like it. Yes, we will be trying to fix it. It’s too bad we didn’t get this feedback during the development cycle, since that means we may not get good feedback on an implemented fix until after a release (which is why I said “trying” to fix it ). I found it interesting how many people on Trent’s blog and here complained in great detail about the volume control and commanded us to do various things to it, without actually asking if we were going to change it or not, first, or giving helpful suggestions instead of commanding proclamations. It’s one of those things that you try not to let get to you, but it kinda shows the mentality that a lot of complainers have — “It sucks”, without “thanks for the effort and for trying something new, but could you try tweaking it like this for the next release?” This isn’t how your comment feels, but just felt like putting that out there.

“Please don’t tell me to use Nepomuk” — I didn’t, and I won’t, and I wouldn’t…

Could you elaborate on the ways that “collection management” isn’t being met for you with A2? Other than Dynamic Collection being broken, as we’re trying to fix that, and other than transcoding support?

(couldn’t find out how to do the indented quotes you use, so I’ll just put quotes into “”)
“I don’t know who has told you this, about requests not mattering. They certainly do. The largest problem is that for every request we get to change something one way, we get a request to do just the opposite, and people often don’t like “no” for an answer. ”

Well, I remember quite clearly that after I explained how I used amarok 1.4 I was told my use case was a minority, and wouldn’t be considered. That is what I call being told my requests didn’t matter. Amarok 1.4 filled most use cases, and now some of its users are being told their use case isn’t important, as it never was a mainstream use case, just an unplanned secondary effect, that will never work in 2.x. It is well within your rights to say so, and to act according to the route you’ve planned, but no user likes being told he was using an application the ‘wrong’ way and he should just go and find something else for the no longer available functionality. Or, as you put it, “A lot of users hate being told “no” exactly because the things they want are what they are passionate about. ” – and I add also those for which they have no effective alternative.

As for specific issues:
“I don’t understand how it affects using your netbook since netbooks aren’t really media devices you connect via USB — maybe you can explain your precise setup in greater detail? 17000 tracks is quite a normal/small size — people use Amarok successfully with 200,000+ tracks.”
I don’t use my netbook as a media device. I just don’t store any music tracks on my netbook (one of the reasons why I won’t use a nepomuk based player). I store all my media on external HDs, with duplication. At home I have a HD connected to a NAS, serving my media centre and serving as the ‘master’ repository. To use with my netbook, I also have some NTFS formatted 2.5″ HDs, with my media collection replicated among them. My music is in a single HD, which I tried several times to read into amarok without success. It worked perfectly well in 1.4, and it loaded (after a couple of tries where it didn’t load but never gave an error) at my home pc mapping the NAS as a cifs mount. I didn’t open a bug as I never got an error. I don’t remember if it just showed ‘updating collection’ or never gave no feedback at all, as it happens now with 2.3.1.
When after some hours I tried dismounting the HD from amarok, I got hit by https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=243702.
Tried a couple of times more, and have been trying every couple of months, every time with the same results.
I do miss a lot the media devices feature, as that was also one of the big strengths of 1.4, I used the transcodig options to convert ogg to mp3 for my smartphones, etc.
Corrupt tags – 95% of my tags were written first by ABCDE, then updated with amarok 1.4. I am now going through them with easytag, letting it rewrite every single one it doesn’t like. In a couple of days it should have finished.

As for the layout – Without your tip I wouldn’t have ever guessed you could have the media collection and the context window tabbed. Even if the tabs are in the (for me) wrong place, at the bottom, it is a much better usage of screen real estate that the default view. Thanks! I was just dragging the context to above the layout and making it the smallest possible size.
I do use the slim toolbar, I really don’t like the huge buttons in the regular one, and I found about the volume control as tried it again in 2.3.1 to see if it was usable on my home pc. As I don’t use it, I really have no ideas on what to do, it just feels so unintuitive I gave up at once.

The local collection appears closed on first usage, so even on my pc I thought it hadn’t scanned it; only after opening it I found that it had indeed been scanned. Now amarok shows the latest thing I had opened, as you said. It is just confusing to not see anything after configuring amarok to search the right folders and waiting patiently for a hour or so for it to finish scanning.

You know, if I had the time, I’d be throwing something together right now to do that – but maybe not in amarok. Possibly adding collection management, media devices, lyrics support, and replaygain support to easytag. Or picking one of the collection managers out there and adding media tags and all the rest to it. But please don’t tell me to use nepomuk – I don’t want to fill my netbook SDD with the database for a collection that is on a portable HD. And I want to be able to open that collection in all my netbooks, laptops, pcs, without having to rescan it every time.

As a final clarification, I used amarok 1.4 firstly as a collection manager (and yes, to help me find more music that I might like based on what I had in my collection), and secondly as a music player, as you probably guessed by now. The second part might work well in 2.x, but I found that I now don’t listen to much music on my netbook any more. One of the reasons is that I stopped using amarok with 2.x, and never found another player that satisfied me as 1.4 did; but also because I already listened to a lot of music on my mp4 player, managing it with amarok 1.4 (and just copying dirs when I switched to kde 4.x /amarok 2.x), and I now almost exclusively use my android or my mp4 player, and at home I use my xbmc media centre.
So, I really am out of your use cases by now. I do miss a lot amarok 1.4, and still haven’t found a decent music collection manager that will also play my tracks on my pc when I feel like it, so I still take the time to write about the bugs I can reproduce or what I still miss/dislike in 2.x.; but I am no longer a active user as I was in 1.4 times.

I use an external mysql database and I only see it when there’s a large collection, otherwise it’s barely noticeable.

First, I’m not taking sides here. I understand both positions, and I feel both you and Trent would never have gotten so far attacking each other in RL.

I’d like to point out that, other than a very few choice words on my post, and well after the original experience on Trent’s blog, I didn’t attack Trent. I simply tried to be nice and friendly, and was dragged through the mud for it.

There is one thing I think you didn’t understand, some users (like me and possibly Trent) have been told a few times that their requests don’t matter, the things they are more passionate about won’t change to be like they liked in 1.4.

I don’t know who has told you this, about requests not mattering. They certainly do. The largest problem is that for every request we get to change something one way, we get a request to do just the opposite, and people often don’t like “no” for an answer. For instance, someone in these comments requested that we use Nepomuk for our collection, like Bangarang, instead of our collection scanner. Above, you request just the opposite. So, one of you is going to be told “no” — in this case the person that wanted us to use Nepomuk. So from his/her perspective, we have indicated that his request doesn’t matter, right?

A lot of users hate being told “no” exactly because the things they want are what they are passionate about. Sometimes this is for techincal reasons like with Nepomuk, sometimes it’s for philosophy reasons, and sometimes it’s because we simply don’t have enough time to realistically get to a particular request anytime in the forseeable future. Many users however take this to mean we don’t care about their opinions or desires, which is not the case — we just can’t accommodate all of them.

(FWIW, as far as Nepomuk, we did at one point have a GSoC project to be able to show a Nepomuk-derived collection. I’m not sure how far that is from completion; the code is still there.)

So, any request by a amarok dev to explain why I don’t like 2.x feels like a provocation, as I am already expecting the final answer to be something like you never understood what amarok was about, and we won’t change anything because of you, you’re not our target, which some developers started using after one too many attacks from users passionate about amarok 1.4. And that would make me probably react like Trent did, and lash out on someone genuinely trying to help, like you.

It’s true — after enough endless attacking, some devs gave up trying to be politic back to users. This wasn’t productive in terms of dev-user relations, but when you get bitched at over and over and over from users that aren’t trying to be constructive and are simply attacking and attacking and attacking, it can certainly get to you. It’s unfortunate, too, since it just gives more fodder for the trolls to complain about.

You mention devs saying “you never understood what amarok was about” — both on Trent’s blog and here, you’ll see it flipped around — comments from users saying that the devs forgot what Amarok was about. Which I find pretty funny. But I think a fair response to “the devs forgot what Amarok was about” is to say “you never understood what Amarok was about” — because as a dev for five years, I can tell you with good authority that our vision is the same as it’s always been. “Rediscover Your Music” means the same now as it did back then.

That doesn’t mean though that we don’t want it to be a kickass music player for those who don’t care about context. Users that complain that, because it’s taking time for the A2 series to get back to that point, that we have forgotten what Amarok is about are simply vastly overestimating the resources of the development team.

Now, on to your specific questions/problems/issues:

I can’t comment on the media device crash — I don’t use any media devices. That part of the code could use some love in general, I think. I don’t understand how it affects using your netbook since netbooks aren’t really media devices you connect via USB — maybe you can explain your precise setup in greater detail? 17000 tracks is quite a normal/small size — people use Amarok successfully with 200,000+ tracks.

As for 176402 — we had a patch to support embedded cover art, which was not an acceptable patch for various reasons, and the author did not follow up with a fixed patch as he said. I will try to put this on my TODO list. The other part of that bug concerns lyrics; look for an announcement hopefully soon on my blog on that front.

The layout: why not just dock the media collection and context pane together? Then you have exactly the setup you describe wanting. View -> Uncheck “Lock Layout”, then you can drag the components around from the title bars of each component — it’s slightly tricky but you can drag and drop one on top of the other to cause them to be tabbed. You could even tab *all* panes together if that works best on your netbook, and switch between them with keyboard shortcuts.

Also try View -> Slim Toolbar for a slimmer toolbar. If you have suggestions to improve the volume control then I’m all ears — my current plan is to make it so that instead of dragging round it, the OSD with the volume level will pop up, and dragging left and right will change it.

“Local collection is closed by default” — can you explain this? When I launch Amarok it shows the last thing I had open, so if I had the local collection it shows the local collection, and if I had an Ampache collection open it shows that.

Crash on scanning collection — please file a bug about this and assign it to me (mitchell, kde, org). Believe it or not, most crashes in scanning are actually from TagLib, and even most of those are from corrupted tags written by other programs; but, really I’d like to work with you on this to fix it. If you can take the time, try iteratively bisecting your collection and seeing if you can isolate the crash to a particular file(s).

Burn in k3b; replaygain; improving slower than you’d like: I know that this sometimes pisses off users to hear this — although I don’t really know why, since it is after all an entirely volunteer project, and being told this is exactly how I got into Amarok hacking — but we could sure use help to get things like this back. Lots and lots of users want various things but aren’t willing to help out, and our dev team tends to be very busy and not have anywhere near enough time to get things in as fast as we would like. I agree that these would be nice things to have back, but please know that we’re working as fast as we can.

It is not about your blog, it is because the KDE tag that you use.

I don’t understand this comment; not only is it my blog and I can use what tags I want, but if you look at the conversation with him, much of it discussed KDE.

My opinion is only that the problem of that guy with Amarok is one of many that people can have, and if he removes/edits/etc the comments, it is not a reason to “spam” planet KDE,

I don’t understand this comment either. Planet KDE is a blog aggregator. You can’t really spam it unless you modify its configuration to pull from sources filled with, say, advertisements. Otherwise it’s doing the exact job that it was set up for.

then it becomes harder to find specific KDE posts.

I agree. Every time someone posts a new blog post that goes up on Planet KDE, it becomes harder to find past posts…but, that’s kind of the nature of the beast as a blog aggregator. That’s also why Google/Bing/insert_search_engine_here is useful.

As for the screenshot you posted, I’ve never seen anything like it. Not sure how to help you, but it’s not the norm.

It is not so notorious in fast (or with good driver) graphic cards, try with the vesa driver for example. Amarok is the app with the slowest interface (including plasma) that uses Qt or kdelibs. When it is started, I can see for some seconds parts of the interface being loaded, it takes ~1-2 seconds to load. Screenshot http://yfrog.com/n0amarokj It is a bit difficult to describe.

Any way, Amarok still is nice.

regards.

I’ll look at it again, though. It feels like it is improving (albeit slower that I’d like) and I still remember how much I liked using 1.4.
I just hope you guys don’t use nepomuk as an engine – no way I am letting strigi/nepomuk index 17000 tracks, even more on my netbook, as they are on a external drive. That was the reason why I removed bangarang immediately after I installed it.
All in all, don’t take things so seriously. We are all passionate about amarok here, you, me, trent, etc. And we need to take a step back sometimes.

Why do you out this on Planet KDE?

I put it on my blog. My blog, like many many many others, happens to be syndicated on Planet KDE.

Amarok is nice, but has some problems since the 2 port, like the slow interface (the slowest from all KDE apps), but it is very innovative. The pros and cons of Clementine is that it uses only Qt.

I don’t know what “the slowest interface from all KDE apps” means. Can you clarify this? The interface feels just as snappy to me as other KDE apps.

What is the problem? Every body can use what they want.

This post had nothing to do with people choosing to use Amarok or Clementine.

What is the problem? Every body can use what they want.

2) What about them?

3) The context view is based on plasma. Nothing prevents you, or others, from adding that functionality via fairly easy-to-write data engines and applets.

4) Expanding at the first level would be hugely problematic for the majority of our users. You also do not need to double-click to expand nodes, so I’m not sure what you’re referring to.

5) “Most people don’t put their music in $XDG_MUSIC_DIR”: Sure they do, because for most distros $XDG_MUSIC_DIR is ~/Music. Saying that we should do something a certain way because Windows does it like that is not a compelling argument.

6) Then we’re agreed that sorting by genre first is not a good default.

2. look lately at : songbird ? windows media player ? itunes ? Xmms is another beast for 20th century. i’m talking about 21th century

3. Rediscover my music ? rediscover what ? lyrics are not working. It at least it was showing useful stuff like miro ( concert, … ), or like last.fm proposing related songs on the library or in internet, or allowing to buy albums/goodies from stores on internet, or showing a keyword tag for artist/titles, or details stats about my tastes, ok I could understand. Presently “current track” is just showing what I have in … the playlist but taking more space.

4. just expand at the first level. I need to discover there’s music by double-clicking : again this is discovering. I’m fine with this, not my grandma.

5. Why scanning $HOME first ? because most people don’t put their music in $XDG_MUSIC_DIR. But only $XDG_MUSIC_DIR should be monitored by default. Windows and Picasa do it this way : show everything available, but only monitor a few directories

6. indeed, most people don’t have tag at all

7. glad to hear this

The other is to generate or load your saved playlist, and then click the bottom-right button under the playlist, and choose random. This will play your playlist randomly.

All the best,

Valorie

If I don’t sit here and agree with everything you say in your nasty, badgering way, you complain here and on Trent’s blog of the “same old shit” and “talking to a wall”.

Meanwhile, you’ve been unable to stretch yourself to give an inch and acknowledge anything I’ve said, either to your comments or anyone else, except to twist it out of context.

You’ll notice that out of over 25 unique people that have commented on this blog post, you are, as far as I can tell, the only person dissatisfied with the discussion. Make of that what you will.

No its not for a number of people.

And yes it is for a number of different people. That’s exactly my point.

Given the flexible main window and playlist layout possibilities

Oh goody – so I can arrange multiple m3u playlists and the collection list to be visible at the same time and drag/drop between them?

I do miss my little viz from 1.4, but I think it’s coming back soon. It’s not important, though. I completely disagree about what should be scanned, but again, you can set that up any way *you* like.

Valorie

Think you summed it up nicely Trent, I and others tried again on the boards and Jeffs blog – still the same old shit.

I did see an interesting admission on Jeff’s blog which I replied to, since I’m lazy I’ll just replicate it here

I would be very surprised if any other commenter on this blog felt that “the same old shit” was going on here (though most of them wouldn’t agree with Trent’s characterizations of my attempted discussion with him in the first place).

I did see an interesting admission on Jeff’s blog which I replied to, since I’m lazy I’ll just replicate it here

Amarok 2 is much closer to the original vision of Amarok than Amarok 1. Amarok 1 became a very nice music player, but point of the slogan “Rediscover Your Music” was to have context at the forefront

An acknowledgement I thought that Amarok 2 is not primarily about playing music and a key source of a lot of the frustration and disconnect between the old Amarok 1 users and the developers.

You are, of course, free to read that however you want, and given your clear skew on things, you’ll read it in whatever way makes Amarok and its developers look bad in order to fit your arguments.

Regardless, the fact that the primary goal of both Amarok 1 *and* Amarok 2 is to provide contextual information to your music is independent of our desire for them to be good music players. We want Amarok 2 to be just as good at playing music as Amarok 1. (Given the flexible main window and playlist layout possibilities, the faster and more accurate collection scanning, the existence of the vast majority of features of Amarok 1.4, the Internet music sources, and so on, for many workflows Amarok 2 *is* more capable.)

Well maybe there’s part of the problem people have. Amarok 1 was primarily about playing music, Amarok 2 is not. If users *and* developers acknowledged that rather than trying to convert each other and went their separate ways there would be a lot less angst.

This makes the suggestion that developers need to acknowledge something or other about Amarok 1 or Amarok 2. I’m not exactly sure what, but I’m pretty sure the developers have a good bead as to what Amarok — 1.x *and* 2.x — was primarily about. Regardless of your claim above, Amarok 2 isn’t a paradigm shift. It’s exactly in line with the original goals and even slogan of the project.

Amarok 1 users/devs can just focus on Clementine and other players to play their music

Amarok 1 devs are the same ones working on Amarok 2. Not on Clementine.

Amarok 2 people can focus on their “Context”, what ever that is.

You know what it is. It was in Amarok 1 too. Honestly, your tone and wording and insinuations in your comments are just tiring. (Not to mention your defense of Trent’s wild claims, for whatever reason.) So have your comments on his blog:

I’ve tried engaging with the developers at the Amarok forums, they are not interested in any critiques or comments on the UI. Politeness gets you ignored or patronised, frustration gets you deleted. Unless you’re part of the echo chamber don’t bother.

I actually don’t mind they have their vision and are somewhat single minded about it – that’s their prerogative as the developers, its this pretence that they are open to feedback that is quite irritating and the tendency to evangelise.

Plus what you say above:

It would help a lot if Amarok 2 evangelists quit trying to tell others they are wrong and ignorant for not acknowledging Amarok 2 is “better”.

Seriously, just stop it. It’s tiring, and it’s annoying, especially when I’m spending large amounts of my free time doing exactly the opposite of everything you’re claiming, and have been for years.

Go away.

Well maybe there’s part of the problem people have. Amarok 1 was primarily about playing music, Amarok 2 is not. If users *and* developers acknowledged that rather than trying to convert each other and went their separate ways there would be a lot less angst.

Amarok 1 users/devs can just focus on Clementine and other players to play their music, Amarok 2 people can focus on their “Context”, what ever that is.

It would help a lot if Amarok 2 evangelists quit trying to tell others they are wrong and ignorant for not acknowledging Amarok 2 is “better”. Its not – its as you say a completely different beast and to Amarok 1 and never shall the twain meet.

And Amarok 1/Clementine users would be a lot happier if they stopped trying to make Amarok 2 like Amarok 1 – its not going to happen.

Since you where making such a big paradigm shift with Amarok 1 -> 2 perhaps it would have been a good idea to have a name change as well. To late now though.

IMHO Amarok should have sane default settings/layout.

It’s a frustrating statement, because it’s both totally obvious and something that everyone agrees on. *Everyone* thinks *every program* should have sane default settings.

Now, you qualify it below with what you feel “sane default settings/layout” should be, which turns the criticism constructive and helpful. But many people don’t, and just leave that statement all by itself. You can imagine how frustrating that is.

Anyways, to your points:

Waste of space: it’s not a waste of space if you want context. During the Amarok 1 days we got a lot of people complaining that they kept having to go back and forth between their collection and the context information, and to go between the various context bits. So in the transition to Amarok 2 we made a bunch of people happy and made a bunch of other people unhappy. So what you really mean is that it’s not your preferred layout. But waste of space it ain’t.

Too far away from other media players: I don’t really think this is a problem. Amarok was very far away from XMMS. iTunes was far away from Winamp. Different isn’t necessarily bad, as long as it’s easy to figure out what to do. (Some have said that they intuitively knew what to do with Amarok 1 but can’t figure it out with Amarok 2. I do think that argument is a bit bogus, because the workflow is exactly the same — the collection settings are in the same place, and the ways of adding to the playlist are the same — so I tend to think that those comments are in the “I just don’t like that it’s different” camp).

Context view hidden by default: no way. It wouldn’t be fair to the large number of users that like this layout, nor the developers who worked hard on the context plasmoids, nor the spirit and intent of Amarok — Rediscover Your Music. But, I think it wouldn’t be a bad option to have easy ways to switch between the default Amarok 2 layout and an Amarok 1.4-style layout (including the playlist layout). Maybe even present that option to users in a first-run wizard.

Collection selected and expanded: I’m not sure why you feel your collection is empty (when my collection scans and I get a list of a few hundred artists, I sure don’t feel that way), but there are a few logistical problems with expanding it. Off the top of my head, knowing at what level to stop expanding — do you leave it at albums, or all the way to tracks (answer: half the users would want one, half the other)? The even more important reason is that he collection is lazy loaded to keep memory use under control — so this would hugely increase memory usage, CPU usage, and cause the browser to be far less responsive.

Scanning in $HOME vs. $XDG_MUSIC_DIR: I don’t think most users would want the collection scanner trawling their entire $HOME by default. I certainly wouldn’t — when Soprano does it it slows things down to a crawl. I also don’t see the advantage in scanning for things in $HOME one-off and then only monitoring $XDG_MUSIC_DIR.

Sorting by genre/artist: why should it be sorted by genre/artist by default, instead of by artist? (N.B.: A very large percentage of users do not have correct genre tags, if they even have them at all).

Visualization plugin: Totally agreed, we need one. Now that projectM is (more) mature it is a good option to explore. I have some ideas for how I would want it to work, but I’m not sure how possible it is.

IMHO :
- the context View should be hidden by default.
- 25% of the window space should be dedicated to the “Media source” part, 75% to the playlist
- By default the collection should be selected AND expanded, because presently you feel your collection is empty.
- by default Amarok shoould scan for all music in user $HOME but only monitor for musics in $XDG_MUSIC_DIR
- by default the collection should be sort by genre/artist and fallback to filename as many people does not have files with correct idv3 tags
- there’s a need for a visualisation plugin. it could eventually replace the context view in the current layout

I’ve been in situations (work and otherwise) that require a similar balance and trying to please people, so I completely understand the balancing act of trying to please people and still make something you’re also proud of. It’s not easy and putting your work in front of the rest of the world requires thick skin, no matter how good the work is. The problem, I think, is a lot of people lack a sense of perspective, only seeing one side (theirs), especially when it’s something personal. If you’re using a program every day and getting frustrated with an aspect of it, it can be hard to see look at it subjectively. That, in turn, gets frustrating for the creator, because emotional feedback is less likely to be useful feedback.

I nearly passed the whole thing by, and probably wouldn’t have comented at all if Trent had been more civil. Regardless of the topic — Amarok, KDE, GNOME, art, literature, etc. — I hate it when hostility takes the place of constructive discussion. Differing opinions don’t have to be attacked, and it’s a shame it had to play out that way. Clementine versus Amarok 2 could have been a good springboard for discussion of potential improvements and changes to both projects, but his hostility ruined it. At least it seems to have generated more constructive discussion here.

I’m looking forward to reading what changes or improvements come of this whole thing; it’s one of the reasons I kept the KDE and Debian feeds that were added to Akregator by default (which is how I found this, actually). I like learning about upcoming features, as well as the interesting tips and tricks that sometimes appear in them.

http://www.behindkde.org/people/jono/

Are there reasons that you would dislike the VLC backend to Phonon though?

I’m not sure what your dislikes are of VLC compared to GStreamer, but as long as a Phonon backend works, are there other issues we should be considering when recommending one backend or another to people?

We are definitely always considering feedback, including the feedback in the comments on this post. I know some 2.x users and/or haters won’t believe it, but we are as committed now to user feedback as we were in the Amarok 1 days. We’ve just had this very tight and difficult balance — a lot of the user feedback is “you’re still missing X feature”, so if we implement that, we get other user feedback like “why are you adding new features when Y doesn’t work right”.

Then we get other users that just attack, attack, attack. Some Amarok developers have, in the past few years, gotten pretty short with users. But it’s a cycle — some developers get short because of dealing with users who attack and refuse to try to give constructive criticism (not necessarily short to those users — sometimes they end up being short with other users who really don’t deserve it…but it really can be hugely difficult when you have warring sides of users saying “X is great, don’t change it” and “X is awful, you must change it”, with each being very demanding). Then users get angry because of feeling like the developers aren’t listening to them, and feed it back to the developers, and on it goes. It’s a real problem, and we are trying to make sure that we are better in the future.

Anyways, we really are committed to user feedback, and this all has given me some ideas of better ways to communicate that to users. I’m going to propose some things internally and we’ll see what sticks. I’ll definitely post such things on my blog once they’re sorted out, so watch this space. (I’m going to some conferences at the end of the week, so if you don’t see anything for a bit, it’ll be because I may not have much time when I’m out of town.)

I heard about the VLC backend, and I have to say I am not really a fan of VLC. GStreamer would be a much better way to go IMO.

I also wanted to add that I personally like seeing developers attempt to interact with the users, including the ones that aren’t developers. It’s a nice thing to see, and unfortunately, attitudes like Trent’s are why it seems to be a rarity. Don’t let things like this discourage you (or anyone else reading this) from getting user feedback; it would be a shame to see that happen.

Even if I don’t agree with every change made to every program I use, I appreciate knowing that, at least for some of them, feedback is considered in those decisions.

I know this doesn’t matter much to someone who didn’t have these troubles before, but they really were big problems for both us developers and for many users.

Amarok *is* much more complex than MPD, which is very focused on one thing

As I said in an earlier comment (or maybe it was a comment on Trent’s blog), Amarok 2 is much closer to the original vision of Amarok than Amarok 1. Amarok 1 became a very nice music player, but point of the slogan “Rediscover Your Music” was to have context at the forefront. With the way Amarok 1 was built, that became very difficult to do.

That being said, we’re discussing some UI changes based on feedback from these comments. So stay tuned.

He didn’t say, until long after I gave him the advice, that he didn’t want Amarok 2 advice. Which is pretty petty and ungracious when someone is simply trying to both be friendly and helpful.

There is an unfortunate bit of history here. You may or may not remember that after Phonon was created, Trolltech (now Nokia) decided to incorporate the project into Qt proper and take care of providing backends for Windows, Mac, and Linux. The Linux backend they were maintaining was the GStreamer backend.

Unfortunately, it didn’t go so well and for a long time the GStreamer backend was pretty much neglected by them. Partially because of badgering from the Amarok team we did finally get some of the major bugs fixed, but I’m not sure what its current status is today.

However, one thing we’re very excited about is the upcoming libvlc-based backend, which is cross-platform and, from what I hear, generally easier to work with.

First, thanks for the UI feedback. Please know that I’m taking it to heart and will propose some changes to the developers.

Regarding the volume knob, it seems like many of your concerns could be addressed by, on the left and right side, having – and + buttons that adjust the volume X percent (say, 10%). As it stands right now, you can still change the volume with the mouse wheel over the volume knob (just as you could with the old slider), and you can use keyboard shortcuts, but for those that like to point and click, this would help. What do you think?

As for the audiobook handling, I want to point out that Amarok 1.4 didn’t have this feature, to the best of my knowledge; which is simply to say that it’s a complaint about Amarok, and not specifically a 1.4 vs. 2 complaint. You’d be surprised how often someone says “Amarok 2 can’t do this” and forget that Amarok 1.4 couldn’t either.

Developer Nikolaj has been working on CUE support for a while though, which won’t really help you if you have multiple CDs for an audiobook, but will help those that have audiobooks in one file but want it separated into chapters.

- Scanning external devices -> If the device is not plugged in, the collection is wiped clean. Can we have a feature where a directory can be excluded from the “always watch” list?

- Time – Compared to MPD amarok is just not that responsive (I realize that this might not be a fair complaint since Amarok is much more than MPD).

My problem is that I just want to play my Music. I don’t care about what Wikipedia says about that artist, or who the similar artists are and such. For some reason, Amarok-1.4 had music as at the forefront while Amarok-2.x has everything about music but music at the forefront. Hope you get the point.

Since some other Amarok feedback is coming up in this, I wanted to throw in a bit of my own. First, I’ve always used the slim toolbar, so until someone mentioned it in another comment here, I didn’t even know about the round volume control. I gave it a try just now to see how it worked, and my experience was as follows:

* Clicked the icon to interact, muted music by mistake.
* Clicked again to unmute, or so I thought.
* My ears are still ringing from unintentionally blasting a song at 100% volume.

There is no clear identification for the area you click to modify the volume versus the area you click to mute it. I clicked the center area — not the ring that seemed to be the volume control itself — and was rewarded with sharp pain. At best this control is unintuitive, and at worst it’s difficult to use well. I like the idea of it, but I dislike the current (as of 2.3.1) way it works.

Possible solution: Clicking (and holding) the mouse button anywhere in the volume control brings up the OSD with the current volume. Dragging the cursor right or left could raise and lower the volume. This seems to be the sort of interaction you’re trying to use, but the current control lets you click an arbitrary position on the control and completely change the volume instead of modifying it incrementally, which can be something of a shock to the user.

Second, a problem that is more personal. Dynamic playlists have not acted right since Amarok 2. I love Amarok’s dynamic playlist feature, and it’s something I use constantly. It’s a great way to interact with the music, and the sort of thing Amarok is perfect for. I set the playlist bias and let it generate the next five songs in the list on the fly. If I decide I want to hear something specific, like an album that a song just played from, I drop that into the playlist and it plays that album and then goes back to generating the dynamic playlist after that’s finished.

Now, the problem: since I started using Amarok 2, dynamic playlist mode will stop updating the playlist randomly. The only way to get it working again is to close amarok, make sure the process ends (usually requires a kill -9), and start it again until it breaks again. I’ve tried to figure out why, but I’m at a loss. When it happens, Amarok shows in the status area “Generating Playlist . . .” with progress showing as partially complete, and the task never finishes. I’ve had this happen using the internal SQL database as well as an external mysql server. I’ve tried rebuilding my collection, I’ve even wiped out all my amarok configurations and started fresh. It continues to happen regardless of what I do, and it can be extremely frustrating, especially since my experience with Amarok is, otherwise, very smooth, with few other problems.

Dynamic mode also seems to favour albums in its random selection, though that’s not really a problem, just an odd quirk that may or may not be a bug of some kind. To clarify: if the first song in the playlist is album “foo” and the second song in the playlist is album “bar”, then all songs from both albums will appear in the dynamic playlist within the next hour or two of play. In a collection of several thousand songs, this bias stands out and seems rather strange.

Dynamic playlist problems aside, though, I really Amarok 2. I like the UI flexibility, I occasionally like using the context features, and really like the way it works when interacting with collection and files. There’s a lot of good work in it, and I can’t think of a music player I like to use more in any OS. I think it’s also the only player I’ve ever used where I actually pay attention to the interface at all. I usually dump everything into one large playlist and ignore the app, but with Amarok I find myself checking what’s coming up in the dynamic playlist, tweaking the upcoming music, adding albums or similar music, etc. as I listen. That sort of interaction seems to be Amarok’s goal, and for me, at least, it succeeds.

I’m a old amaroK lover because it simplicity.

I don’t care with tech buzzword i want listen my music but with amaroK 2 i can’t do with, many things to adjust.

That why people people use winamp default skin till today people just want to listen music don’t adjust configuration.

I’m a fan of KDE4 uses it on my main computer and my notebook but i can’t use amaroK.

I proporse a test, on first time open amaroK give ppl choice over old laytout or new.

I want to back to “just listen music” on amaroK but I can’t configure that the thing. I don’t want and have time to learn to use amaroK. The time I lose learn whom it’s work i wanto to “just listen music”.

Trent is venomous because you hijacked a thread to tell him you knew what he wanted better than he did – he had explicitly said he didn’t want KD4 or Amarok 2.x advice.

However, all was not well when trying to use amarok 2.3.1 as a music manager for my collection on an external drive. The return of smartplaylists convinced me to try using the new version to control this collection, something version 1.4.10 handled flawlessly. Problems abounded. For one thing, the collection is deleted when accidently starting amarok without the external drive mounted. This is stupid, as I have to rescan the entire collection; amarok 1.4.10, on the other hand, waited patiently until I mounted the drive and continued to function without any fuss.

Secondly, the smartplaylist feature is a failure on two counts: 1) the blank slate presented to the user in 2.3.1 versus the simple but informative layout seen in 1.4.10; 2) 30 track limit (wtf?). I can easily load 10 to 4,000 tracks using the smartplaylist feature in 1.4.10. I wouldn’t be so harsh on the devs if this was their first stab at the feature, but they had a beautiful framework previously and could have simply, or not so simply, port those features/ideas to work with the present amarok. Instead, they went ahead and reinvented the wheel.

Third, for some strange reason the startup times for amarok 2.3.1 are noticeably longer than in 2.3.0, even after deleting ~/.kde4/share/apps/amarok.

Sorry, but I broke down and compiled amarok 1.4.10 and wondered what the hell was I thinking by sticking with amarok 2.3.x for that long. After recompiling xine libraries, I can play most of what I throw at it (mp4, tracker modules, etc). Maybe when amarok is at 2.4.10, I’ll consider trying it again.

We’re now at KDE 4.4 and Amarok 2.3. KDE is more than ultra usable, I would say it is the best full desktop environment for average users (and with tiling in 4.5 it shoould be the best for everything), and Amarok has solved every problem I had with it and every problem I’ve seen people say they have. To top it off, all other players don’t come anywhere near the feature set provided. So hats off to the Amarok and KDE devs.

P.S. My only problem with Amarok are the keyboard shortcuts, you’re missing one for turning on/off random. The ability to save collection searches would be cool too.

I liked very much about Amarok 1.4.x. But when 2.x came, there have been vew very bad usability problems what developers do not want to fix. But otherwise the Amarok has been good, most parts only missing the community around it making themes and widgets.

Amarok 2 should really design again the latest play UI. The next/previous buttons are not good idea when you have typically the playlist shown. If the user uses the rare config that playlist is hided in tab, only then the “next & previous” links works. Otherwise they are duplicate for the playlist where you can more easily just double click the next skip.

People who have used Amarok 2.3.1 has missed the old fashion next/previous buttons next to the play/pause button. They want bit buttons and not the tiny version.

The second problem comes with the volume button. You can not see ever such button in KDE SC or in any other GUI. It is totally out of logic. It is fancy but simply just does not work. It is hard to change and it lacks the contrast so you could actually see the volume position or even the % meter. Only good thin in that is the mute button is big enough. The volume button should always be something what you can adjust with single click right away without thinking on what part you need to click. It just need to be linear. It can be old school but it is best.

Then comes the typical problem not implenting he Ctrl+M feature. Now users need to use QtCurve or Bespin to get the menubar hided. Amarok does not have so many menus that the menu would actually be needed all the time. It would be much better to implent back the Ctrl+M feature but just making the default such that it is not enabled from the settings. That way those who can by mistake press Ctrl+M (very very rare) and do not know what just happend (even more rare, we are talking about promille usersbase here) they could not do it by mistake.
Now the UI is not in balance because the top left has small menubar. There is useless functions for application use itself in daily use. Just add Ctrl+M feature, do not assign shortcut to it but leave it for the user to assign it from shortcuts and everyone are happy. The UI comes clean and simple and we can even get the Amarok locked by that way so in parties no one goes to change settings or similar.

Amarok does not support well the audio books. There is lots of audio books users and Amarok does not work well for them. Reason is that Amarok do not separate the IDv3 standard support of the CD number. The Album is not same thing as the CD. One album can have multiple CD’s and you can not include wrong metadata to album name just to get CD versions separated in the database and in the playlist.

I have few dozens friends who listens audiobooks. I borrow from them and to them lots of audiobooks and they are easily 24-32 CD’s. To get them actually shown right in the database, it is not possible because you need to add own info to every song what is in the CD so it comes as different album and not the correct. Then you have from one writer 6 audio books and when you open the “artists”, you get easily over 100 albums and not 6 albums where every one of them is all the CD’s.

There is need to have new feature in database filtering:

Artist > Album > CD

Now there is just Artist > Album what works someway but when transferring audiobooks to other devices (MP3 players, Car players etc) they do not work correctly because the Album metadata is needed to have misinformation what does not belong to it but to the CD number part.

Amarok 2 is unusable for real audiobook handling only because of that the filtering does not follow CD number.

Otherwise I think Amarok 2 has all the great features, they might need some polishing but they are there. For some people, not in the default settings but possible to do it. One big improvement for that was at last when developers implented the layout change possibility. It made the UI so flexible that it just reminds the power what 1.4.x really had.

1) I don’t know, personally. But — what about it is so problematic? There are keyboard shortcuts and you can use the mouse wheel over the control to change the volume too. Or you could use the slim toolbar with its slider.

2) What defaults would be sensible, in your opinion? (*Everyone* has their own opinion about this, btw…)

3) Trent is venemous because he attacked me for asking questions and trying to give helpful advice, regardless of his underlying reasons.

It’s impossible to say up front whether or not your UI suggestions would be implemented. One issue we run into fairly often is that people come to us with UI ideas and improvements that we *like* but we either lack the experience or (usually) the time to make them ourselves.

My hope is that this will warn others so that they don’t also waste their energy.

It’s a waste of energy, especially when you have such a character on the other side. It’s about freedom, so let him troll as much as he like. Who cares what does he think about Amarok. I love it, I use it, but also I use Clementine from time to time when I want a little change and a snappier player. But, the question again is: WHO CARES what apps do I use?

I appreciate your effort, but sometimes is just best to let things be.

Greetings from Serbia

As much as I didn’t like the attitude of that guy, he didn’t owe you any explanation, and he can dislike Amarok 2.x interface as much as he wants, and he’s free to express it, also, he didn’t act particularly offensive to Amarok in the original article.

You should really learn to accept critics, or people who dislike Amarok.

I said its interface is outrageous, and, in case you wanted to, I could write something outlining all the design problems. You said yes, well, now wait for it.

Some of Trent’s concerns are valid, namely these:
1) The Amarok volume control. Why is it a rotating knob? That volume control is the reason that we do not use Amarok in our household. No, I haven’t checked if there is a bug but this forum post makes it seem that it won’t change anyway:
http://forum.kde.org/viewtopic.php?f=121&t=85937
And changing the entire toolbar just to get an intuitive volume control is ridiculous.

2) No sensible defaults. Trent complains that he must spend an hour configuring Amarok. That is a problem, and I know that it exists! Amarok went too far with the interface, it _can_ be configured in a more conventional form for those who will spend an hour learning it. But what about sensible defaults?

3) Trent is “venomous” because he feels that the Amarok devs took an application that he loves, and ruined it. A lot of KDE 3 to KDE 4 converts feel the same way about many KDE apps. The truth is that KDE 3 was a _great_ environment, and KDE 4 is simply mediocre. Amarok 2 is not bad, but it’s nothing special. Amarok 1.4 was simply fantastic.

All in all, I really do appreciate the work that you have put into Amarok. I don’t use it anymore, though, as I find it difficult and unintuitive to use. If you want I will spend some time with Amarok 2.3 and detail exactly what the problems are, but fixing them _will_ require changing UI elements and default settings. I won’t spend the time if the devs are opposed to doing that, as I’ve seen in the past.

Articles complaining about Amarok’s UI are all well and good — actually helping effect those changes are much better.

FWIW, when people have volunteered in the past, we have worked with several people that do GUI design or usability professionally to help shape things up — and we have a very large userbase. So while I’m happy to hear your comments, I’m already rather skeptical about your claims that the Amarok UI is completely outrageous and that it has nothing to do with your personal preferences.

I believe DAAP is still supported, but I can’t comment for sure as I’ve never used it. It’s not a priority for support, since you can’t make it work with iTunes and other implementations (including Amarok’s) may or may not interoperate. That said, one of the GSoC students this year is working on UPnP (DLNA) support, which is standards-based and should thus provide a much nicer experience.

It has nothing to do with my friends, or me.

The article will be up in the planet soon

Daap Support

I dont know if this is a distro specific problem (I run Kubuntu 10.04 (kde 4.4 recently upgraded to 4.5RC) But I cant get amarok to work as a daap server or client I asked at the amaork forums and was told it supports the free implementation of DAAP however I have never gotten amarok to see music from daap enabled music players on my network. I tried sharing my music on another pc running rhythmbox but there did not show up on amarok. There is also no UI for configuring daap support It would be really nice if that support is added to amarok.

MTP support. Again words on the street is that amarok as MTP support I have never been able to sync my songs with my MTP enabled music player. or my N900 much supports mass-storage mode. On rythmbox I use ls_audio and but that never works on amarok. It would be nice to be able to sync some of my fav music to amarok.

I woul also love to be able to add to favourite context menu / buttom which would easily allow me hard currently playing song to a favourite / or any playlist playlist.

I am sure some of this issues are already known to you guys and I really look forward to amarok 2.4 (although things have been relatively quite in the amarok camp of late.. oh its summer time )

Unfortunately, he’s the wrong kind of person for that kind of decency.

Anyways, you should separate out “posting this on Planet KDE” and “blogging about this”. I blogged about it; my blog happens to be one of hundreds of blogs aggregated on Planet KDE.

As for the point of blogging about it? So that others can take this as a lesson, know Trent’s opinions and statements for what they are, and avoid The Linux Critic in the future.

He should also know that he can’t just make negative statements about something and then expect to get a pass and not get called on them.

The original post in the Clementine article simply said “I’m not really a fan of the new Amarok”, – then went on to talk about Clementine. Without any other reference to Amarok2.

I would be annoyed if he bashed Amarok, but I don’t think he did in the article – and comments always get out of hand.

Sure, you got a stupid reply to your first comment/question, but then you replied back with something rude – it’s going to descend into namecalling very quickly.

Unless I’m missing something, to edit a playlist I have to:
- Switch to the playlist
- Load the play list in the play queue
- Drag/Drop songs to rearrange the order (a very erractic UI for that)
- To add music
- Switch to the collection list
- Locate the music in question
- Drag it across to the play queue (again somewhat painful to position)
- Rinse, Repeat
- Save the Play Queue – which *DOESN”T* update the original playlist, just creates a new one.
- Delete the old One
- Rename the new one to match
- Hope during this process that Amarok doesn’t crash and loose all my changes (has improved in 2.3.x)

Back in 2.x there were saving bugs – changes would be just silently lost.

These days if I’m going to bother I just edit the m3u file directly.

I just installed Clementine and while it could be better, the playlist editing is far easier and less clumsy.

As of the bugs — we really do get through bugs as we can, I promise. We’re just an all-volunteer developer base and we’re all very busy, so sometimes it takes a bit for us to slog through them. I’ll see if I can find the right person to poke about that, it sounds like a bad regression.

You say Amarok is meant to more than a play list player, well that’s fine and dandy – can you actually define what its meant to be then? got a vision? a plan? something more than vague cool? Because from the outside it just looks random “what the developers think is cool this week”

a) Dunno. Looks like we have text color; I imagine it wouldn’t be hard for someone to add the ability to adjust the background color.
b) It’s something we need, but nobody has had the time to implement yet. (IIRC projectM wasn’t really stable at the time we were first porting over to Amarok 2, and libvisual had given us problems in Amarok 1.)
c) What bug? I suggest filing a bug report.
d) ?
e) i) I’m not sure why being able to move them offends you, but some people want to be able to reorder them. ii) We haven’t used a custom Plasma fork for a long time.
f) Same as b). Nobody has had the time to implement it yet. Actually, that’s not quite true — work was performed on it for Summer of Code several years back, but Nepomuk itself wasn’t in good shape at the time. But it needs to be updated, because we’d all like to see Nepomuk as a media source.

Also, we have KNotify support.

It isn’t about what “I like”, or about what “I don’t like”, if you want to, I would gladly write a post about all the defects it has, and I could start a “mini” end user study to show I’m right (I already did, many people I know use Linux now, but none of them, not even one, likes Amarok).

However, the KDE community as a whole is truly amazing, and it deserves as much cheers as possible.

If you can’t handle critiques then stay in your little echo chamber.

To sum it up. Just boycott this site. Most of the comments in the article show clearly that it already belongs to trashcans of the internet. A magnet for all trolls

For instance tabbed playlists are great for parties and such because people don’t have to learn where to go to create a playlist because it is the same bit of UI as the now-playing playlist, different people can create and switch between a set of playlists.

Having said that I don’t suggest you go the route of the Foobar layout designer “insert separator”, “delete element” and “insert tab” are certainly less easy to get to grips with than dragging panels around.

And I don’t mean this as an implicit criticism of Amarok 2 which I know has come in for a lot of flak for over-design of the UI.

nice things in foobar:
> tabbed playlists
> Ability to save layouts and switch between saved layouts
> the “console” which is great for seeing what the problem is if some plugin isn’t working
> um some other stuff but I realise it isn’t particularly constructive to just list all the good points about another music player I’m stopping

I think KDE3 was dead as a project, and a lot of its apps with it. Not dead as in no users and no devs. Dead as in no vision. It was dead because it had reached a local maximum in terms of usability, stability, etc.

Of course, that meant the for a lot of users, it really was the best possible environment. And of course, they loved it. But clearly, it was slowly going to go the way of GNUSTEP over the next years. Because it catered to people who basically wanted a better windows 2000. And you know what? free software issues aside, they will never admit that there is a better paradigm, they do not want this convergence between devices. They do not care about us with hundreds of thousands of files who just need a better find even with perfect hierarchies of folders, nor do they care about us who care about the integration of the information fluxes made available from modern-day Internet. I am glad we just ignore their limitations: because this is the problem, these users don’t just want their features kept (which they are, possibly with minor interruptions). They also want no new features!

Of course, the transition is hard, but from the start, you could see the potential, and where it would be once all the bits were properly reimplemented in the KDE4 mode. And more important, you could no see where it would get stuck (and we still don’t know that: in the next 2-3 years nepomuk and akonady will make amazing stuff possible).

But I am an old user. I remember KDE1, which I also liked very much (I remember the excitement of 1.1.2 “Kolour” with the high-colour icons). I think KDE1 was also a dead project when it went to 2, with the Qt licencing issues. And it was painful! Kicker was amazingly unstable, and at the end of the process (KDE3.5.9) it still had not all the features of KDE1.

KDE1 had this cool feature that you could miniaturise your panel into an icon bar with only the windowlist and the app menu. And have it placed as the apple menu on the toplevel menubar. I hope someone will do a plasma containment which behaves like that — then we will have come full circle. But of course this does not matter. KDE 4 is so much better than 1, 2 or 3 that it is not funny. But some of us who like your work remember older days, and features lost along the way. But we understand movement, change and evolution is like, and continual fiddling towards perfection is death.

This is to say that in transitions, you lose features. You have to. Because the trade-of is positive. So go on hacking: for every sour apple like this guy, there are a thousand of us who like what you do, and all the time we are more numerous.

I said that
“Don’t call us. We’ll call you. So scurry off to your KDE4 lovefest and leave the rest of us be to solve the problems you created for us.”
was a stupid vision of FOSS. On the second comment I put it without the word “stupid” but got it deleted too.

The worst part is that, apart from another guy, no one else seems to be affected by this. So I have to manually arrange items randomly now, if I want to get that effect. It’s a bit frustrating at times, especially when I would just like, you know, to be surprised – and that never happens when I try to surprise myself (unless I set up endless playlists, so that I can forget their order).

Anyway, I’m a big fan of Amarok – Rock on! – and totally sympathise with you for what has just happened with that troll.

BTW, thanks for Amarok. Ah, don’t take such unconstructive comments from hateboys so seriously.

Anyway, people are entitled to like what they want, but imo if you’re going to bash something in public you should provide a better argument than “I HATE YOU!”.