Back in June, I reviewed Amarok 2.1 and was far from impressed. The layout editor was difficult to work with and felt tacked on, and the fact that a great deal of my music was placed under “Various Artists” for no apparent reason frustrated me. Amarok 2.2 has been released recently, and it’s a definite improvement, and may even be the best music player released this year.
Reviewing Amarok is always a great deal of fun for me, even if I don’t think the current release is necessarily the best. In fact, as I write this I’m jamming some music on my laptop right now, and it works perfectly.
One of the best aspects of the new Amarok is that its very easy to make it yours. Almost everything is movable, though it may or may not be apparent at first. You can move virtually any element anywhere you want, even customize how the playlist is displayed. Almost everything has seen an improvement here or there.
As far as performance, Amarok handles its tasks quickly and stabily, though I don’t really think I’ve ever used a slow media player other than iTunes on Windows.
Although I’m not sure if this is the way its supposed to be or something to do with my system, but it seems that cover art is downloaded on the fly, rather than in one large lump while you set it up. With the automatic download of cover art turned on, cover art is downloaded as I browse through my collection. This way it doesn’t put a damper in performance. In all fairness, I’m happy that cover art downloading even works at all, considering it stopped working in Amarok 2.1 for some odd reason.
It’s great that Amarok seems to finally be getting on the right track, though many long time fans may still be cautious due to the fallout from previous versions of the 2.x series. For those people, 2.2.0 may not necessarily win you over, though Amarok 2.2.0 is definitely going in the right direction.
I did have a few issues with this release, but none all that major. First of all, I couldn’t find a way to change the theme colors of Amarok within Amarok itself, which may be an issue for those of you that use GNOME or another desktop. Finally, while it may be that I don’t know how to do it, I couldn’t find a way to export a play list out of Amarok and import it back in. This is important to me because I use several computers and I would like the same play list on each one. Neither of those problems are enough to mark Amarok down, especially because the latter may just be because I’m not sure how Amarok saves playlists.
Conclusion
You owe it to yourself to try Amarok if you’re a fan of music. If you are an old-school Amarok fan, you may not like this release either, but you’ll probably appreciate the effort that’s going into it and the fact that it’s going in the right direction now. I found Amarok 2.2.0 to be an awesome player, and it’s what I’m using as default for my collection.
Screenshot (click to enlarge)
The Good
- New Layout, Fully Customisable
- Everything I’ve Tested So Far Works
- On The Fly Cover Art Downloading
The Bad
- No option to change colors outside of KDE for GNOME fans
- I couldn’t determine how to export a layout and import it back
- It wasn’t released sooner
Overall: 5/5 (Great!)
Jeremy is a Certified IT Technician that blogs at ITNewsToday.com in his spare time. He has over ten years of industry experience, and studies the IT industry every single day. Jeremy has become an open source enthusiast over time and is studying for his Linux+ certification. He lives in Waterford MI with his wife Krystal and son Alan.
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Good article.
Amarok was always one of those musthave programs and the configurability and functions are finally back for the most part.
I like being able to configure what I need to show and not all the rest I wont use.
I was hoping for a minimalist view option for when you dont want a full page music player and maybe something for the people with bad vision.
(I do support for many family members in tehir 60-70′s and they want things big and easy to see/understand.)
Luckily, the Now Playing KDE widget both offers a minimalist view player, you can also make the buttons HUGE.
VLC, Digikam, Audacity, Gvenview, K3B are my must have apps and Amarok is making its way back in my top 5 list.
But ever since Ive been using the Now Playing widget option, Ive barely used the Amarok interface and am still on v2.0.2.
Why does every program need a changeable skin? Amarok’s skin changes with theme in KDE
Nice but not necessary. Eye candy gets everyone in trouble with basic functionality. The wiggle under word spelling cost 6 man years. I would rather have function.
Cheers John
Changing themes in Amarok never used to rely on using KDE, it worked in any desktop environment. Making it rely on using KDE to me is a downside, because there are plenty of GNOME people out there that use it too. I personally don’t mind the default theme, I’m just thinking about other people. All programs don’t need changeable skins, but Amarok used to have it so it should get it back for those that liked that.
“Making it rely on using KDE to me is a downside,”
it doesn’t rely on using the KDE workspace/desktop, it just coordinates with other KDE apps. so instead of all the settings being in each individual app, they are aggregated. you can change that aggregate setting when in a GNOME, XFCE, etc. workspace.
“and the fact that it’s going in the right direction now”
personally, i think it was always going in the right direction. people are only now realizing what that direction was. direction is not always immediately visible, but it does tend to play out over time.
Wouldn’t that mean that GNOME users would have to download KDE’s System Settings in order to configure the themes? My only point was that in Amarok 1.x you could do that right from within Amarok.
Another thing I didn’t mention in my other comment is that “theme” was a very loose definition for A1; it didn’t extend nearly to all parts of the application, and was in truth mostly a huge hack that easily broke when we added new bits. I don’t know if you remember when we tried introducing color-coding for the stars for various ratings to make it more easy to find them — that probably never made it to an actual release, but we got huge numbers of complaints because the colors of the stars didn’t look good with *their* theme, and we had no real ability to figure out what their theme was and how to work with it. With A2, since we’re using a system theme we have easy access to every single color in the palette, which not only allows us to easily tweak colors but to do so in ways that isn’t going to be an eyesore for users of some theme or another. *PLUS* it looks natural with the rest of the applications.
Also, to echo what Aaron said — A2 is going in the exact direction it’s been going pretty much since we first started planning it, people simply placed too much emphasis on releases that we communicated *very clearly* in our release announcements were for early adopters only. (And that Kubuntu very stupidly and against our advice made its default media player.) I won’t go into the details of why we released 2.0 when we did — search the ama…@kde.org mailing list for details if you want, as I’ve gone into it multiple times there — but it was a necessary release for us as developers. It’s heartening to us, however, after seeing all the negative pounding on us for 2.0 and the tentative-maybe-things-will-be-okay harping on us for 2.1 to see people finally starting to appreciate what we’ve been creating over the past three years
Actually I really enjoyed the first Amarok release. At first I hated it but after I used it for a while I started to appreciate it. I felt that 2.1 was a step down from 2.0, but thankfully 2.2 is just as awesome as ever and everything is back on track.
“Wouldn’t that mean that GNOME users would have to download KDE’s System Settings in order to configure the themes?”
I could be wrong, but I believe that even though Phonon is part of QT now, System Settings is still required to change the Phonon configuration from Amarok and Amarok just calls up the Phonon part of it. So assuming I am correct it’s not like you need something to change the color in addition to what you already need, just provide something from within the application that calls up the relevant part or parts of the systemsettings.
If you do it from the command line:
kcmshell4 style
kcmshell4 colors
: I could see arguments for having both of these.
Later, Seeker
Jeremy,
Thanks for the review. I’m glad you like the direction 2.2 is going. You will probably be happy to know that now that most 1.4 functionality is back with 2.2 we’re on a long-term 6-week bugfix release cycle with the 2.2.x series to really nail down the issues that currently affect people and make things super solid. (I say “most 1.4 functionality is back” because for some reason this seems to be a huge issue for some people, that every single feature that was in 1.4 must be back in A2, but it ignores the fact that Amarok 2.2 contains an enormous amount of new and superawesome functionality that was never in the 1.x series.)
Don’t think the pace of development has slowed, however — just look at the current ChangeLog for 2.2.1 to get an idea (and we’re still three weeks away from release!).
A few specific points:
First, the reason that album art stopped downloading in 2.1 was due to a change in licensing terms and API by Amazon, from which we were fetching covers. The API change broke cover fetching, and we opted not to issue a 2.1.2 release since we were already nearing the end of the 2.2.0 release cycle. AFAIK there was a patch available for distro maintainers, but it was up to them to apply it.
Second, about themes: it’s true that Amarok 2 used to support “skins” that changed the color theme in-program, but there are a few reasons they’re not supported anymore. First, we wanted Amarok to fit in with the system color scheme and look more like a “native” program. You mentioned that this could be an annoyance to GNOME users if they don’t have systemsettings installed (but then, it’s the same for KDE users that don’t have the gconf GUI installed), which is a fair point. However, KDE has the ability to decorate GTK programs with its color and window scheme; I’m not sure if GNOME can do the same with Qt programs, but if not I’d suggest that it’d be nice functionality for them to implement. The other thing I would contend is that it’s not *that* much of a burden to ask a GNOME user to install systemsettings, which is usually contained in its own package.
Hope this helps,
Jeff
In my opinion, the theme issue isn’t that big of a deal, but it was important enough to mention. To me, having to install another package to change a color scheme is silly because a beginning user will just assume the feature is not there at all. However, that problem doesn’t take away from Amarok too much which is why that didn’t lower the score at all. It’s just something to consider for a future release.
Thanks for the comment, I really appreciate it!
To me, having to install another package to change a color scheme is silly because a beginning user will just assume the feature is not there at all.
That I think we all can agree on, but you have to put the blame where it belong. This problem is solely a Gnome bug.
One showing the lack of will to integrate with non Gnome/KDE applications from the Gnome side. As opposed to KDE, who have had the ability to apply it’s colors to non KDE applications since the days of KDE 1.
That’s a very good point!
Amarok 2.2.0 should be considered as an Amarok version 2.0 RC1 (Release Candidate) or maybe a beta release.
It is like an upgrade from XP to Vista in the windoze world. It have a lot of annoying quirkiness. It is bloated full of eye-candy with the _basic_ function that make Amarok 1.4 the best music player in the Linux world left out.
Try to change or update some of the ID3 tag on your music file collection using Kid3 or EasyTag. It won’t reflect the changes on the playlist even it was set to monitor changes on your music collection. Even if you rescan your music collection it won’t reflect the changes on the playlist.
The Amarok 2.2 default playlist layout is designed for album oriented music collection which is in my opinion is ideal case in the real world. It is very seldom for all the track in an album are good song or nice to keep or collect. Even on a greatest hits album some track is/are not good.
Although with version 2.2.0 you can already create an old style (spreadsheet) layout, it is limited maybe up to 7 element (tag) and the column could not be fully adjusted and the layout could not be pan to the right in case of overflow.
The sorting with the old style (spreadsheet) layout under version 2.2.0 is like a step backward in UI designed. It is not intuitive unlike in the Amarok 1.4 where you will only click the column header to sort the said column.
These are the reasons why I’m still using the Amarok 1.4.10 under Ubuntu Karmic 9.10RC1 with XFCE4 desktop environment.
USB Mass Storage device support? When I could no longer install 1.4 on Mandriva, I had to switch to Sunbird to be able to sync. I love(d) Amarok, haven’t used it in about a year, if/when it supports music sync to all the MP3 players I and my family uses, I’ll give it another shot. Been posting this question for a long time. It always amazed me that 2.x simply dumped support and inadvertantley forced people to stop using it. Everyone I upgrade and support, they get Sunbird and a lesson on using it since I can’t install 1.4 anymore.
That’s a good point. Unfortunately, the MP3 player I have is a Creative Zen that isn’t natively supported in Linux. I use an open source program called “gNomad” to access it in Linux, so I have not tried it in Amarok. If anyone else has tried an MP3 player in Amarok 2.2, can you post here and let us know if it worked?
Works fine here (Amarok 2.2) with a Cowon iAudio7 16Gb (fantastic player) – using Mepis with KDE 4.3.2.
USB Mass Storage devices are completely supported in Amarok 2.2.
Thanks for the information. Sunbird is pretty good but slow. I will try 2.2 tonight. I especially liked being able to designate an SD card in the slot as an “MP3 player”, load it through Amarok and toss it into my TV that reads SD cards.
TripleII
I want my queue track from collection back… and to work properly. it should add the track as play next not skip to wherever it is in the playlist
also waiting for the day that adding music to my collection doen’t end up with tracks that appear to have wrong metadata (note: appear rm -r mysqle and rescan fixes it)