When I first checked out Amarok 2.0 back when it made its debut, I didn’t think it could match up to Amarok 1.4.x in terms of usability or features. In fact, I was far from being the only person to have that opinion of it as the overall release was met by quite a bit of criticism and even fallout from longterm Amarok fans. However, the more I used Amarok 2 the more I started to enjoy it. Now, I actually find myself preferring it to Amarok 1.4.x and it’s all I use for my music for my music these days.
As soon as Amarok 2.1 was released, I mulled over reviewing it for a while. Sure, there are improvements all over the place but there aren’t as many changes in this version as there were in 2.0 when compared to 1.4.x. I decided instead to do a mini review which would be more fitting for an application anyway. Sadly, now Amarok 2.1.1 (the first maintenance release of the Amarok 2.1 series) has been released so I that means I am already around a month late. Oh well, better late than never, right?
Amarok 2.1 comes to us in a desperate time for the music player. Amarok was the king of media players for us KDE fans, and once 2.0 came out, long time users decided to stick to the old version and not adopt the newer releases. Version 2.1 comes with several of the missing features added back, but will it be enough to put Amarok back in the spotlight? That remains to be seen.
First and foremost there are several improvements here. The playlist itself can now be edited just about any way you want it. You can now search, filter, and customise pretty much all of the layout of the playlist. In fact, there are smaller improvements all over the place. Replay gain, Amarok URL’s, Bookmarks, and more.
Unfortunately, Amarok 2.1 has its share of issues as well. First, a great deal of my tracks were classified as “Various Artists” even though they were not from compilations. My ID3 tags were perfect and other media players didn’t see the tracks as being from albums with more than one artist. I am not sure why that happened. I had to right click each of the songs and click “do not show under various artists”. I then found the following quote in the official release announcement: “Thanks to the sleepless nights of many Amarok developers, identifying albums as compilations (aka “Various Artists”) now works more reliably” More reliably? Nonsense! This caused me more work editing tracks that should have otherwise showed up perfectly.
A bit worse is the playlist layout editor itself. I played around with it for a little bit, but was unable to make it look like I wanted. In fact, the interface for customizing playlists is far from user friendly and could use some work. I am sure with some time I will get used to it and be able to use it, but for now it really stinks. I do give kudos to the developers for trying to give the user more options, though. The very fact that we have a layout editor is still welcome even though it’s irritating.
There are a few minor problems such as not being able to export playlists unless you manually type the “m3u” extension at the end of the file (there is no mention of having to do that) and not being able to see all of the lyrics due to the scrollbar not having enough room to scroll if the track info applet is activated. Another annoyance is not being able to save over top of an existing playlist – you have to save your changes by creating a new playlist instead.
Although there are some really irritating problems with this release, I still find Amarok 2.1 to be a useful media player. I hope in the future the system for editing the playlist layout is improved considerably and the small irritating problems are fixed. In general, Amarok 2.1 is good but it seems that for every improvement in this release there is an equal or greater annoyance. On the plus side, once you do get Amarok 2.1 set up the way you like and you get used to working around its issues, it’s decent.
Screenshot: (Click to enlarge):
Report Card
The Good:
New playlist editor
Smaller new improvements all over
The Bad:
Playlist layout editor is not user friendly
No way of simply saving changes to an existing playlist
Final Grade:
Look & Feel: 5/5
- For what it’s worth, Amarok 2.1 does look good.
New Features: 3/5
- Amarok contains new features, but some of them work against the release
Speed: 3/5
- Amarok 2.1 is not the fastest media player, nor the slowest
Stability: 2/5
- Strange things have happened for no reason during my testing, especially with my playlists
Overall: 3/5 (Average)
Amarok 2.1 is a good media player, but there are some annoyances that should be corrected as soon as possible.
Jeremy is an 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. 
For the ‘various artists’ issue, it may be worth recreating the DB?
In my case the database just didn’t collect all my files. Other players (including Amarok 1.4) had no problem at all with it. I’ll wait until that’s sorted out.
I still mainly use 1.4, although I have both installed. Right now, the main problem I have with Amarok 2 is the fact that it won’t show the embedded album art in the mp3s I purchased from Amazon MP3 (it has no problems showing the album art I’ve personally embedded into mp3s that I ripped). Don’t know why. The other lesser problem is that importing the info from 1.4 doesn’t seem to be complete (especially things like “first played” and scores) – and while not critical, I like that “historical” information.
Oh, and I don’t like that putting songs into the playlist automatically starts playing. While that generally may be OK, when I’m doing a sound gig, I sometimes want to populate the playlist before it’s time to play it.
When will someone write about free WEB-based music managers ?
For example: Ampache (has interface to Amarok, I think..?), kplaylist, ampjuke, andromeda and jinzora…
…just to name a few..
I agree, it still lacks important features (e.g. equalizer) and it tends to mess around with the tags. It happened to me many times and so far the only solution I found was to ‘rm -rf ~/.kde/share/apps/amarok/mysqle/’ and restart amarok.
I stopped using Amarok with the release of 2.0. The developers took a perfectly functioning piece of software and changed it simply for the sake of change. And as we’ve all seen it’s been a total cluster f@ck.
I entirly agree they took a working incrediblt functional music library app and royally mucked it up. I have tried 2.0 a couple of times but each time i have reverted and still use 1.4. I will try this latest release bur this review already kinof makes my mind up about the outcome!