I am trying to use Amarok 2.2.1 on Kubuntu 9.10 with KDe 4.3.3. I have tried to use Amarok occasionally but the interface confuses me (I am a very experienced computer user) and I cannot understand how to use it - I normally end up installing an alternative piece of software such as songbird (which has an interface that I can understand). Is there a help file for Amarok somewhere? I have looked at the Amarok site and didn't find anything. Amarok is a KDE app and therefore I would prefer to use it as my music player.

Here are a few examples of the things that confuse me:

How can I list my collection (which is all in one folder on an external drive, and appears in the left hand pane) by album?

How does the concept of a playlist work? Why can't I just play an album? If I right click on any album I can add it to playlist but then it doesn't play. If I click the play button nothing happnes (except I receive a message that no track is playing, which is pretty obvious!).

When I click on tools - cover manager - fetch missing covers nothing happens (I have >400 albums and they certainly have extant covers) even though I have a very fast internet connection that works fine.

With grateful thanks, Martin

OK, let's do that step by step:

Help file: No, we don't have a help file nor do we have a handbook. This is work in progress and needs time and manpower, neither of which we have in sufficient amount.

Now about the usability: if you are an experienced computer user you have the experience to look around and read what is on the screen:

List your collection by album: In the Local Music you can see on the top left a "Search collection" field with tool buttons on its right, which explain you what you can do with those in a tooltip that shows up when you point your mouse on it. Right below the field it tells you the default sorting, which is Artist/Album by default. If you want to have another way to sort in the collection browser, you need to change the sort options:
Click on the button "Sort Options" and you can see other predefined options. Sorting is done by levels, if you want to change the sorting level, well you can change it there

Playlist: if you can't play anything then this is most likely not a problem in Amarok but a problem of your distribution not providing the necessary codecs. Since you use Kubuntu, you should install the kubuntu-restricted-extras package which provides the necessary codecs. Also make sure you really have the default sound configuration for KDE, e.g. *no* pulseaudio and the xine backend in Phonon ("Settings" menu -> Configure Amarok -> Playback -> Sound System Configuration: click on the configure button).

Cover search: are you certain that your version is indeed 2.2.1? There was a bug in the 2.2.0 version which prevented the Cover fetcher to actually retrieve those. Works fine here.

Many thanks - most helpful. Regarding usability I think it is the concept of the playlist that confuses me. Anyway, kubuntu-restricted-extras is already installed and it is Amarok 2.2.1

Regarding lack of playback: xine & phonon are there on the second tab of the configure (and I have clicked the default button). On the first tab, without the advanced options clicked, I have HDA Intel first and Pulse Audio second. Should Pulse Audio be removed (and if so, how - there does not appear to be a delete for this)?

With respect to the albums I have 474 albums, 324 of which do not have covers in Amarok. Many of these are albums for which I have successfully downloaded covers in the past (either with Amarok or another player).

With grateful thanks, Martin

aridus wrote:Regarding usability I think it is the concept of the playlist that confuses me.

If you are used to the way some of the other players operate, getting used to the playlist thing takes a little time.

Don't know what the thinking of the developers was, but to me, requiring a playlist is an important design decision the developers made and the way that decision affects the rest of the design is one of the things that sets Amarok apart from the other players.

The design does lead to some performance limitations if you are used to creating huge static playlists. In particular if you fall prey to the temptation to add your entire collection to a playlist.

If you explore the use of dynamic playlists, I think you will find this covers many of the use cases where you would be tempted to create huge playlists, in particular if you just want to play random tracks from your entire collection, as tracks play, played tracks get removed and new randomly selected tracks get added. Depending on how deeply you get into the dynamic playlists, you will probably find they are little bit sloppy in the sense that depending on the characteristics you define for the playlist you will still get some random stuff playing that you may not have expected.

If you don't want to use dynamic playlists you can think of the playlist like a queue adding things you want to hear as you go, but unlike a queue you will have to remove stuff that has already played yourself.

If you right click a track or selected group of tracks in a playlist you do have the option to queue tracks, but this is not a feature I use so I can't tell you more about it than that.

Later, Seeker

Many thanks, most helpful!

Martin

aridus wrote:Regarding lack of playback: xine & phonon are there on the second tab of the configure (and I have clicked the default button). On the first tab, without the advanced options clicked, I have HDA Intel first and Pulse Audio second. Should Pulse Audio be removed (and if so, how - there does not appear to be a delete for this)?

Well, if you don't use Gnome anymore, then you can remove pulseaudio with the following command:

Code: Select all

sudo apt-get purge pulseaudio*

If this doesn't suggest to remove more than pulseaudio* and libpulse* named packages, then it will not harm the system. Once you have these removed, you will need to erase the phonon configuration file to make sure that Phonon doesn't try to rely on Pulseaudio anymore:

Code: Select all

rm $HOME/.kde/share/config/phonondevicesrc

then restart KDE.

aridus wrote:With respect to the albums I have 474 albums, 324 of which do not have covers in Amarok. Many of these are albums for which I have successfully downloaded covers in the past (either with Amarok or another player).

This very much depends on where the covers are fetched from. Our previous source, Amazon, did change their API conditions and with the new ones we would have to integrate an authentication framework that only allows people with an Amazon account to actually download covers. This is not easy to build in a short time so we changed to fetch the covers from last.fm, and it is not unlikely that their database is not as big as the Amazon one was. There is still work in progress on that anyway.