Hello guys,

I have been using yammi with XMMS as player for a long time.
I found yammi being developed very slowly and amarok growing better and better very fast, so I finally decided to try out amarok.

My first experience: It doesn\'t work.
After some testing I found out that the CVS version of amarok works only with arts on my AMD64 machine. Gstreamer and Xine produce strange and bad errors.
Well, arts works fine at least.

My second experience: It\'s great!
Amarok can handle FLACs which is a very great thing for me, and it has some cool funtions as downloading the covers, managing them, the lyrics display and the \"suggested\" song window.
The whole application seems way more modern than yammi and it is obvious that this will be THE music manager for linux which ROCKs the house.

However, I miss some features, that yammi has and amarok doesn\'t have.
These features made me switch back to yammi. But since yammi is developed by only one man who doesn\'t have a lot of time and amarok is developed much faster, I thought it would be a good idea to name these missing features and hope that they will be implemented in the future.

The most important features that amarok doesn\'t have in comparison to yammi, are:
1 - XMMS support
2 - Fuzzy search
3 - Flexible collection
4 - Prelistening function

1.: XMMS support seems very important to me. XMMS is a great music player and there is an awful lot of good plugins available for it. For example, I have been using xmms-crossfade with yammi and I will never want to miss it again. The crossfading funtion of amarok is ridiculous compared to xmms-crossfade.
By supporting XMMS, the amarok team would save themselves a lot of work since they don\'t need to reimplement stuff in amarok that XMMS is able to do anyway.
And noone really wants to use Xine as an audio player, do they?

2.: A fuzzy search is very comfortable. We need a search bar at the top in which you can search for a song in the whole collection, wherever you are. When you look for a song, you often don\'t know the exact name or you just want to be fast and therefore skip some letters. A fuzzy search is ideal for finding the song that you are looking for as fast as possible.

3.: The collection of amarok needs to be way more flexible. At the moment, you can\'t even delete a single song. It would also be good if you were able to rescan particular parts of the collection. The fact that I have to play time eating tricks on the collection scanner to get one tag of one single song updated, which I have edited with easytag, shows that a lot has to be done about the collection flexibility.

4.: A prelistening funtion is great and very easy to implement. You just need 4 buttons and one config option, and amarok is richer by a great feature. Prelistening is very useful in large collections where you can\'t remember every song just by seeing it\'s artist, title and album. Prelistening is the most comfortable method to solve this issue.

Well, all that sounds very criticising. Forget it or not, I just wanted to make sure someone mentioned these points.
Amarok has a lot of great features that yammi doesn\'t have and looks much more promising for the future. The reason why I post what amarok is missing in this forum and not what yammi is missing in a mail to its developer is, that I believe the amarok team is fast and powerful and it is more likely to see these features in amarok some time than to see the amarok features in yammi.

The point is: We have two great music managers, yammi and amarok. But unfortunately, it\'s those features that the other doesn\'t have which make both very special.
If all features are packed in one application, this application will rock like heck, it will blow away all other music managers in the world. And I think there is the ability to make this dream come true.

Thank you for reading this,

Ypsilon

*jumps up and down, raises hand* I like using xine as my audio engine!

I\'m not sure what you mean by prelistening. It would be nice if amaroK supported two sound cards, thats all it would take to make a nifty DJ app.

Ypsilon wrote:

1.: XMMS support seems very important to me.

I think this is a horrible idea. Why would you want to have two media players running at the same time?

Support for more XMMS plugins is a good idea. Support for using XMMS as a player backend, is, in my opinion, not.

2.: A fuzzy search is very comfortable. We need a search bar at the top in which you can search for a song in the whole collection, wherever you are. When you look for a song, you often don\'t know the exact name or you just want to be fast and therefore skip some letters. A fuzzy search is ideal for finding the song that you are looking for as fast as possible.

Hmm, sounds like it\'s not terribly easy to implement, but a good idea.

3.: The collection of amarok needs to be way more flexible. At the moment, you can\'t even delete a single song. It would also be good if you were able to rescan particular parts of the collection. The fact that I have to play time eating tricks on the collection scanner to get one tag of one single song updated, which I have edited with easytag, shows that a lot has to be done about the collection flexibility.

So... you want:
1. The ability to delete tracks from your collection in the collection browser
2. Better refreshing/update handling.

Correct?

4.: A prelistening funtion is great and very easy to implement. You just need 4 buttons and one config option, and amarok is richer by a great feature. Prelistening is very useful in large collections where you can\'t remember every song just by seeing it\'s artist, title and album. Prelistening is the most comfortable method to solve this issue.

You don\'t actually say what \'prelistening\' is.

Does this description sounds good:
We listen to the begining (configurable: 5-20 sec) of all the songs defined in a dynamic playlist and when you find (hear) the one you are looking for then you stop the (pre)listening (and eventually go fast/forward).

I\'m sorry, I should have described prelistening better.

You need 4 Buttons: Prelisten-Start, Prelisten-Middle, Prelisten-End, Stop-Prelisten.

When you click the first button, the song is played on a second sound device from the start.
The second button starts playing at the middle of the song, and the third one is for listening to the last 15 percent of the song.
The forth button is there to stop the playback again - you can listen to the whole song if you klick the \"Prelisten-Start\"-button and just let it play until the song is over.

This is a great way to find the songs that you have been searching for so long and forgot their names.

I don\'t really understand how amarok can support any XMMS plugins by not using XMMS as the player?!
My intention was to say that amarok would profit from the flexibility of XMMS and its lots of high-quality plugins.

About the collection: Yes, it would be great if more could be done with the songs.
It happens often that the tags of a song change due to editing with easytag or something.
Then it should be possible to just rightclick the song and say \"reload from haddisc\", so that the song gets really updated in the collection database.
And of couse it is a good thing to be able to delete a song from the collection. Sometimes songs are doubles and have just different filenames and you want to delete one of them. Or when you own a single and then buy the album which contains it, you don\'t need the single anymore. You should be able to keep your collection clean this way.
Of course you could delete the whole collection by removing the file and then rescan everything when you want to delete something. But with 3000+ songs this is just a big thing which takes a lot of minutes and it\'s not a clean way at all.

It\'s great that you like the idea of a fuzzy search. There are some good algorithms out there, I think this will be peanuts for you gurus

Thanks very much for reading my feature requests.
Amarok is a great application, it\'s something really special. You do awesome work!

Ypsilon

Um, amaroK already supports XMMS visualizations. Obviously some plugins wouldn\'t be applicable, but theres a handful of formats that XMMS plays that others do not. For instance, I think mplayer can call on XMMS plugins to play files for it.

Though, yes, the idea of amaroK spawning a separate XMMS process is a terrible one. Though with the plugin and scripting stuff they\'re thinking about/developing, such a thing would probably be possible. To each their own.

Instead of having to manually select a file to reload it into the collection, it should Just Work.

Ypsilon wrote:

About the collection: Yes, it would be great if more could be done with the songs.
It happens often that the tags of a song change due to editing with easytag or something.
Then it should be possible to just rightclick the song and say "reload from haddisc", so that the song gets really updated in the collection database.
And of couse it is a good thing to be able to delete a song from the collection. Sometimes songs are doubles and have just different filenames and you want to delete one of them. Or when you own a single and then buy the album which contains it, you don\'t need the single anymore. You should be able to keep your collection clean this way.
Of course you could delete the whole collection by removing the file and then rescan everything when you want to delete something. But with 3000+ songs this is just a big thing which takes a lot of minutes and it\'s not a clean way at all.

Try enabling "Watch folders for changes" from Collection Configuration dialog and this all should work like you want. If not, then it\'s a bug. To delete song from collection you first need to add it to playlist and from there you can delete it. Again, "Watch folders for changes" needs to be enabled so that it will disappear from collection. Otherwise rescan is required. With the current implementation it works like this. Sure there are things to be improved still.

Your suggestions are good. Some aren\'t really feasible to add before we make a major version jump.

I want to make an libxmms engine one day so 1 is likely to be done already. But I don\'t know really if the crossfade plugin will be usable with it. Our engine independent nature makes crossfade hard to implement, hence you say it sucks. The xmms is very good but I don\'t know if we could ever get it working with the xmms-engine.

2 is hard to do this major version, and hard to do in a way that doesn\'t compromise our interface.

3. The collection should update itself when you edit tags, if it doesn\'t it is a bug. You can\'t delete stuff from the collection no, but amaroK isn\'t a filemanager, I wonder if adding this is useful to many people?

4. Prelistening is a nice idea, I think we could do something there. Prolly a tooltip that plays music would be the least confusing way to do this.

Thanks for the post.