I have a few ideas to make amarok a little more functional. I understand these are very big requests and may very well not be possible, but I would like to see them in perhaps a later version.
First, I would like to see mplayer as a possible engine. Mplayer is intended to be a movie player, but it does audio very well too. It supports ANY audio format, which is helpful to people migrating from Windows that ripped all their CDs with WMP and as a consequence, their music files are in .wma format.
Second, I would like to see an integrated vizualization window ( see images ). Functionality would not be lost if above the vizualization, the filter field is replaced by a few buttons such as a visualization/playlist toggle and a fullscreen button. The playlist could be easily accessible by closing the tabs on the left, which would cause the playlist to expand out past the visualization. A combo box could also be added above the vizualization to choose the vizualization to use.
Third, since mplayer could be used as an engine, video support would be possible. I\'m not saying turn amarok into a video player, but the possibility would be nice. This would allow as well for an amarok plugin to be made for konqueror and firefox browsers. I currently use mplayer-plugin for mozilla and it works nicely. But if amarok could control all media, I would be very happy.
If you can\'t tell, I am all about \"one program does all\" and full integration with the os. I realize this is not for everyone, but I thought I would throw it out there. [img size=499]http://amarok.kde.org/components/com_simpleboard/uploaded/images/amarok_pic.jpg[/img] [img size=499]http://amarok.kde.org/components/com_simpleboard/uploaded/images/amarok_pic1.jpg[/img]

Ok, I can\'t seem to get the images to work. Oh well.

Post edited by: sleepkreep, at: 2005/01/30 10:48

I know what you mean about mplayers wide selection of codecs, but I really dont think amarok needs another engine.
I think even 2 is enough. Gstreamer as default, and then maybe xine as a backup Doesnt xine support wma aswell?

I totally agree with the visualisation idea though. In fact I think I posted about it a while ago! Theres some pics in the mock up section of how it might look and they look really really cool.

The visualisation idea is planned.

An MPlayer engine is welcome, but none of us will code it, mainly because there is no libMPlayer which makes writing the engine basically a big hack.

xine and gstreamer both support \"ANY format\" already, and both xine and gstreamer support video too (though amaroK won\'t show the video components). There really is no significant advantage that MPlayer has really.