How about adding the song title and artist to the title bar? Right now, it reads \"Amarok\", but it would be much more useful if it displayed the title and artist of the currently playing song. This way, the information would also be available in the taskbar, a very out of the way, yet accessible, location.

Of course, it would be great if this were customizable, if it were implemented at all.

But it will never show the whole title due to room problems and scrolling is no option.
Better use e.g. a superkaramba extension to display the played title somewhere on your KDE desktop, that\'s a lot more flexible.

Most of the title would be displayed in the tooltip displayed when hovering over the taskbar button. A karamba theme would always be on the desktop, which I do not want. Also, it would be buried under my desktop\'s windows, unlike the taskbar.

The behavior I\'m asking for is pretty standard behavior, which is used in Foobar200, Winamp, XMMS, and other players.

I use for XMMS a small kicker app to display and control xmms (xmms-kde). It supports scrolling of the title etc.

My suggestion of a karamba app includes that it would display it\'s output somewhere at the kicker. As amaroK supports dcop interface it should be really easy to implement one.

Amarok already uses up space on Kicker in the taskbar. All I\'m asking is that it be made more useful.

Most media players act this way. Your web browser has the title of the webpage you are browsing in it\'s titlebar (and taskbar button). Your text editor probably does this too.

I don\'t think you would want a Karamba theme or special Kicker applet that would display the title of the webpage that is currently in your web browser. If your browser window is not visible, you look at your taskbar.

if you don\'t like amarok in the taskbar, use KDocker, found on kde-apps.org which will make it into a permanent system tray.

*sigh*

It\'s like talking to a wall. (No offense)

yeah, seems so.

you just don\'t get it.
there is a reason why they show it in their titlebar: you usually have various browsers opened, editing several text files, whatever.

but you can only have ONE amarok opened and can only listen to ONE song at a time. if you still like this feature to be implemented: feel free to commit a patch, we\'ll happily accept it. but as long as none of us developers would enable such a feature, we\'re just not going to implement it.

easy as that.

...muesli

That\'s what I don\'t get about Amarok development. Developers are happy to add unneeded features like Audioscrobbler integration, lyrics grabbing, and a media device browser, but seem to care nothing for to add a simple, unobtrusive, standard feature. I like Audioscrobbler, but there\'s no reason it should be a built-in feature. It\'s bloat, as are those other features. That\'s what plug-ins are for.

I don\'t expect every feature I want added to a program. I can accept a program as it is and conform to how it works if I have little choice. It just seemed to be that this was a very obvious feature common to almost every desktop application. I don\'t see why Amarok should act differently.

But, hey, it\'s not my project. I\'m just a user, so I just have to deal with it.

gomez wrote:

That\'s what I don\'t get about Amarok development. Developers are happy to add unneeded features like Audioscrobbler integration, lyrics grabbing, and a media device browser, but seem to care nothing for to add a simple, unobtrusive, standard feature. I like Audioscrobbler, but there\'s no reason it should be a built-in feature. It\'s bloat, as are those other features. That\'s what plug-ins are for.

I find this to be quite hypocritical. You say that all we do is add bloated and unneeded features, yet you fail to realise that perhaps we see your suggestion as unnecessary. It also happens to be not standard (although found in many places). I\'m not going to go into the reasons why we will not implement such a request. I will however mention that most of the features which you spoke about have been widely requested and are extremely useful to many users.

I don\'t expect every feature I want added to a program. I can accept a program as it is and conform to how it works if I have little choice. It just seemed to be that this was a very obvious feature common to almost every desktop application. I don\'t see why Amarok should act differently.

But, hey, it\'s not my project. I\'m just a user, so I just have to deal with it.

Don\'t misunderstand us, we still value you as a user and as somebody who makes valuable suggestions. We just don\'t side with you this time :silly:

It\'s just this way: Features are implemented that either are wanted by the developers themselves or by a certain amount of people using the software and articulating it.

But this is Open Source, so feel free to do it yourself if no one else does.

And BTW: Getting answers here that disagree with you, are also (mostly) just opinions like yours, so there can be no wall just (normal) people asking why to have a feature or giving ideas how to get the feature (in this case how to get it without changing amarok itself).

Cheers.

Well as you are having so much thick blood because of this, i made it happen. Its on the current CVS atm.
It will be probably removed by sunday again, so those who want to try it and see, that it sucks can do so in the next few days.
Its not perfect(displays artist - title instead of title - artist), but its working.

Well, I have no wish for such a feature, but I wouldn\'t mind either. There aren\'t really any users it would hurt, are there?

Obviously \"Why not\" is not a good reason to add features, but all the same I can\'t think of any anti-cases.

well, in the playlist Window, its redundant with the statusbar. I guess thats the main reason we didn\'t already have it.

From the KDE Style guide:
\'The application window should be labelled with the name of the document in the window, and the application name, separated by a hyphen. For example, \"www.kde.org - Konqueror\", \"StyleGuide.ps - KGhostView\", or \"(untitled) - KEdit\".\'

So if we want amaroK to act like all the other applications in the user\'s task bar, perhaps it should have the current song in the window title!