I recently converted to Linux and am by and large happy with all the programs, however I have to say, what I miss most of all from the Windows world is Winamp.

Amarok is the closest thing I\'ve found in functionality to winamp but I\'m afraid it still has a some way to go. Don\'t get me wrong, I respect the efforts of the amarok developers and hope that my criticism is seen as contructive and not malicious.

In general I think devolopment should concentrate more on basic usability issues rather than glamorous (and cool) features such as lyric-fetching and audioscrobbler integration. Here are some specific gripes:

a) Searching. In Winamp you type the search string in the media library, press down arrow and then you enqueue a song by pressing enter. In amarok you first have to unfold the artist node which makes the whole operation twice as long. And pressing enter causes the song to play, not to enqueue. OK, you can use flat mode but then you have to type more than three letters. What If I want a song by u2?

b) In winamp it\'s really easy to select the most often played songs. In fact your entire selection can be sorted according to this criteria. In Amarok you have the \"most played\" smart playlist, but this only gives you 50 songs and I think it\'s very counterintuitive and requires lots of extra mouse clicking. Why not have one extra column in the amarok library window with playcount?

c) I can send music to my MP3 usb stick really easily in Winamp.

d) There seems to be an issue with the tagging. It\'s unclear which tags you can actually edit in amarok (i.e. the old or the new ID3 version). I think that you can edit one version whilst the other version gets sent to audioscrobbler.

e) Winamp is generally faster than Amarok,

f) I use ubuntu hoary and there is a bug whereby the special context menu for files and directories is replaced by the default one and I can no longer enqueue whole directories.

Well, that\'s it. As I said, Amarok is definately the best that Linux has to offer but I think that at the moment the project is getting feature-itis and basic ease-of-use issues are being neglected. I want to click less and just get to the music I want to hear quicker.

Has this been of any use? I don\'t know. What do you think?

Caspar in Berlin

You forget that it wasn\'t long ago amaroK didn\'t even have a collection. Is this an example of featureitis?

Anyways, it is helpful to get an idea of what issues new users are having. Good UI is trying to conform to what most users expect.

I\'m not clear what your trying to do with with the collection. Add all of the artist, one album?

Let me say some things to point d):

Amarok writes id3v1 and id3v2 tags.

It uses taglib for it.

The problem is taglib writes id3v2 tags only in the version 2.4.

The latest standard. But id3lib the other often used libaray to read and write mp3 tags only reads v2.3 of the id3v2 tags.

So there are a lot of programs (for example xmms, grip, easytag) which can not read correctly the v2 tags written by amarok.

But that is not a bug in amarok neither in taglib. It is just that a lot of other programm are not able to read the relative old standard v2.4.

I sometimes think it would be good if amarok could wirte 2.3 tags, because there are so much program which can not read the 2.4 version but mhh how long do oyu wnat to use old standards?

danielw

eean wrote:

You forget that it wasn\'t long ago amaroK didn\'t even have a collection. Is this an example of featureitis?

Of course not. It\'s an example of the amazingly quick progress that amarok is making.

Anyways, it is helpful to get an idea of what issues new users are having. Good UI is trying to conform to what most users expect.

I\'m not clear what your trying to do with with the collection. Add all of the artist, one album?

I have a lot of standalone songs that are not part of an album -- in the tree view it requires an extra click to get them cued.

Oh, and another thing, Winamp allows you to search for genres in the media library. This is really ace and I would love it if Amarok could do this. --> so far it only works via smart playlists.

Basically Amarok does most of the stuff that Winamp does, just not as quickly or intuitively. The smart playlists are a good idea, but their functionality should also be available via the "collection" tab combined with the search bar.

Apart from that, keep up the good work!

C

just select genre as an extra level in the hierarchy, and ta-da: it gets searched.

most songs? create a smart playlist with as many most-played songs you like, if 50 is not enough for you. copying to usb stick? there is a script for it, iirc.

...muesli

Caspar wrote:
Oh, and another thing, Winamp allows you to search for genres in the media library. This is really ace and I would love it if Amarok could do this. --> so far it only works via smart playlists.

ther is a song (don\'t remember the artist), it\'s called "with open eyes" ..." with open eyes you see the sky, see the world in brighter light, and...."

[img]http://www.bit-freaks.net/gallery/main.php?g2_view=core:DownloadItem&g2_itemId=232&g2_serialNumber=1[/img]

Post edited by: Apachelogger, at: 2005/05/09 17:42

Erm, how could we make \'Group By\' more obvious?

Hello,
I am a very happy user of amaroK. For me one of the best application under Linux.
But let me say something about the points listed by Caspar.

\"c) I can send music to my MP3 usb stick really easily in Winamp.\"

Yes this is one of the most wanted features for amaroK and I am waiting for the next releases only looking for the correspodning implementation of it.

Best reagrds
juan_lutz