Hi together,

I trie to discribe my wishes for the future amorak project. Pleas excuse me for my poor english.
I am using Linux for a long time. Since a half a year i use Linux distribution for desktop use too. About 2 weeks ago I discovered the amarok project. I like the style of the player, I like the features a lot (dynamic playlists, CD Covers, ratings....).
But to be the perfect music player for my use I miss two features:

A) Prebuffering songs
I play my music often over a wireless or slow network collection. When somebody else causes traffic, Amarok begins to stuck. Is it possible to set a prebuffer of 128KB or above?

B)Crossfading / Continuator Plugin
For me, these kind of plugin is a must. On my Windows system, i have foobat2000 with continuator plugin (http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/ind ... opic=18703) running. The best plugin I´ve seen is the SQR Advanced Crossfading for Winamp 2.x (http://www.sqrsoft.com.ar/en/index.html)
Both are intelligent plugins, analyzing the songs, fading dynamically in and out.

What do you think about these features?

Buck

We already have crossfading

True, amaroK does have crossfading, but not to the same level of control & finesse that these winamp plugins young buck here is talking about, it is a feature that seems sadly lacking. To be able to control how the program crossfades would be a nice touch. Features like: start the next track when the previous track is less than XX seconds from the end AND falls below XX db. I also don\'t like the mandatory fading out & fading in of tracks that the current crossfading does if I could circumvent that it would be a good place to start!

Apart from that I think that this is the best music player I\'ve used.. bloody superb!

At the moment I\'m using amarok 1.3.6 and xine for my engine.

I agree with aeon totally. I use XMMS for a radio station where, obviously, custom fading is key. Look at xmms-crossfade, and look at how many customizable features it has. The gap killer is probably one of the most important. It even has different fades for every type of songchange, almost identical to the winamp plugins. That\'s one of the main reasons I don\'t use amarok for live streams because the crossfading is so under par and always results in a few seconds of silence or an ungraceful transition. amaroK has so many integral features like album management, covers etc., but much work needs to be done on the actual sound ouput.

Devin

Devin wrote:

The gap killer is probably one of the most important. It even has different fades for every type of songchange, almost identical to the winamp plugins. That\'s one of the main reasons I don\'t use amarok for live streams because the crossfading is so under par and always results in a few seconds of silence or an ungraceful transition.

I totally agree.
The gap killer is one of the most important features for me (and for lots of users...)
For example, in "The Dark Side of the Moon" by Pink Floyd it is just essential - I set amaroK to "No crossfading - Insert Gap: 0ms" but can still sometimes hear the gap between the songs (some songs have longer gap and some have shorter). On the other hand, xmms does it perfectly.
I really like amaroK and will probably keep using it as my default player, waiting for a better crossfading / gap-killer feature in one of the next releases

Post edited by: Pretzel, at: 2006/01/02 12:23

Post edited by: Pretzel, at: 2006/01/02 12:23

According to this thread, amaroK will soon have TRUE gapless playback. And that is way better than a **** gapkiller, that tries to guess how many samples should be removed. Once amaroK has true gapless playback, I won\'t miss foobar2000 that much.

I agree with Buck - please implement song prebuffering and not only for streams ... I often experience interrupted playing on disk highload and there is so much free space in memory ...
btw. great player, keep developing