Firstly, I'm not an Amarok user, but I could be if the Player Window was a little more than the 1-day mash-up is seems to be at present (I'm using 1.4.

For starters, there needs to be a way to stop the scrolling of the song name. It drives me absolutely nuts!

It would also be nice if you could hide the title bar, close button, minimise button, etc and have it look more like XMMS/Audacious/Winamp.

If just these small changes could be implemented, I could almost tolerate Amarok.  I say "almost" because the file names are truncated, no matter how much I resize the middle pane, when browsing songs via the "Files" tab to the left.

Oh, and another thing, can that stupid equalizer stop dancing when there are no songs playing? Seriously, the Player Window as it currently stands looks very much like an afterthought.

The thing is, that as none of the developers use or has any real interest in the player window, it has been unmaintained for quite a long time. As a result of this, we are completely removing the player window from the upcomming Amarok 2 ( Better IMO to not have it at all than having something broken and ugly )

We are hoping that some of the Plasma themes that people are working on will evolve to eventually offer the same functionality as the player window.

Yes, I would agree that it's better not to have it than to have it in its current form. I don't use Amarok, though, because the main window is massive and I prefer a minimalistic window (similar in size to XMMS) to sit at the bottom-right corner of my screen so that I can glance at it and see the track name, the time index, etc, and even to pause it quickly. With the main Amarok window being as large as it is, I just don't bother with it because I'm not having something like that clutter my desktop at all times.

couple of small suggestions - configure your OSD and use your system tray.

dangle_wtf wrote:couple of small suggestions - configure your OSD and use your system tray.

I'm away from home at the moment but if you're suggesting that I should configure Amarok to minimise to the system tray and to keep the OSD on-screen at all times, then I wouldn't call this an adequate alternative to a decent/minimalistic player window. For starters, you can't pause a song from the OSD (to the best of my knowledge) and having to click on the system tray to load a huge window just to pause something temporarily is, well, not as user-friendly as I would expect from a community-driven music player.

You would, no doubt, be aware of global hotkeys, and the extra functions of the system tray icon.
Hovering your mouse on the icon pops up a tooltip with all the track details, right-clicking on the icon brings up a control menu, scroll-wheel on the icon controls volume, global hotkeys allow control of Amarok without opening the window.
OSD is only one way to display Amarok's current track - there are many applets, desklets, karambas, screensavers, wallpapers etc which can be used to display current info.
Or you can continue to use xmms... it's an adequate solution - nothing will ever suit *everyone*.

The player window was pretty much an afterthought - designed as a transition from players like xmms to Amarok.

Beyond hotkeys, there is also an applet called "multimedia control" for the Kicker panel which simply gives you, well, control over amarok, among other players.  I'm not sure if it was installed by default for me or not on Kubuntu, but if not, it's from this package.  For other distros I'm sure you can find it somewhere.