Like many of my friends, I am very disappointed about Amarok 2.0 and the way features are introduced. I completely understand the complications raised by KDE4, but still: Current Amarok 2.0 is no Amarok. Too many of the Key-Features are missing. Yes, it is not bad, but it is absolutely not great either.

Almost all of the key features, witch made amaroK 1.x so unique, are currently missing, such as: Queue, Handset-Management, Playlist-Configurability, Large/Mixed Playlist-usability, Sorting, usable internationalisation in the song collection (still too many encoding problems to count, collection is buggy as hell in amarok2), visualisation is missing, the thing is slow, the "plugins" in the middle are big, slow, and not very usable, the entire thing lacks configurability, the d-bus interface of Amarok2 is not closely as powerful as the dcop interface of amaroK 1.x, and that's only a start.

I understand the work is not simple, but people: Don't forget what made amaroK a great player: Not some blending-effects of pointless plugins, the greatness is about it's abilities and a clear and configurable user interface. Amarok never needed big skinning features and UI effects to be great.

Me for my part I see this as an early beta of the next Amarok generation. This is not something that should have been released, not with that much functional, design and programming issues still at hand. This is no reason to celebrate for me. Amarok 2 is no player I can tell people "drop your iTunes, this is better", or "drop your Winamp, this is better" any longer - because it is just not true.

Thanks for your efforts, but I hope you focus more on the real deal about this player in future.

I just installed amarok2 to give it a shot and I'm a bit disappointed as well.  I think it's a good start, but it's not amarok 1.x.  Missing the ability to sort my playlists is well...basic and leaves me wanting to go back to 1.x.  I give every one of my mp3s a star rating with the sole purpose of later on being able to sort my mp3s by star rating.  This makes it easy for me to just drag an entire artists folder from my collection into the playlist panel, then sort by star rating, and I'm good to go.  I can't seem to be able to do this in amarok2.

Also, I'm not sold on the 3 pane layout.  The middle pane where the track info is, seems like a huge waste of space.  Also, when I added the lyrics applet to the middle pane, it doesn't occupy the entire vertical space of the window, and there is no way for me to resize it to make it fit.  Oh well.  I've been a huge fan of amarok for a long long time now, but I'm not so sure about amarok2 just yet.  I'll keep using it, but I'm tempted to try out other options now as well, like songbird.  I'm anxiously waiting for amarok2 to get some basic features back in.

Even with my criticism of amarok2.  I have to say thanks for the hard work guys.
Cheers.

there is one thing that is bugging me real bad .. where the hell is the equalizer ?

I'm tipping the "missing" equaliser doesn't bug you as much as people who can't be arsed doing a simple search bug me...

People pleople, think of Amarok 2.0 as a beginning. Amarok 1 didn't stop on 1.0 vversion right, it reached 1.4
I just hope Amarok 2 will have at least the same array of features like Amarok 1.4 (i need iPOD support!!! )

Cymaphore wrote:Me for my part I see this as an early beta of the next Amarok generation. This is not something that should have been released, not with that much functional, design and programming issues still at hand. This is no reason to celebrate for me. Amarok 2 is no player I can tell people "drop your iTunes, this is better", or "drop your Winamp, this is better" any longer - because it is just not true.

I completely agree.  I've been a major fan of Amarok since around amaroK 1.2, and have avidly recommended it to my friends.  Amarok 1.4 was a killer app for me, but I can't say the same for Amarok 2.  I tried beta1 when it hit the ~x86 (basically the unstable line) in Gentoo, and ended up masking the package.  Today I noticed 2.0 final was out, and I was willing to give it another shot.  Alas, I am still not impressed.  I can overlook the GUI which I''m not quite fond of (perhaps I'm not use to it), but the lack of several features which were critical to my use pattern kills Amarok 2 for me.  After giving it a second spin, I've one again masked it and will hopefully have better luck with the 2.1 release.

With that said, I do feel its a good product with a ton of potential.  I am very grateful for the work thus far, and have great hope for the future.

hemna wrote:I just installed amarok2 to give it a shot and I'm a bit disappointed as well.  I think it's a good start, but it's not amarok 1.x.  Missing the ability to sort my playlists is well...basic and leaves me wanting to go back to 1.x.  I give every one of my mp3s a star rating with the sole purpose of later on being able to sort my mp3s by star rating.  This makes it easy for me to just drag an entire artists folder from my collection into the playlist panel, then sort by star rating, and I'm good to go.  I can't seem to be able to do this in amarok2.

Also, I'm not sold on the 3 pane layout.  The middle pane where the track info is, seems like a huge waste of space.  Also, when I added the lyrics applet to the middle pane, it doesn't occupy the entire vertical space of the window, and there is no way for me to resize it to make it fit.  Oh well.  I've been a huge fan of amarok for a long long time now, but I'm not so sure about amarok2 just yet.  I'll keep using it, but I'm tempted to try out other options now as well, like songbird.  I'm anxiously waiting for amarok2 to get some basic features back in.

Even with my criticism of amarok2.  I have to say thanks for the hard work guys.
Cheers.

To add to your list, I'm eagerly awaiting the reintroduction of usb mass storage device support.