Hi,
Just wanted to report my experience using Amarok2. I used it for about a month and just reverted back yesterday. There were some minor problems but in the end it was the tagging that pushed me away. The program seemed to endlessly do weird things to the tags. Some albums would be missing individual songs, other albums wouldn't show up at all, and songs would show up with the wrong album name, wrong song name, wrong artist name ... the reason I stuck it out so long was to try and determine a pattern to it, but there just didn't seem to be. Sometimes fixing the tag would work, and sometimes it would change back the next time I started Amarok.
Overall I truly did appreciate the interface and will certainly give it another try in the future, but for now I've grown tired of regularly having to work just to find and enjoy my music. Keep up the great work guys.
ps - did anyone else encounter these issues? I saw a few people post on the Ubuntu forums with similar circumstances, yet I never came across a proposed solution. Personally I assumed that it was just a bug that will be worked out in due time.

Just checking, were you using one of the beta versions, or a release? As far as I'm aware, a lot of work was done to fix this.

It was an actual release (I assume - if it came from repositories?) but only a couple hours after posting this yesterday, I saw the announce of a new release. Gotta love that snappy service! Anyways I installed the latest version and it seemed to help, a few things were still out of place but fixing the tags seems to have stuck this time around.

btw - what's the most thorough way to scan through my music directory and clean up the tags? within Amarok, or is there another program suited for this?

The only problem I hit with this latest version was an initial problem in scanning my collection. I found an old thread on Ubuntu forums that worked for me with Amarok 2. In my .kde/share/apps/Amarok folder, there was a file called 'scancollection.log'  (or close to that) and in there was a single audio file name, once I moved that out of my Music folder, my collection updated no problem!

again, keep up the great work everyone.

Personally, I did most of my bulk tag-cleaning before Amarok came along, so I used Easytag. Since Amarok though, I've found it's pretty much the same time consuming process - it does depend what condition your tags are in though.

At *this* stage, Amarok 1.4 is probably better if you need to fetch tag info from musicbrainz (although only on a track-by-track basis); it's something that's apparently being worked on for future versions of Amarok2, but not implemented yet, afaik.

Easytag allows cddb lookups for albums, which is slightly more useful if you have a LOT of tracks to work through. There's also an official musicbrainz tagger called (iirc) Picard that's available from their site (http://musicbrainz.org).

Basically it comes down to personal preference, and your methodology. If you get everything fixed up, then maintaining tags with Amarok is very easy.

Thanks.
I tried EasyTag and it looked like most of my collections was good to go, and after fixing just a few albums, I went back to Amarok and kept getting random errors.
SO, as a last effort before going back to 1.4 again, I deleted both the program and the folder with all Amarok info in it, rebooted, reinstalled .... so far, so good. (fingers crossed)
Not sure what was going on, but my guess is that some data was leftover from my old Amarok install, and that was somehow causing problems? I'm certainly not the expert here but, for the first time, I'm enjoying the Amarok2 full-tilt. Hope it keeps up.

It's possible leftovers were causing problems. There was (and is some ongoing) trouble with tags showing up incorrectly for some tracks, but sounds like you're ok so far!

It's been fine for the last couple of days.

Sometimes when I add new music to my collection, it doesn't show up in Amarok. I have to go into 'Configure Amarok' and rescan the collection. AFter that, the new music shows up, but I get some of the old problems, albums showing up under the wrong artist etc.

But, everytime I restart the program, it's fixed and everything shows up properly. Definitely still weird and a little bit annoying, but it's usable enough that I can wait for the bugs to be ironed out.