Hi,
After madman was no more supported in Ubuntu and debian testing I tried almost every music player I could get hands on and finally ended up with Amarok 1.4
I really love Amarok 1.4 in spite of some errors (like sometimes playing two seconds of a song and then skipping to the next one)

Recently I tried Amarok 2.0.1.1 and are absolutely disappointed.
It's no problem that almost all of the old features are missing, that may come with the time.
What I really hate is the new layout.
I have a small screen on my notebook (1024x786) and the new layout is absolutely unusable.
In 1.4 I used to put all of my titles in a playlist and work mostly with sorting and the rating stars. In 2.0 everything is gone.

No more column for artist, album, title, genre, rating. Thus no sorting.
No means to load all songs into my playlist. (the "whole collection" option in intelligent playlist)
Why cant I sort my playlist for artist, album, title...
Instead each song is "decorated" with the album cover bloating it up to three lines of height.
I don't understand the value of  middle column at all. For me its just waste of space.
No means to set the font (Did you know that not everyone ownes a 1900x1200 monitor)

I don't know whether all of that is just owed to the beta state and will disappear with the evolution of Amarok or if that is the new intended style. If the second is true it's a pity and I had to restart my search for a usable audio player.
Ubuntu is threatening it's users to use Amarok2 in it's new 9.04 Version. For me that sounds more like a threat than an improvement.

So why would you not stay with Amarok 1.4? I do not see the problem. In case Ubuntu decides not to package it anymore, just compile it yourself or often simply the old packages from prior Ubuntu version will just work.

marcel wrote:So why would you not stay with Amarok 1.4?

Because it will become stagnant.

More than that: The distributions will stop support on 1.4 soon after 2.0 will be out and I'm not a friend of ./configure, make, make install.