hello,

before all, please don't take this personal or get angry. i have been using amarok for many years and i'd like to give my '2 cents' or opinion about the amarok 2 release.  i'm not a coder and i know how complex and time-consuming software creation can be. unfortunately i agree with many arguments of quite a few amarok users who have been ventilating their frustration about A2 here. i'm running a kubuntu build on (gnome) ubuntu 8.10. my first impression was quite disappointing. a lot had to do with the (in my view) ugly default kde4 settings. also, it took a while to get used to the new layout and in combination with the 'ugly' kde4 settings my initial (!) feelings/impressions were quite negative. biggest drawback in my view, and after a few days of using, is the feeling that i can do less or handle my collection in a much less convenient way than i was used to with the 1.4 series.  A2 does not display useful, even crucial information, like bitrates and more. sorting seems difficult. i also encounter the collection problems that have been mentioned here numerously. especially "various artists" audio files are not handled as we knew with amarok 1.4 and A2 does not handle well the feature. ex., i see many album entries when i try putting together different tracks of the same album with the 'various artists' feature and A2 crashes a lot while doing that. in short, my collection seems **** up (and i have already spent many hours to clean and tag my collection correctly, etc.). the big collection issue and overall impression of degraded usability or 'convenience' is why i think that A2 was maybe released a bit too early. no offense.

so far the bad news

what i (now) really like about A2 is the new look and layout/organisation. it could use some enhancements/polishing here and there, like a bigger default cover view or at least the option to do that. but the overall impression of the new layout is OK! a new feature, album view, is amazing but takes too much to compile and slows down A2 when launching. the context view 'tabbing' is fantastic. but i'd like to see the applets using all available space, instead of default max size like now. another great thing is the dynamic playlist and fuzzy options. that is just wow! please restore the musicbrainz feature back (or similar) and better options to handle covers (like the option to save a cover in the correct folder).
in general i'd like to see that amarok is not only a fantastic music player but also a great music collection handler as i considered the 1.4.x series. nevertheless, i can see that you guys have been thinking a lot about A2 and that much and hard work has been put into it. i'm convinced that amarok has (and will have) a bright future! please continue the good work!


peace,
Michael

i'm pretty disappointed with amarok 2 so far. i had the earlier version i was using on mint4.0 with gnome down and enjoyed telling all my windows-using coworkers how it was vastly superior to itunes or any other player on windows or linux.

now...i dunno. it barely worked at all when i initially installed it on fedora 10 with gnome. admittedly, some of that might have been fedora's problem, because i noticed that it became a lot more stable after a few weeks worth of bug fixes. like the previous poster said, a lot of features seem to be gone (although to be honest, its been so long that i've been with the new version, i can't rember which). all in all, it was so bad that i tried to go back to an earlier version, but i guess you can't because a lot of the required packages aren't compatible with newer versions of linux (at least not fedora 10).

then there was tonight. i just spent about an hour figuing out how to get a folder with a mix of m4a and mp3 files to import to my existing collection and then copy to my ipod. i think a lot of the problem had to do with this "various artists" bug i've seen mentioned here a few times. basically, amarok would throw most of the files (although not all, for some reason) into various artists. once i figured this out, i was able to search for the files individually by name and manually update the track info (file by file) to get them to show up where they were supposed to be. had to do that both for the local collection and for my ipod. like i said, it took about an hour to figure this out and do the data entry. exactly the kind of thing that keeps windows users away from linux (note: no flames, please. linux is still definitely worth it for me).

i expect amarok 2 will eventually be great and appreciate the effort to make something even better than the older versions. i'm just agreeing with the original poster here and saying that, so far, it's not even close to ready.

kmd wrote:especially "various artists" audio files are not handled as we knew with amarok 1.4 and A2 does not handle well the feature. ex., i see many album entries when i try putting together different tracks of the same album with the 'various artists' feature and A2 crashes a lot while doing that. in short, my collection seems **** up (and i have already spent many hours to clean and tag my collection correctly, etc.)

Its not easy for some people to understand that this problem is to be ignored by many Amarok2 Users. My guess is that most A2 Users are using the file and folder view and give a sh**t on ID3 tags. It seems that building the same sorting algorithm in A2, what was good in A1, is a hard piece of work or not a thing of common interest.

1.4 rulez

(Sorry for my bad english) BongoFury