Without changing a single other part of my rather basic system, I found that the upgrade from 1.4 to 2.0 was very disappointing.

The program is noticably slower, has a loss of features, and doesn't work as well as the old one.  I am very surprised.

There used to be a way to change the skins, or at least the color themes, but that is gone.  There used to be an active list of Internet radio stations under the Shoutcast playlist category, but that's gone.  Upgrade didn't find my old playlist items, so now I can't find them thru the station list; I must add them manually from the individual web sites.  The program misrepresents its own version number, as well as the desktop environment.

The interface is cluttered as badly as the old, and there are less options for making it more usable.  We seem to be going the wrong way here.  As I wrote earlier, I am more than a little surprised.

Still, I appreciate the free program, and it seems to have the basics down pat better than the alternatives.  But that is a foundational issue, and probably existing since the first version.  It just seems as though there has been no basic GUI improvements over the years.

The loss of quality improvements remains disturbing.

Has anyone else noticed these issues?

Thanks for allowing me to rant.

I find the upgrade a big disappointment. I was a very happy Amarok 1.4 user on Ubuntu 8.10. Then the Ubuntu 9.04 upgrade brought me Amarok 2.0.

My favourite player suddenly looked different, not better. The interface is confusing and clumsy. My collection-database doesn't work anymore which is a bug disappointment because I spent a long time fine-tuning the star-ratings. Now I have to start a new database. Plus I don't like having database-servers on my workstation: I have a NAS which functions as a web-, database and file-server. Why only support an internal database-server?

And worst of all, Amarok doesn't want to play my collection. I mount an NFS-partition in /etc/fstab which was perfectly okay for Amarok 1.4. But Amarok 2.0 refuses to play any file. I can access the files like any other file in the filesystem. But Amarok says that there are too many errors to play them.

Grmbl, not happy.

We've communicated this many times, so I'm going to make this short:

Amarok 2.0 was only the very beginning of a long series of 2.x releases, which laid the technical foundations. We're close to finishing 2.1, and you would probably be surprised to see how quickly we are making progress, with the excellent new code base.


http://amarok.kde.org/en/releases/2.1/beta/1


PS:
Also check this articulate and detailed essay on Amarok 2 by our developer Seb Ruiz (pretty far at the top of the article):

http://commit-digest.kde.org/issues/2009-02-15/

Thanks for you clarification. I understand it now. I didn't know because the Ubuntu people did not communicate it.

The problem lies not with the Amarok team but with the Ubuntu team. They did the same thing with the Firefox 3 beta release for Ubuntu 8.04. I cannot understand why anyone would release beta-versions of packages (and Amarok 2 is this incomplete still, I consider it to be beta) as part of a stable release. They should have waited until the Amarok 2.1 release.

Until that moment (and I couldn't find a timeline) I will have to try out different methods of playing my music.

Me, too.  That makes a difference.

However, without knowing anything else, it is confusing to hear about a new 2.0 version of something and not knowing that it was a beta release.  (Shouldn't mine have been 2.0.3B?)  I have to admit that everyone's numbering scheme is different, so the user is left with no way to intuit the status of a given project.  And It isn't like there are any details about that posted on a program's home page.  Mine came from the usable program respository for Arch Linux.  I'll have a little talk with them about proper categorization.

By the way, how does Amarok designate the finished version?

Seb Ruiz's fine article should have also been on the home page with a big subject heading asking if one should change to 2.0 or stick with 1.4.

Also, I noticed that the bug report comments said that the slowness was due to something wrong on my system, and to take the issue elsewhere.  Since 1.4 was fine, and nothing changed, evidently there is a problem with downward compatibility as well.  All of the hard work of the developers will be for naught if they have lost the compatibility of the product.  That would be a shame, and a great loss to the Linux community.

Erik-Jan Vens wrote:And worst of all, Amarok doesn't want to play my collection. I mount an NFS-partition in /etc/fstab which was perfectly okay for Amarok 1.4. But Amarok 2.0 refuses to play any file. I can access the files like any other file in the filesystem. But Amarok says that there are too many errors to play them.

On http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=7133327 I read:

install phonon-backend-xine

which did the trick. Now Amarok at least plays my music again.