Hi guys. I've been using Amarok 1.4 for some time and I was pretty satisfied with it. I have some suggestions for new Amarok. I use version 2.0.2 installed form adept manager. I have Kubuntu 9.04 with Kde 4.

No CD playback. Why, oh why? I read about it in other topic, and I hope it will be fixed. I just cannot explain it to my mother, why she cannot play her CD with Amarok. It used to be like that: she inserted a CD into a drive, opened Amarok and clicked “Play CD” (or however it was in English; I used Polish version). Now the procedure looks like that: put CD into drive, open ripping program, rip it, search for it in collection (or on a hard drive) and then play it. And it doesn't take 3 minutes to rip CD; not everyone has new, very fast computer. Plus I have some albums I listen to quite rarely, I don't want to rip them, listen to songs, and remove files (because of limited capacity of harddisk and wasting too much time). And I know I'm being quite ignorant at that point, but' I don't really care if a computer program doesn't see difference between playing and ripping CD. Other non-geek users don't either. I hope you'll return this function.

Animated tray icon. It was useful, for instance for knowing if playlist is over or it's just a quiet ending of a song (I don't listen to music loudly too often). And after a while off computer I don't know if a song will be played from beginning or from middle.

Tray icon pt. 2. I don't know if it's Amarok or Kubuntu/Kde thing, but when I turn up/down volume using a wheel on mouse, sound is changing after I stop twirling, not instantly.

Collection: I search for a song in my collection, I find it, I want to play whole album, so I click on a song and clear search bar. What happens? I see list form the beginning, not album with selected song. It's a little bug, but it's annoying.

Collection pt. 2 – when no song is playing and I double-click on a song from a collection, why it's only added to playlist, not being played instantly?

Collection pt. 3. It's more useful of songlist appears after clicking on album cover or album title, not only after clicking this little “+” sign.

Layout – ok, I stop complaining for a moment. I like it. Big play buttons are great, they're intuitive – when I launched amarok 1.x for a very first time, I looked for quite a while for those tiny buttons. And now they're big and visible, and on their place. And a longer seek bar is something I appreciate the most! That previous, always short bar was hardly usable. Maybe it should be coloured with more contrast? BUT. The centre window shows too little information. I'd rather see it +/- like that: next to cover more details from mp3 tag – title, artist, album (year), track number, total length, maybe a little shuffle/slider with more properties – bitrate, file “weight” and localization?

Playlist: one annoying thing – when I want to erase several songs, I one-click on one, press “delete” key on a keyboard and... I have to click another time or use arrow button. It's little bug, but still annoying, see – try to delete songs 2,3,4 and 8 form 10. It's not as easy as it used to be. And maybe it'd be better if a song name was bold-typed, especially when playlist is long and made of one song per artist.

One more thing - I think Amarok 2 launches faster. And that's good, of cource


Ok, I think I'm done. I'm sorry it was so long, but I tried as much as I could to back my arguments with explanations why I see something should be improved. I still quite like Amarok 2, though I think previous was more elaborated. But hey, you don't make mistakes only when you don't progress! Sorry if my English is bad sometimes, I'm not native speaker.

cheers,
Pawel

Why don't you use kscd for CD playback? Should come up automatically when inserting an audio-CD.
CD support seems not to be on top of the TODO list. (Don't know, if it is there at all.)

The tray icon is animated. (in 2.1-beta)

For me it's more annoying, that playback starts instantly, when I drag tracks/albums to that popup thingie, which appears over the middle pane. I want to organize my playlist first, and start playback afterwards.
Should be a shortcut, I think. But reading the options, while holding left mouse button pressed? So it's way faster to drag it directly onto the playlist-editor.

The little sign is a triangle in my setup. But the best is:
In latest SVN (built today) the treeview only stays open, when you click directly on the artist/album. (That's the behaviour you want). BUT it only stays open, when you hold left mouse button pressed and your unable to select something.(Moving the mouse with LMB pressed results in dragging)

Anyway, perhaps you should try out 2.1-beta1 (2.0.2 is a bit buggy on Jaunty).

Greetings
m0nk

true 2.0.2 is bad...i had immediatly switched to 1.4.10

but 2.1b seems promising

For what it's worth, we already have experimental Audio CD support (playback and ripping) running in one of our development branches, so it will probably be featured in 2.2.