honestly i got very disappointed with amarok 2, it crashes constantly and appearance is horrible. sorry.

how can I downgrade to the 1.4 version? i use ubuntu.

my best regards from spain.

tipotest wrote:honestly i got very disappointed with amarok 2, it crashes constantly and appearance is horrible. sorry.

how can I downgrade to the 1.4 version? i use ubuntu.

Sad to hear, but this is due to Kubuntu shipping 2.0.2, which is already quite old. A lot of work has been done in the meantime: there is a Amarok 2.1 beta 1 available in the Kubuntu PPA repositories, and 2.1 final should hit the repos in about a week.

To have some ideas about the current state of Amarok, you should have a look at our website and the developer blogs.

I agree -- Amarok 2 is horrible.  I also liked Amarok 1 much, much better, and would happily downgrade if I knew how.  Now I'm looking for an alternative instead.

"The customer is ALWAYS right!"

After reading your posts, I agree with you. Look for an alternative.
Unfortunately you're no customer in this case, but part of a community, participating on the hard work of others.
Think about it.

m0nk

If you haven't found how to downgrade yet this is how.  I did after 10 minutes of painful reality that Amarok 2.x (to include 2.1) was stripped down of some many capabilities that it has become just a simple music player.

I'm using kubuntu 9.04.  It should be the same in ubuntu.

1.  Make sure you have the intrepid repositories written in your sources.list file.
2.  Using your favorite package manager (mine is synaptic), search for amarok.
3.  I recommend uninstalling the previous version just in case.  At least that's how I did.
3.  Highlight the app - go to package - force version - select 1.4
4.  After the upgrade, search for amarok again - select it - go to package - select lock version.  This will prevent the package manager from suggesting or upgrading amarok.

The amazing music player that made Amarok the best (version 1.4) will be installed in your system.

I think the appearance is terrible in Amarok2. Please devs, I understand there is a lot more backend improvements, but please have an options to return to the pre-v2 layout in Options!

I strongly agree, if I cannot downgrade I will have to use something else to manage my music.

just found this

http://helpforlinux.blogspot.com/2009/0 ... u-904.html

hope it helps

Just wanted to respond to this post

  ----After reading your posts, I agree with you. Look for an alternative.
-----Unfortunately you're no customer in this case, but part of a community, participating on the hard work of others.
-----Think about it.
-----
----- m0nk

Yes Monk your right we are part of a community .... and while not customers .. we are users / stakeholders in the process. By using these applications we become part of this process.  The powers that be among Amarok designers clearly wanted to make a new player that was compatible with Windows and Mac OS ... so they started from scratch ---- abandoning ALL of their stakeholder for a new set outside the Linux community. 

I can come up with no feasible reason to abandon this basic tenents fo Usability Engineering. The first responsibility of the design team was to its current users. With the redesign as bad as it is they CLEARLY dropped the ball.

T

"The first responsibility of the design team was to its current users"

Why? I actually think this is a statement that is worth exploring a bit as I think it is the underlying assumptions in much of the criticism of both Amarok 2 but also KDE 4 in general!

On the surface this is obvious, but I think this is because you tend to think about it in terms of a normal business where a paying customer base is essential to keeping a project alive. With a Free Software project where the majority of work is done by unpaid volunteers, I would say that the first responsibility would always be to keep the project itself healthy, as if the project is not healthy, then development will cease and the users will not get any new versions at all. Although they might not like the new version, it still beats getting no new versions at all.

There was a few things happening with Amarok that was starting to hurt the project. The code was a bit of a mess, it was getting very hard to add new features without causing breakage in multiple other places, and the switch to Qt 4 needed to happen. It would certainly have been technically possible (if still a _huge_ task) to clean up the code and moving to Qt4 while maintaining much of Amarok as it was, but the main point here is that no one was motivated to do that. Had this been a commercial project, the boss would likely have kicked us in the rear until we did just that, and you would eventually have an Amarok based on Qt 4 that worked much like the old one, but as this process would ahve ttaken a long time and no innovation would happen in the mean time, it would likely have a hard time going up against some of the other music players that were at the time quickly catching up to Amarok in terms of features and popularity. It would also have left us with some of the same issues regarding extendability as much of the framework was simply not geared towards adding some of the features that we really wanted to try out.

So we did something different.

The results so far are obviously not to everyones liking. Part of this is simply because Amarok 2 is not yet as mature as 1.4 and is still not completely on feature parity, another part is because people do not like the new concept, which is something we knew would happen. But, as a project, I would argue that Amarok has come out of this stronger than ever. We have picked up many new developers in the process, and many of the old developers have gotten a huge dose of fresh motivation to work on the project as it is now possible to experiment with a lot of the ideas that were simply not possible on the 1.4.x framework or with the old ui.

And the 1.4.x version is still around. This is free software so it is possible to keep running this version as long as users desire to do so, and if there is enough interest, someone could step up to further develop, maintain or even port it to Qt4. So far no one has shown any real interest in doing so though.

Of course there is a possibility that Amarok 2 will never be as good as 1.4.x, or that it will even fail completely. But I will much rather take that chance than be forever bound by the confines of the 1.4.x version, and just maybe, we will actually come up with something really awesome. If not, then perhaps some of our good ideas gets picked up by other projects (the code from the configurable playlist layout in 2.1 is already being used in kopete, for instance to allow you to customize your friends list).

And personally, I already like Amarok 2 much more than I ever did Amarok 1.4.x, and We are just beginning to scratch the surface of the true potential of the underlying frameworks.

Hi. Whilst agreeing whole heartedly with the above, I think you may have missed the point somewhat. Many of us are not complaining about GUI and lack of features (that will all come with time). No, I/they are complaining about new versions of Amarok being released with major bugs that totally cripple the app. We are still having the collection constructions bugs that needed dealing with from the first release of version 2. This is happening in both the Linux and Windows versions. I am however prepared to wait as long as it takes. Amarok will be fantastic when the bugs are ironed out. And can I say "thank You" to all who code her. Hope you trap those nasty bugs soon.

I created this account to post here. I'm not here to ****, but to let you know.

1.4 rocks. Works well, low resources. No news - this created who Amarok is today. Yay!

2.x does not suite my needs, resource hog, missing *many* features, hard to navigate, isn't intuitive. I feel lost when in the UI. I feel let down as 1.4 is feature rich and complete. I frankly cannot understand WHY the changes were made. Oh well, not my program or concern.

There are *many* posts like mine I know. But it doesn't appear anyone is listening. No, I am not a customer but a simple user. An unsatisfied user that will *run* to another media player if it can come close to competing with the 1.4 UI and features that I enjoy and use everday.  At that time I will frankly careless what happens to Amarok in the future. For now,  I have backports of 1.4 available.

Harsh, but honest.

Stop shooting yourselves in the foot.