First off, I'd like to say how much I appreciate the people who put plenty of their own time and effort into creating and fixing Amarok. I've been using it for about a year now.

However, I recently changed from Ubuntu to Arch, and in the process went from Amarok 1.4 to 2.1.1. Unfortunately...it feels like Amarok got a whole lot less sophisticated. There are almost no configuration options available. (I can't even set the sound engine it uses, for instance.) I honestly can't stand the new GUI. I can't get the playlist layout editor to work. I wasted time trying to figure out why it wouldn't play my music, only to discover that I needed to install xine (which for some reason wasn't flagged as a dependency)--I'll grant that that could be a distro problem, though.

Okay. Ranting mostly done. Here are my specific questions and issues:

1) I don't want any applets. None of the ones currently available appeal to me at all. However, when I remove all of them I can't resize the playlist to fill in all the space--there's an annoying message in the gap saying "Please add some applets from the toolbar at the bottom of the context view." I don't want any! Can I get this to go away somehow?

2) I've created a new custom playlist layout including a few things I wanted to show up besides the default (I added rating and play count). They still don't show up, despite (a) saving the new layout and (b) making sure it's selected. Is this a known bug, or am I missing something?

3) For some reason, in the collection view (left-hand sidebar), if I have multiple albums by the same group it sorts them by reverse date. I.e., I have three albums by Boston, and their albums show up from newest to oldest. I want normal chronological order. How can I do this?

4) Is there some way to get back the way 1.4 separated groups by first letter (and showed the letter prominently)? That layout looked much better and made it easier to find specific groups.

All in all, 2.1 just seems like a huge leap backward from 1.4, as far as the GUI goes. I still want to give it a try (especially if anyone can address my issues here), but I'm now giving serious thought to trying something else...which is kind of sad. I used to like Amarok!

You should try Amarok2.2, if you are using Arch Linux, its easy to install the current development version.

Just:

yaourt -S amarok-git

http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Yaourt

1) You can hide the context view in current amarok git (and what will be 2.2), it is a config option

2) Custom playlist layouts should work fine. Make sure you are editing the right kind of track---there are 3 (group header, group item, and individual item). If you edited the individual item type, but all the tracks in the playlist are in albums, you won't see any change. You need to edit the group header and group item ones.

3) Not sure about this one

4) There are currently no alphabetical markers in the collection browser. probably wouldn't be hard to add, but no one has done it yet.

First answer is a bit?
1)In 2.1.1 you can hide the middle pane by checking hide CV in general options.
In 2.2 you will be able to hide and shuffle the panes as you like.

2)all said

3) No way, albums are sorted descending. Btw. the sorting of artists starting with digits is still buggy. Amarok uses the whole number for sorting , so "69 Eyes" come before "1000 Funerals" or "35007".
Or is this intended behaviour?

4) Markers would really be fine in huge collections.

m0nk

1) Aha! I didn't realize that was the context view, so I missed the option to hide it. Thanks, m0nk! One down. Great.

2) I double-checked, and after trying a bunch of things I noticed that it's actually some sort of rendering but, not a problem with changing the settings itself. If I add new details in the same row as the default details (title and length), then they don't show up. If I instead move them down to a new row, they do show up. If I move them back up, they disappear again--but the tracks stay two rows tall, instead of going back to one. Curiously, hitting "preview" makes them go back to one row each (though the extra details still don't show), but then hitting "okay" returns to the two-row-high format, with a blank second row. Definitely some kind of bug.

3) No, it's really true. Here's a screenshot:

Curiously enough, they do sort into their proper order in the playlist: that is, if I drag the whole group (Boston) over to the playlist and start playing, it starts with the first song in the 1976 album. (Note that the years here are part of the album name, not extra info taken from the year ID3 tag.)

4) Okay, I guess this just isn't in there.

So (1) was easily resolved, and I guess the next two are just bugs. It sounds like (4) might get implemented at some point.

I hadn't realized until after I first posted that Amarok had been pretty well redesigned to take advantage of KDE4. It sounds like along the way, a lot of features got dropped but are being added back in? It also sounds like it's having some of the same kinds of problems that early versions of KDE4 did.

Anyway, I'll go ahead and try the latest development version and see if any of this behavior changes there. (Thanks for that suggestion, karoshi and lfranchi.) I usually like sticking with slightly less bleeding-edge stuff, and having it in the official repositories also makes things easier, but it's worth a try in this case, I think.

2) Perhaps you can post your XML layout file here.
It's in $HOME/.kde(4 if your using openSUSE)/share/apps/amarok/playlist_layouts

3) As I wrote, albums are sorted descending from newest to oldest.
But what do you mean by

Note that the years here are part of the album name, not extra info taken from the year ID3 tag

2006 the year of the remastering or 1976 the original release year (which is read from the tags)?

m0nk

Okay, I'm now using the newest version from the repositories, and still seeing the same behavior with #2. (I like the way it handles #1 better, though, for what that's worth--how you get rid of the context view makes more sense to me.)

2) Gladly! Here's the XML layout file, followed by screenshots of what I'm actually seeing:

Code: Select all

<!DOCTYPE layouts>
<playlist_layouts>
 <layout name="Custom" >
  <single_track active_indicator_row="0" show_cover="true" >
   <row>
    <element size="0.8" bold="false" alignment="left" value="Title" italic="false" />
    <element size="0" bold="false" alignment="center" value="Rating" italic="false" />
    <element size="0.2" bold="false" alignment="right" value="Length" italic="false" />
   </row>
   <row>
    <element size="0.5" bold="false" alignment="left" value="Artist" italic="false" />
    <element size="0.5" bold="false" alignment="right" value="Album" italic="false" />
   </row>
  </single_track>
  <group_head active_indicator_row="0" show_cover="true" >
   <row>
    <element size="1" bold="true" alignment="center" value="Album" italic="false" />
   </row>
   <row>
    <element size="0" bold="false" alignment="center" value="Artist" italic="false" />
   </row>
  </group_head>
  <group_body active_indicator_row="0" show_cover="false" >
   <row>
    <element size="0.8" bold="false" alignment="left" value="Title (with track number)" italic="false" />
    <element size="0" bold="false" alignment="center" value="Play count" italic="false" />
    <element size="0" bold="false" alignment="center" value="Rating" italic="false" />
    <element size="0.2" bold="false" alignment="right" value="Length" italic="false" />
   </row>
   <row/>
  </group_body>
 </layout>
</playlist_layouts>

Here are screenshots of what the playlist layout editor is showing:
The head layout:

The body layout:

The single layout:

Here's how my playlist actually shows up:

And here's how it shows up in preview (which at least isn't spaced out--though of course it's dimmed here, since I had the layout editor open on top of it):

It doesn't matter how wide I make the playlist pane, either; I made it narrower for the screenshots, but the spacing, things not showing up, etc. stays the same even if it's much wider.

3) Ah, I wasn't reading closely enough. You're right, they're definitely sorting from newest to oldest. Why? If I'm sorting A-Z, doesn't it also make sense to sort from 1-9? Or perhaps a better question: what about making the sorting customizable, just like other parts of the sorting behavior are?

The other confusing thing about it is that when I drag the entire group over to a playlist, the albums show up in ascending chronological order--the reverse of how they're displayed in the collection browser.

(Oh, and you're right about the year vs. the album name: I was mistakenly thinking of my folder layout, where I have them name Year - Artist - Album. In Amarok it is, of course, pulling the year from the tags.)

Code: Select all

    <element size="0" bold="false" alignment="center" value="Play count" italic="false" />
    <element size="0" bold="false" alignment="center" value="Rating" italic="false" />
    <element size="0.2" bold="false" alignment="right" value="Length" italic="false" />
   </row>
   <row/> <------------- must be removed


The last line in the above snippet shouldn't be there.

m0nk

Interesting. I wonder how that got there? I never edited this file by hand (well, until now).

And with that out, the double-spacing is gone! Yay. Now if we can get the rating and play count to show up...

(I did some more playing around, and again I can see the play count and rating as long as they aren't on the first row with the title and length. As soon as I put them on that row, they stop showing up. Also, it stuck that bogus <row/> tag back in there...I'm going to file a bug report on that. Thanks for catching it!)

Set column width to auto and you'll see them.
If you take a look at the xml file, you see that

Code: Select all

    <element size="0.8" bold="false" alignment="left" value="Title (with track number)" italic="false" />
    <element size="0" bold="false" alignment="center" value="Play count" italic="false" />
    <element size="0" bold="false" alignment="center" value="Rating" italic="false" />
    <element size="0.2" bold="false" alignment="right" value="Length" italic="false" />

title and length sum up to 1.0 == 100%, so there's nothing left for rating and playcount.

Here's the Excel style, I'm using:

Code: Select all

 
<!DOCTYPE layouts>
<layout name="Excel" >
  <single_track active_indicator_row="0" show_cover="false" >
   <row>
    <element suffix="" prefix="" size="0" bold="false" alignment="left" value="Title" italic="false" />
    <element suffix="" prefix="" size="0" bold="false" alignment="left" value="Artist" italic="false" />
    <element suffix="" prefix="" size="0" bold="false" alignment="left" value="Album" italic="false" />
    <element suffix="" prefix="" size="0.05" bold="false" alignment="left" value="Year" italic="false" />
    <element suffix="" prefix="" size="0.05" bold="false" alignment="left" value="Length" italic="false" />
   </row>
  </single_track>
  <group_head active_indicator_row="0" show_cover="false" />
  <group_body active_indicator_row="0" show_cover="false" >
   <row>
    <element suffix="" prefix="" size="0" bold="false" alignment="left" value="Title" italic="false" />
    <element suffix="" prefix="" size="0" bold="false" alignment="left" value="Artist" italic="false" />
    <element suffix="" prefix="" size="0" bold="false" alignment="left" value="Album" italic="false" />
    <element suffix="" prefix="" size="0.05" bold="false" alignment="left" value="Year" italic="false" />
    <element suffix="" prefix="" size="0.05" bold="false" alignment="left" value="Length" italic="false" />
   </row>
  </group_body>
 </layout>
</playlist_layouts>


kde-apps.org now needs a section "Amarok2 Playlist layouts" ;-)

m0nk

peppergrower wrote:... Also, it stuck that bogus <row/> tag back in there...I'm going to file a bug report on that. Thanks for catching it!)

You should check on Amarok 2.2-git first, as this seems to be solved there which would make your bug report unnecessary.

Dieter Schroeder wrote:Set column width to auto and you'll see them.
If you take a look at the xml file, you see that

Code: Select all

    <element size="0.8" bold="false" alignment="left" value="Title (with track number)" italic="false" />
    <element size="0" bold="false" alignment="center" value="Play count" italic="false" />
    <element size="0" bold="false" alignment="center" value="Rating" italic="false" />
    <element size="0.2" bold="false" alignment="right" value="Length" italic="false" />

title and length sum up to 1.0 == 100%, so there's nothing left for rating and playcount.

Great, thanks very much for the tip! Although this makes sense after the fact, I didn't realize that I had to manually specify the width of each column...or change the width to automatic. Since it let me just drag and drop the elements where I wanted them, I figured it would also guess and automatically pick a (non-zero) width for each. Then, if I'm not happy with the widths, I could resize them myself. I think the best default would be to have the width set to automatic; perhaps I'll suggest that for the future and see if anyone else agrees with me. :) Thanks for your layout too, by the way. It makes a good example for me to try customizing things.

And thank you very, very much for all the help in getting two of my biggest annoyances figured out. Amarok 2 is now usable, and I'm very happy to be able to keep using it. I'm glad my frustration wasn't too off-putting. :)

Mamarok wrote:

peppergrower wrote:... Also, it stuck that bogus <row/> tag back in there...I'm going to file a bug report on that. Thanks for catching it!)

You should check on Amarok 2.2-git first, as this seems to be solved there which would make your bug report unnecessary.

I'm using a version I checked out from git yesterday (2009-08-25)...this is what you meant, yes?

Yes, that's what I meant, so why is your post about "Amarok 2.1.1 GUI" then?

Because he used 2.1.1 when starting this topic.

m0nk