I'm sorry to have to begin with an itemized rant, but, sad to say, I don't think I can use Amarok anymore. It is a total shame. Amarok was the reason KDE had become my desktop of choice. As a player, cataloguer, music manager, tag editor, no other single program compared, not in Linux, not in Windows. Of course, I could go back to Amarok 1.x, like many have (including distributions), but other players are evolving and I'd rather not rely on dead-end software.

I would have dutifully begun writing out a bug report -- but the sheer number of problems and the resulting frustration was too much. In desperation, I've jotted down a list of snafus (some I've forgotten)

• watching the collection has the effect of the program constantly and strenuously scanning
• sometimes Amarok simply stops responding in particular ways: double clicking on a track in the album view doesn't place it on the playlist and play it ; if I delete or move files from the file view they sometimes remain visible there a long time even though they don't exist any longer (re-deleting them or doing anything else with them brings up an error message that they don't exist) (you need a refresh button)
• there's what looks like spurious bookmark functions in the UI. The only one that makes sense to me is the one in the "Files" view on the left-hand side; but there's another above it that simply duplicates the functionality of the viewing selector (i.e., Local Music / Files / Internet / Playlists), and another on the right, above the playlist window
• in the "Edit tabs" dialog there's no "Next" and "Previous" buttons to quickly tag the other tracks in the playlist as in the previous incarnation of Amarok
• while editing tabs there's no completion anymore, I have to type out the whole name or fumble "manually" with the drop-down widget and scroll through hundreds or thousands of titles/names.
• I cannot organize files directly from the playlist anymore
• some tag edits refuse to be written for some reason; I change the artist name, for instance, click "Save and Close" and nothing gets written, no change in the playlist view and, when checking the tags again, find the artist name as it was before. I've had to resort to EasyTAG, which is good on its own, but makes the whole process a lot more cumbersome.
• some tracks, though tagged identically as others in the album (for whichever tags are common, ex., album title, year, artist...), don't get read as being part of the same album (in the "Local Music" collection view and in the playlist layout). This happened when adding new tracks to the collection that already contained some other tracks of the same album - some of the new tracks were integrated properly, others not.
• SOME TRACKS SIMPLY VANISHED INTO THIN AIR while attempting to organize some files: namely, where I had the different tracks of a single album in different places in the collections, I decided to rationalize their placement, and so, from the "Files" view of the data, I right-clicked on the selected files and chose "Move to Collection" (why not just "Organize..." as before, since they're already in the collection?), using exactly this string of tokens in the "advanced" tab:

  Code: Select all

  (Collection root/)"%composer/%album/%track - %title - %artist.%filetype

  . The composer and album directories were created, but the files themselves (from %track on) were not. The 'find' command could not find them anywhere in the filesystem. (I retrieved the files from my backups - but I'm not relying on Amarok 2.x to organize my files again any time soon). I can't really apologize for "screaming" the first words on this one--it should really be in 24pt, bold, red, and flashing... but that might detract from the message
• When creating and tagging files with KAudioCreator and then reviewing them in Amarok some of the unusual characters (for English speakers) get munged up (I fix some of them in Amarok, but some won't change (see item above) -- EasyTAG to the rescue again). WTF! My locale is set to UTF-8 encoding; it's been years since I've had to worry about this - shouldn't KDE programs understand each other? Okay, maybe this one isn't Amarok's fault, and I'm only using KAudioCreator because the new version K3b is also crippled, but Amarok and these other programs are an integral part of the KDE experience, and KDE problems (if that's what this character snafu is) are also your problems. Fix them, or don't offer a public release. All this reeks of Beta, even Alfa software. I shouldn't have to spend a whole afternoon tagging and cataloguing a couple of audio CDs! I shouldn't have to worry about losing my music!

This is with Amarok 2.2.0, KDE 4.2.4, on Slackware64 13 Current (i.e., bleeding edge - but Amarok 2.1.1 in Slackware64 13 release seemed even slower and buggier).
I guess I'll be going back to my other partition with OpenSuse 10.3, KDE 3.somethin', and Amaro 1.4... but I'm looking around for an overdue upgrade, and if Amarok 2 fails here, so might KDE..

a shame
I really hope you guys can fix this, but it isn't just one or two little bugs. You must have done lots of great work "under the hood," and some of the UI changes are nice, but the whole thing feels terribly brittle.
Maybe you should shelve all the "wow" features for a while, go through the whole machine, and tighten all the bolts...
overnout
.

Anything new, that is not already reported here or recorded as a bug?
No.
If you read the news, then you would have noticed, that 2.2 is somewhat of a "feature freeze" to solve the remaining bugs.
And by the way Amarok was never a mass tagger, so you better use easytag.
Strange enough, that all these problems don't occur with my installation.

m0nk

I realize that some of the issues I encountered may already be reported--but again, it's just their prevalence and quantity that drove me to attempt to make a statement: one of the premiere user-beneficial opensource/freesoftware projects seems to have run adrift and got stuck in a quagmire. And if these bugs have been around for a while and are still not fixed, then all the more important it is to sound the alarm.

I read the news about 2.2 (although it wasn't quite as clear as you make out that this was a feature freeze) and about the coming improvements in scanning speed. Good news, and good work. So take my post as an avid user's attempt to impress upon you the importance of existing shortcomings in usability.

About "mass tagging," I think the facilities provided in Amarok 1.4.x are eminently desirable. It means I can can take a batch of freshly ripped tracks (I don't even have a functioning CD player in the house and all my CDs are immediately ripped) or recent downloads and tag and organize them all, all while listening to the music, fetching lyrics (as the case may be), album art, etc.

And about the destroyed files, I understand that these kinds of problems are hard to track down. I had in fact successfully moved a dozen tracks into the collection before the problem occurred, which makes it all the more problematic. Eventually perhaps, when I'm back with the newer installation and I have the time, I could try to created a testing scenario...
Might some of these problems be related to locale and encoding?

All the best,
Ron

Okay, the "Organize files" feature is one, I would never ever use in any application on any OS. Batch Moving and copying files, done by an application, is always suspicious to me.
Let me explain you my workflow:
-Rip the CD into album folder with minimal tags
-Use easytag UTF-16 id3v2.3 (way more economic than Amarok built-in) to tag them and add the cover.
It's essential that you even open downloaded music in easytag. "Correct wrong chars" and "keep timestamp of file" & "update timestamp of parent folder" (for scanning issues) should be activated.
(I've kanji, scandinavic and cyrillic chars in my tags without any problems)
-Copy album art into the album folder and set it as folder icon.
-Move album folder into my collection under /"first letter of artist"/artist/


m0nk

The need for the above post just proves there's a problem. Also I've found the decisions on interface design in 2.x to be consistently mystifying.

My opinions about Amarok 2.x compared to 1.4:

Since i've switched from windows, where i was using winamp, to linux based OS, i was a very happy user of Amarok.
Amarok was very important for me, and after a short time of using it, it got more than a good replacement for Winamp for me.
For example the ability to tag masses of Track inside Amarok while playing, and have them on-the-fly appearing in the right places inside my collection is very helpful, so i never got in the need of an external MP3 tagging application.
Another nice part of Amarok 1.4 is the player window.

As of Amarok 2.x, you changed virtually everything. So, in fact, it is another application. You could have called it 'KDEMusic' or any other title, but i think you shouldn't have called it Amarok. Of course, you would have losen the popularity of the name, but i thing that would have been even better than beeing for all times associated as successor of an almost perfect program...

Maybe it could make me thinking again about this if you would bring back the nice and handy 'player window' and the ability to manage my files and tags inside the playlists like in Amarok 1.4

Apart from that i like to thank all the developers of Amarok for their hard work. Especially for Amarok 1.4, which is still the best music player running on linux.

Folks, give it a break. None of you were or are involved in Amarok development and simply ignore the decisions that had to be made in the past 3, almost 4 years.

Constructive criticism is OK, but the constant bashing without any serious contribution is simply not gonna make it.

Consider this thread to be closed.