Ok I just read a closed post .... people have been complaining about MAJOR problems with this software for some time ... with the site moderators correcting them and cutting THem off... THERE IS A PROBLEM WITH AMAROK!!!.. this is an open community and should be treated as such ....

number one problem is that when so many people report major problems ... there is a clear usability issue.... we had a great program ... now we have a broken one that looks pretty but ignores major HCI heuristics....

VERY DISAPPOINTING > I assume I'll be cut off and this post closed but seriously ... revive 1.4 ... I'VE TRIED 2.0 2.1 AND NOW 2.2 IN ALL FLAVORS AND VERSIONS OF kDE AND LINUX AND THE THING HAS NEVER WORKED RIGHT ....

BRING BACK OUR SOFTWARE ..

If you want things fixed be more specific. You can't simply say Amarok 2 y bad and Amarok 1.4 rocks.

v1.4 will not me maintained, so if you are really all that disappointed stop trying to get it back and try to help the development of v2 by reporting bugs.

Bugs and usability issues are different things one is an error in the code one is bad UI and features ...

Seriously, dumping garbage in the forum is not helpful. Can we focus on what we love -- music, and listening to it in Amarok? We all love Amarok, or wouldn't be here on the forum.

So, if you are having problems, create a good, helpful post about it. That means being specific about what you are using (exact version, in what KDE version, what distro and kernel, what hardware), what you are doing/trying to do, and what exactly happens.

If English isn't your first language, use one of the sub-forums, or get someone to help you express yourself clearly in English.

We all love Amarok here, and no one is trying to make it worse -- only better. Lets work together to do that.

coacharnold wrote:VERY DISAPPOINTING > I assume I'll be cut off and this post closed but seriously ... revive 1.4 ... I'VE TRIED 2.0 2.1 AND NOW 2.2 IN ALL FLAVORS AND VERSIONS OF kDE AND LINUX AND THE THING HAS NEVER WORKED RIGHT ....

BRING BACK OUR SOFTWARE ..

The great thing about open source is that you can bring it back either yourself or anybody else who is interested. Contrary to proprietary software where you typically try to talk with money, telling (in capitals) volunteer developers what to do usually gives opposite effect.

@coacharnold: Please look at

sorry, i moved my post to here: viewtopic.php?f=116&t=84281

Well, I can understand coacharnold a little bit because I myself had to find out that switching to Amarok 2 it quite difficult. There i a lack in functionality that should not happen. E.g. that I cannot listen to audio cds (different posting viewtopic.php?f=116&t=84144&p=141652#p141652) and even more problems with both, functionality and usage.

Anyway we all want to say thank you to the developers! (Having Icons is an improvement to the options in bug reports!)

(I personally think that the support process still is a bit inconvinient and unsatisfying and this is a field where normally it is said that the situation here is much better than in the closed source area. After years I am no longer sure about that. But this for sure is a wide area!)

Regards, Martin

PS: Sorry about the wrong internal link - I have to learn this!

I understand that the developers have stopped supporting Amarok 1.4.* I personally would like to beg them to reconsider. I have been using Amarok 2.* for about 6 months. It in my opinion is functional in the fact that it plays my music, be it ogg or mp3. But on the same note 1.4.* seemed to give the users so much more control over what was happening with their music.

My desktop is currently running Fedora 10 just for the fact that a few weeks ago I found an RPM that a generous gentleman put together to "upgrade" back to 1.4.* Unfortunately until I can muster the experience to do the same with Fedora12 and eventually Fedora13 my desktop will probably remain on fc10 for quite some time.
I don't mean to stir anything up but I still want to voice my desire to have a choice of 1.4.* or 2.*.
Nothing new in 1.4.*, just as it was. I'm sure there will be a lot of grateful Amarok users out there.

(@MoDaX) "The great thing about open source is that you can bring it back either yourself or anybody else who is interested"
I certainly agree. I just wish I had more experience to make this a reality.
Going to be some long nights with this one.

sniperson2002 wrote:I'm sure there will be a lot of grateful Amarok users out there.

Me fore one.

I have had some issues with Amarok2. However personally I think Amarok 2.2.1 is now better then Amarok 1.4. True not all the features of Amarok 1.4 are implemented...but they will come ...in due time.

Cheerz

valoriez wrote:Seriously, dumping garbage in the forum is not helpful. Can we focus on what we love -- music, and listening to it in Amarok? We all love Amarok, or wouldn't be here on the forum.

Oh, this is quite true. I'm dizzy about Amarok and would love to have it back. But Amarok-2 is Amarok in name only.

Not that any of this is going to help unless someone decides to maintain Amarok 1.4 independently of the current team. Folks - if you want your music player back, you'll have to get on to it yourself. Rebuilding 1.4 RPMs won't work forever, you know. I just did exactly that and all the icons have disappeared. I assume this is something to do with deprecated KDE artwork, but it's a sign that 1.4 is dying unless someone revives it.

Being a non-KDE developer, there's little I can personally do, but if any *AHEM* previous Amarok developers *AHEM* might like to go back to working on the best music player for Linux ever, I will personally send them cookies.

Thanks for the offer, but we already get cookies from our happy Amarok 2.x users

peterhjr wrote:*AHEM* previous Amarok developers *AHEM*

Previous being the operative word there.

Pulled down 1.4.10 source last night after installing FC12.
I'll post if I get close to a working build.
Hopefully get the cover manager working again since Amazon is no longer used.

sniperson2002 wrote:

peterhjr wrote:*AHEM* previous Amarok developers *AHEM*

Previous being the operative word there.

Pulled down 1.4.10 source last night after installing FC12.
I'll post if I get close to a working build.
Hopefully get the cover manager working again since Amazon is no longer used.

Interestingly, the Cover Manager just got a huge number of patches in Git Master (to become Amarok 2.2.3), and it's now faster and better than ever before.

It's beyond me why anyone would use the stuff from 1.x. Seriously, I coded a good part of that, and the code is horrible. Back then we were young and inexperienced, but now it's 2010, and we have learned a lot of new things in that regard.

Noone in their right mind would use 1.x, if they knew how much better 2.x is, in all technical ways (and usability wise as well).

Hi Mark,

markey wrote:Noone in their right mind would use 1.x, if they knew how much better 2.x is, in all technical ways (and usability wise as well).

you posted some important issuse:

1. Technology

No user is impressed by technology but developers and software architects for sure are! The user will be impressed by performance, continuity and - may be - the impact of the technology on faster improvements.

2. Usability

Users are impressed by usability. Usability is like the kiss that makes functionality to become live. (I hope that this is a correct expression in english!)

Unfortunately nonone knows what usability is. E.g. currently we work with so called desktops and windows on computers a way to interact that might be quite old fashioned...

I would like to add
3. Functionality

In this area I think something went wrong. You desinged a new Amarok with interesting new features - sometimes not usable from first site but really good. E.g. the way to personalize the playlist layout - great!

On the other hand you simply eliminated functionality that was good before. Or the functionality is very hard to find or the usability is quite strange (I know, that strange sounds negative but it should be understood having read 2.) E.g.:

- the simple and useful playlist we had in 1.4
- the music control panel (in 1.4 it was very simple to control the running piece of music even if Amarok was minimalized, now it is more difficult, even in normal view)
- the integration of soundkonverter
- the integration of MusicBrainz
- etc.

In my opinion it is nice to create a new version of Amarok with nice new functions but the basic functions of the former version should only with very good reasons be eliminated. Or if you needed some more time to implement the former basic functions you should keep the older version of Amarok running and make the new version an alpha or beta release.

Not to forget we have
4. Bugs

In this area I especially talk about basic functions. E.g.:

- the ability to play audio CDs
- the correct play of the typical open file formats like ogg and flac

I do understand that some bugs partly are the product of the new architecture, e.g. the phonon layer but I have to repeat this: Why should a user care about that?

At last
5. Incident Management and "Support"

a. being polite

I think I do have to apologize for some comments that were not that polite as you within the Amarok team would have expected - sorry for that! Unfortunately I some time was part of the open source community and never stopped to feal as a part of it. On the other hand I am working within IT since 1989 and do have my experience in the area of communication between users (customers) and software development.

So I think that constructive criticism is necessary to improve open source projects. In addition I personally think that comments like "if you do not like what you get from us, feel free to start to code!" are rude as well.

That leads me to:
b. understanding user requirements

I got a comment besides my bug report on not being able of playing audio CDs: "No one uses audio CDs any longer!" This is quite funny because it tells me something about understanding the requirements of users. I myself are working on the ripping of all my audio CDs but there are some problems with that as I cannot play the ripped files in Amarok (see flac problem above) so I had to stop the ripping process!

I am sure that most users that open bug reports and use this forum to express themselves do this out of two reasons: to get help and to help improving the software.

If within the community the answer to user requirements sometimes sounded like "The new version is much better! It is your problem that you cannot see that or cannot work with that (exaggerated!) or do not work with the (not yet distributed!) version!" then something would be wrong. What would be different to the way our friend Billy or lets say Steve (Ballmer) acts?

Conclusion

No, I think, we do have to find a better way to deal with that. E.g. the brainstorming area here in the forum really helps. But I think we have to work on the following as well:

To combine the development process and the process of evaluating user requirements or in other words to improve the moderation between the different stakeholders. (Yes, users are stakeholders as well!)

We have to stop to see us on different sides. We have to understand that both, developers and users, really like to work and use this wonderful piece of software, called Amarok to show all of these ipod junkies and the users that simply believe that there is only one way to play medias as within the windows media player are completely wrong. There is a better solution!

Regards, Martin