At first, I'd like to thank you for such an awesome piece of software, which Amarok 2 evolved into, guys. It's the best music player I've ever used.

Now, what's on my mind. After years of using Amarok, I realized that current statement of "Genre" tag is bit unsatisfactory (at least for me) for simple reason - very few bands' or musical acts' genre can be described by only one term. In my opinion, list of tags (just like tags, which describes an artist on Last.fm) would be much more accurate. This solution has even more benefits, like option to link this (Amarok built-in) tag list with artist's tag list on Last.fm, which would actualize each other when one of it's changed...

Pleae, consider this. I think that many amarokers (and especially Last.fm users) woud appreciate this.

Let me know about your opinion.

Hail Amarok and it's developers!

Yes, we know about that, see also https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=119539
it's not so easy to implement. You might want to try our new feature in the upcoming Amarok 2.2.2: Labels That allows you not only to workaround the single genre limitation (although, you can use personalized genres, too) but do this is a very personal way.

Thaks a lot for working on this issue. I hope that Amarok 2.2.2 will came soon, can't wait for checking the "Labels" feature...

Jezura wrote:Thaks a lot for working on this issue. I hope that Amarok 2.2.2 will came soon, can't wait for checking the "Labels" feature...

You're lucky, 2.2.2-Beta will be released soon

(And it's quite stable, safe to check out)

markey wrote:You're lucky, 2.2.2-Beta will be released soon

(And it's quite stable, safe to check out)

Nice

Will it be possible to merge in the labels from a 1.4 database (it was some effort to put all this info in there)? E.g. a "import collection" which only merges the old labels to the new database.
Greetings,
s|mon

Mamarok wrote:Yes, we know about that, see also https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=119539
it's not so easy to implement. You might want to try our new feature in the upcoming Amarok 2.2.2: Labels That allows you not only to workaround the single genre limitation (although, you can use personalized genres, too) but do this is a very personal way.

It's not exactly new - it was in 1.4!

Is someone actually working on more support for labels? All I've seen go into the repo so far is the ability to add / remove labels on tracks. As far as I can see there's currently no way to do anything useful like Smart Playlists or filtering by labels.

(I'm not complaining - If someone is working on this I would like to know what and where as I have downloaded the code and am slowly working out where code needs to be added, but I'm completely unfamiliar with the amarok code and don't have very much time right at the moment so it's slow going)

AllenJB: Please do not compare apples with oranges, Amarok 2 is a complete rewrite, so every feature arriving there is new, since it is not just taken over from then 1.4.x series.
Smart Playlists are not implemented yet. If you downloaded the code, make sure you do a 'git pull' at least daily, there is a lot going on on git. Also there are private branches where the developers work on features to come post 2.2.2, so just downloading the master branch will not tell you everything.

While it may be a rewrite, Amarok 2 is still Amarok. When users download Windows 7 or Filezilla 2 or <product> <version-next>, they generally expect, and more, they generally get, something that is feature-comparable to the previous major version.

For some odd reason, the KDE devs, and Amarok devs in particular don't seem to get this. They completely abandoned their existing users and went about implementing something completely different.

Amarok 1 may not have been pretty. Amarok 1's code may not have been pretty. But it generally worked and it's what its users wanted.

I chose Amarok 1 because of the features such as spreadsheet style playlists, labels and Smart Playlists that no other media player has or had (at least, I've not found one yet, and believe me, since Amarok 2 came out I have been looking!)

Amarok 2 has no features which I can't find in an existing music player or web browser. It's full of cloned crud I never use and has none of the features which made Amarok 1 so awesome.

Amarok 2 will ALWAYS be compared to Amarok 1.4. It's Amarok 1.4.next. The sooner the Amarok developers realise this and stop whining about how the users expect Amarok 2 to be somewhat feature comparable to Amarok 1, the better!

If you'd renamed Amarok to something completely different instead of calling it Amarok 2, you might just have a point with "apples and oranges". BUT IT DID NOT HAPPEN! Apple 2 is the second years crop after Apple 1.4 from the same tree.


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Since you haven't said otherwise, I guess I have to assume that no one is actually working on any further support for labels, despite your bold claims that they will be returning in a usable form in the next release!

s|mon wrote:Will it be possible to merge in the labels from a 1.4 database (it was some effort to put all this info in there)? E.g. a "import collection" which only merges the old labels to the new database.
Greetings,
s|mon

Frankly, I doubt it - unless osmeone modifies the existing import scripts that are out there. Of course this problem wouldn't exist if Amarok would store track-specific-metadata in the track metadata instead of (or in addition to) a database.

I can see why Amarok stores some information in the database - it's far quicker to search and select than trying to grab it just from the files. However, in my opinion, storing it ONLY in the database causes more problems than it solves. Yes, you have to deal with updating metadata in the DB from the files in the collection, but I would hope Amarok is already handling this gracefully for other metadata such as track name / artists / etc.

Storing metadata such as labels and ratings in the track metadata, where possible, would allow other media players or Amarok on other systems (eg. for music on a portable hard disk) to pick it up and use it and mean that users don't lose all their carefully setup metadata every time they lose their Amarok DB for any reason.

AllenJB: you are more than welcome to give a hand in implementing the 'missing' features. Join us in #amarok on irc.freenode.net and have a look at our wiki for more information on how to get started: http://amarok.kde.org/wiki/Development

Hello again! At first - Amarok 2.3.0 rocks! The chronic problems with collection are gone now, great job.

However, I apparnetly missed the point of "Labels" feature - is there any other use except the tagging the song/album/interpreter in very personal way? For example, the connection with the dynamic playlist would be really useful, 'cause it's the feature, where the "Genre" tag isn't much suitable.

Anyway, you guys deserve repect. Amarok is far the best audio player I've ever seen and with every new release it grows better and better...

Jezura wrote:Anyway, you guys deserve repect. Amarok is far the best audio player I've ever seen and with every new release it grows better and better...

Well thank you, that's nice to hear, and very motivating

You're welcome. And about the "Labels"?

Did you search the forum? It has been explained several times already...