Hello Amarok forum,

I am still using Amarok 1.4. There are two reasons. One is I find the interface less confusing than 2.4. The second is because when I last tried to upgrade to version 2.1, I couldn't bring in all my existing playlists.

The only reason I'm motivated to upgrade now is that I notice that some services such as Shoutcast and Last FM don't seem to be working in 1.4 anymore, and I imagine that I won't be able to get any support for being on such an old version of Amarok.

However, is there a way I can:

Keep all my playlists, particularly my dynamic ones?

Customize the interface to look more like 1.4?

Thank you for any advice.

You can certainly customize the appearance to be very close to 1.4, although I don't remember exactly what it was like, anymore. (Nor do I miss it, to be honest.) Many 1.4 "holdouts" seem to love the old playlist layout, for some reason. Our new Playlist Layout Editor give you the power to make the new Playlist look just like the old one, if you want. Plus you can resize, move, switch, stack, tab or dismiss entirely any of the panes you want.

Dynamic Playlists accomplish much of the same output as the old ones, but better, in my opinion. But as far as I know, you'll need to set up your biases again. m3u playlists, of course, are standard. Be sure to save to disk, so you can bring them over. Perhaps there is a way to convert the others, but I don't know about it.

Thank you for replying.

I have two computers available, so I have installed 2.4 on one, while keeping 1.4 going on the machine I usually play music from.

I'm sorry to be ungrateful sounding for what is obviously a lot of hard work that has gone into developing Amarok.

However, I just can't help but feel that 2.4 represents the drive to create a "powerful" interface completely at the expense of "intuitive".

For example, it took me forever to figure out that the volume button was not simply a mute button, and that one had to rotate the mouse around to control volume. I guess the kind of pop up slider that ever other interface uses is too boring.

I suppose this kind of thing is subjective, though, so there's no convincing one side or the other what is objectively "intuitive".

I think I'll continue to stay with 1.4 and use something else for streaming audio.

Thank you for your suggestions.

I guess what is intuitive to one person, isn't to someone else. In my opinion, having used both, 2.4 beats the pants off 1.4 in every way I can think of -- though I still do miss that cute little visualization at the bottom of the screen, but I certainly wouldn't trade all the progress for that one little thing.

When I saw the new Toolbar, I just loved it. And understood instantly that my scroll-wheel would find some use in Amarok finally. Of course you still can use the Slim Toolbar, so if you want the old one, you can have it.

However, everyone should use what they like, and if you like the old app, by all means use it. And if you want something that looks the same, check out Clementine, which is being maintained and developed, which 1.4 isn't.

Thank you for the recommendation of Clementine. I will take a look at it.

I am still trying to see if I can live with Amarok 2.x, though, just because I am willing to try and adapt. Clementine is very beta phase, and Amarok 1.4 is dying, so perhaps I need to move with the times.

However, one thing that stumps me: so far as I can tell, upon upgrading, all my star ratings have been blown away, and there is no way to display star ratings in the playlist.

If I upgrade to 2.x, and I supposed to not have or use star ratings any more?

You can display ratings in the playlist by adjusting the playlist layout (Playlist > Playlist Layouts). I believe the Verbose layout lists them by default, or you can define a custom one.

And the F1-button in Amarok gives a wide range of information.

ebisudave wrote:Thank you for the recommendation of Clementine. I will take a look at it.

I am still trying to see if I can live with Amarok 2.x, though, just because I am willing to try and adapt. Clementine is very beta phase, and Amarok 1.4 is dying, so perhaps I need to move with the times.

However, one thing that stumps me: so far as I can tell, upon upgrading, all my star ratings have been blown away, and there is no way to display star ratings in the playlist.

If I upgrade to 2.x, and I supposed to not have or use star ratings any more?

If you still have your old database, it might be possible to import your old ratings to your new db. I believe that has to be done outside of Amarok, however. Googling around, I found a couple reports about how to do this: http://my.opera.com/atomo64/blog/2007/0 ... lite-mysql , http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=932358 . That said, did you try the built-in way: Settings > Configure Amarok > Collection: Import ?

One of the things I most like about 2.4, the version to be released in a few days, is that you can choose to save your statistics *to the file* as well as in the database. Since I run a constantly updated version from git, I've lost my statistics many times. If I had been better about backing up and restoring the db, I would have kept them, but I didn't. Now though, they are in the music files, and I won't lose them again!

If you want this new functionality, you'll have to enable it in the Settings, since it's off by default, once 2.4 is released.

Alright, I'm slowly being won over. I've got my star ratings back, I've tweaked the interface to look more like 1.4.

I think I might be able to migrate.

However, one thing I'm noticing is that 2.x is noticably slower to respond than 1.4 was. Does it have significantly higher machine requirements?

Looks like I spoke too soon.

Amarok is running really slow. So I looked online and found many suggestions that said to switch to using MySQL.

So I did that, and it seemed to go okay. Except that I then lost all my star ratings.

Okay, so I went to re-import them. The import function seems to run just like it did when I last tried it. It spends a little while scanning the previous Amarok database, and eventually says "success".

However, this time my star ratings are not being applied to any of the music in my collection.

Is MySQL and star ratings not compatible?

And Amarok is still running very slow. Takes about a minute to load. And any time I click on anything, it doesn't respond, and sometimes the mouse gets "stuck". For example, I'll click a drop down menu, and it will get focus, but the menu won't appear. If I wait, nothing happens. If I click again, the menu flashes and then goes away again.

I have disabled all scripts available in the script manager, but that has not improved the speed or performance.

Any advice or tips would be much appreciated.

When did you compile 2.4 last? Or are you talking about the 2.4 beta (aka 2.3.90) ?

"Compile"?

I am an end-user who avoids "compiling" like the plague.

I simply installed from whatever version of Amarok is available in the repositories for Ubuntu 10.10.

Which, according to the "help" menu, is:
Version 2.3.2
Using KDE 4.5.1 (KDE 4.5.1)

So, sorry, I guess I'm not actually on 2.4. I just thought I was because I thought that was the most stable version, but I guess I'm wrong about that.

Well, we just released Amarok 2.4 today, have a look on http://kubuntu.org/news for the announcement when it will be available in your distribution.

Okay, thanks for the tip.

I've upgraded to 2.4.0.

I went to Configure Amarok -> Collection and pressed the "Import" button. (I notice now there's a new option to write to files. I don't think that's what I want to do right now, though).

I select "Amarok 1.4" as my impoter, click next, accept all the default settings, and click "next".

It scrolls through a long list of songs, and says "Success: Imported 2,696 tracks". I then click "Finish".

However, none of the songs in my database have any star ratings.

How do I get the star ratings I had from my previous version of Amarok?

Thanks for any advice.

Okay, I have figured out many new things about the new Amarok. I have the MySQL database set up, I have fixed a few problems, and I've got the display looking as I want.

However, one thing about the interface I find slightly awkward.

I have the star ratings displayed in the playlist. in the old Amarok, one merely had to mouse over them, and then if I clicked anywhere on them, that would become the new star rating.

With the new Amarok, though, I have to click on the track to highlight it, and then click again to enable the ability to edit it, and then I can click again on the stars to set a rating.

The problem with this is first that it's just too many clicks, but also that if I do it too fast, it thinks I've double clicked the track and it starts playing from the beginning again.

Is there a way I can make it so I can set star ratings the same one click way as in Amarok 1.4?