About a year ago I switched over from XFCE to KDE. Prior to that I was using Gnome2, and before that I was on OSX. I was a pretty heavy user of iTunes, and was extremely good about tagging and rating things. In short the personal metadata in my iTunes data was extremely valuable. I ended up switching to Banshee simply due to the fact that it had iTunes migration support and didn't require me to toss in a bunch of KDE library I at the time didn't need.

Anyhow, fast forward to a few months ago, I need to rebuild my laptop due to a drive failure and decided that Banshee felt too bloated and buggy, and I honestly didn't want to grab a ton of mono libraries just for it. Since I was freshly in the KDE world, I decided to give it a try. Little did I know that as much as I hated Banshee, that project some how gets how I use my music library.

There's a lot of functionality (which I've come to see as standard with most other music library apps), surprisingly missing from Amarok. Additionally many things don't make sense in how the UI works. I felt the need to document some of that here before finally giving up and switching back to Banshee, mostly because some (not all) of the folks in #amarok on freenode have been a bit preachy on how Amarok isn't every other library app and simply no one else sees eye to eye with me on my opinions regarding all this (which is fine, but they can sure be touchy about the whole subject).

First off some disclaimers, I'm a professional QA engineer, which also includes giving feedback on UI design and flow. I can write code but I'm by no means someone who should be writing things for production (so you honestly don't want to be that person with a one sentence response of "why don't you just fix it yourself, it's open source"). My music library is fairly extensive, so when I complain about something regarding search sucking, it might not be a problem for you if your library is under 10,000 items. I heavily use use metric fields like rating, date added, last played, last skipped, play count. Most of those I use in conjunction with smart playlist to determine what to sync to my mobile device next. I can track things visual faster in my head than I can with labels, and so I depend on album art a lot of the time to find particular songs. Running version 2.8.

So...

* Date added isn't a field that is overly exposed and involves some digging around to find.
* Last skipped doesn't seem to be tracked at all.
* The playlist panel is confusing to all hell. Sorting is hard to make sense of. No easy way to display large album art.
* Applying a rating to an item in the playlist requires 3 clicks with a second between each. This takes forever and sometimes ends up with me starting a track which wasn't playing that I simply wanted to add a rating to.
* The search bars between the Media Sources versus the Playlist act differently and take different keywords. Specifically I can't search for rating and some other things under the playlist.
* Media Source is also confusing, again no way to display larger album art.
* Automated playlists is horrible. The fact that I simply don't have a view or a tab or something I can just see what the playlist is generating without throwing the whole thing into my queue is sad. What's even more horrible is as I edit the rules I can't actively see what's being changed without waiting for a new playlist to be generated.
* Automated playlists wont allow me to include rules with involve the content of other playlists (automated or static), so much for having a playlist of music I don't ever want to help prune the other playlists.

To some it all up, since I've switched from Banshee I haven't dumped any music (new or old) onto my mobile device because there's no way for me to generate a random playlist of things according to rating and last skipped count while avoiding tracks I don't want. I'm also listening to the same albums over and over again because it's so damn hard to browse just by looking at cover art.

So there you have it. I'm frustrated that Amarok doesn't have the features I want. I understand it's its own project and those running it get to decide what features get in and why, but wow I'm just blown away Amarok is missing some of this stuff, and how poorly it does other things. I hope some dev might possibly read this and second think about how they're designing Amarok. Thanks.

* Applying a rating to an item in the playlist requires 3 clicks with a second between each. This takes forever and sometimes ends up with me starting a track which wasn't playing that I simply wanted to add a rating to.

Try using the keyboard shortcuts - it makes it so much more convenient!

* The search bars between the Media Sources versus the Playlist act differently and take different keywords. Specifically I can't search for rating and some other things under the playlist.

You're right, it does act differently. I did a bit of snooping around and found out that you can search for rating by enabling Rating under the Search Preferences menu next to the search field, and then typing in the rating number in the search field out of 10. So Searching for 8 will show all the 4 star playlist items. Enabling "Show only matches" in the search preferences makes the results much clearer.

I hope that helped.