I've installed the Amarok 2 Beta 1 today, and so far it looks
good, but usability-wise it's more Itunes than Amarok, and that's
not a good thing to me.

Some notes:

• The collection list is not grouped by the first letter as before.
• I miss the old playlist window with all property columns. It was
  much more powerful. (This is my most important point)
• The applet/widget part takes up to much screen-estate. It looks
  nice - but doesn't do anything useful, really.
• I can't change a track property for all selected tracks at
  once, I can't even open the Track Details window for more than
  one track. To step forwards and backwards in the playlist in
  the Track Details window is not possible either.
• It seems I can't turn off the fadeout that occurs upon stopping
  playback. However, there's no fadeout when the track ends,
  makes no difference if I've toggled it under
  Settings->Configure Amarok->Playback or not.

I do sincerely hope that these are issues that's going to be
resolved. It's not for nothing that I chose KDE over
GNOME (http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?si ... 13/1340215).

The collection list is not grouped by the first letter as before.

Will get implemented at a later point.

I miss the old playlist window with all property columns. It was
much more powerful. (This is my most important point)

I disagree. I don't miss the old playlist at all.

I can't change a track property for all selected tracks at
once, I can't even open the Track Details window for more than
one track. To step forwards and backwards in the playlist in
the Track Details window is not possible either.

Will get implemented at a later point.

It seems I can't turn off the fadeout that occurs upon stopping
playback. However, there's no fadeout when the track ends,
makes no difference if I've toggled it under
Settings->Configure Amarok->Playback or not.

Fixed in beta2.

Ok, the other points are going to be fixed, great! But...

> I disagree. I don't miss the old playlist at all.

That's your opinion. Suddenly there's no powerful music
library left in the KDE environment. I don't want to use
Exaile, since I don't like GTK-based applications (Firefox
being my only exception).

I still think the old playlist should be re-implemented as a
choice available to the user. And the option to turn off the
nifty applet window that doesn't do anything.

That's what the GNU/Linux world is really, it's all about choice.

jagot wrote:I still think the old playlist should be re-implemented as a
choice available to the user. And the option to turn off the
nifty applet window that doesn't do anything.

That's what the GNU/Linux world is really, it's all about choice.

Well, open source means that you can go ahead at any time and implement the features you wish for yourself.

Well... I thought as much.

The problem is that I'm not proficient enough in GUI programming -
it's not my area. And if I'd implement what I wanted, is that a guarantee
that it would be merged with the trunk, or merely refused because
the main programmers didn't want/like that feature?

Also, since the applet pane is hardcoded (as I read in some other part
of the forum), I would have to implement a feature that turned it off -
instead of using QT's wonderful way of handling frames and letting the
user decide where panes should be, if they should be there at all (eg.
Dolphin).

I miss the old playlist, too. The new style looks completely cluttered. With style i had over 50 songs in view, with the new style i'm lucky when i see 30.
If you have a lot "single", one sees hardly 15. It's said somewhere else, that you could hide the middle pane by making in very small. If you hide the collection pane, the middle pane shows up. This way you can actually switch between them. However i would like to a possibility to remove those ugly squares on the top of the dragging lines.

Mark Kretschmann wrote:I miss the old playlist window with all property columns. It was
much more powerful. (This is my most important point)

I disagree. I don't miss the old playlist at all.

The only detail I miss having is the length of the track.

What I really miss is the ability to view the list of tracks to be played in the order they will actually be played, and the ability to drag tracks around to change the order they will be played in. Having the length of the tracks visible for all tracks is a key to one of my usage cases, when my listening time is growing short I may not want or have time to listen to a 20-30 minute track so it's nice to be able to know the next track that will play is long and look down the list and see one that fits you time frame I have left and drag in to the next spot to play.

What's the use of having a play list oriented player if you can't work with the play list as a list? Just sayin'. 

Later, Seeker

We plan on making the playlist items configurable, so you could choose what information to display in there.

In fact this was already planned for 2.0, but we didn't have the time to finish it, so we'll do that in a later version, 2.1 or so.

Ok, that's better.

In fact I checked out the latest SVN and found
files called PlaylistClassicView.[cpp|h] with comments
saying that this was for purists (like me). But they
were commented out in PlaylistWidget.cpp saying
that the feature was disabled for 2.0. I hope that means
it will be included later (effectively meaning the same as
you said in your last post).

Anyway, keep up the good work.

Rather than making my own thread I thought I would post into this one.

When I add a track to the playlist it suddenly plays, It shouldnt do this, it should be added to the end. When a single track is moved and you have more from teh same album it seems to drag them with it. If the queue features were still there than that would be fine as I could just queue them up. Having read elsewhere that the queuing wont get implamented until a later date if at all this is very discouraging.

Before you say I could go and sort this out by coding it I should mention that my c++ skills are well none existant.

redgore wrote:Rather than making my own thread I thought I would post into this one.

Thank you

redgore wrote:When I add a track to the playlist it suddenly plays, It shouldnt do this, it should be added to the end.

How exactly are you adding the track? There are two ways: "Load" and "Append to playlist," it sounds like you want the latter.

redgore wrote:When a single track is moved and you have more from teh same album it seems to drag them with it.

I don't understand what you mean.. could you please elaborate?

I am adding the track by using PLaylist > Add Media.

When you have multiple tracks from the same album they seem to be put into a group. When you try and move just one they all move.

This is beta 2 BTW, have these options your on about been added for beta 3 ?

*** Steps up to Soapbox ***

Ahem... is this thing on???

Ok, As I've said in other posts... really liking Amarok 2 right now, the feature list is much more robust. Yes, it is more iTunes - I do not think this is a bad thing... I mean, for me, the reason I chose Amarok is because of my iPod and there is no other decent alternative to iTunes for Linux (especially not when it comes down to features and usability). Amarok 2 is a huge step in the right direction compared to the older Amarok.

That being said...

That middle pane... really is a pain in the @$$. I like the concept of it... a completely customizable information center - that's great. Can we put it some place else, besides right in the middle of the player? Consider this a second vote to be able to turn it off and go back to a "purist" view... maybe incorporate that feature into the album view or something, so that we can have a playlist view which is just a big playlist... 99% of the time Amarok is minimized to the tray, I pop it up when I want to listen to something different.... navigating around the middle pain to accomplish what I want can be obnoxious at times...

*** Steps down from Soapbox ***

One more feature request - but for the forum not Amarok... Can we start a how-to section of the forum for Amarok 2? I feel like I'm stumbling around in the dark with this interface at times... and... if there is such a location - can someone tell me about it?? Thanks!

jagot wrote:

• I miss the old playlist window with all property columns. It was
  much more powerful. (This is my most important point)

I 1000% percent agree. The new buttons are cool, but I find myself going back to Amarok 1...

Firstly I want thanks amarok developers for their great work!

I'm not an usability expert and I know that designing an interface for a music player with a lot of features is quite difficult, but I would like to give my 2 cents to the discussion anyway.

I really think Amarok2 UI is better and easier than Amarok1.4, after you get used to changes, but just a couple of thing:
why don't you leverage plasma more, and make even the collection/source manager as a plasmoid for the middle panel?

In this way the user could choose the whole interface to suit his specific needs, and above all he would be able to switch it to focus on the task he intend to do each moment (editing the playlist, reading the context for the song while it is playing, getting informations from an on-line service while exploring it, edit tags, and so on).

Furthermore the community could create other plasmoids that interact with the playlist, such a nice 3d cover chooser, without breaking the metaphor of the UI.

Another thing: is it really necessary that zoom in / zoom out stuff? I think four-five nice icon buttons for choosing the view would work more efficiently and more easily, especially if the user (or the distributor) could choose the icons to adapt it to his configuration. The icon would represent "the task" of the view.

Lastly, the menu... "amarok" and "playlist" seem quite redundant. The user should be able to reach all the "playlist" menu function from the playlist view...