I'll grant, it is a rant, but some of it is valid.  (I put the stuff I like about the new one at the end)

1) Playlist - The playlist replacement is missing all the functionality that made the old playlist useful:  sorting, arbitrary columns, simple, compact, filtering, and fast.  I have read that this functionality is planned to come to the new playlist, but, why isn't it already there?  The new playlist is a joke in comparison to the old.  I don't care if there is album art in the the list, it just clutters it up.

2) Collection Browser - The new collection browser is far inferior to the previous.  It is no longer possible to filter based on when music was added.  My iPod is now included in my music collection.  This is a huge issue, it makes it very very easy to delete music from my collection when my only intention is to delete music from my iPod (i.e. what, which collection am I in?  Is this my iPod?)  This is a very very bad UI design and will cause people to delete music accidentally.

3) Middle Panel - What is this thing and why is in the middle of the player.  Can I put it to the right instead?  Or under the playlist?  After figuring out how to hide the middle panel is the middle panel ok.

4) iPod Intergration - Already mentioned that having the iPod in the same list as the normal music collection is a bad idea as it makes it very easy to accidentally delete music from your collection instead of the your ipod.  But what is the deal with the syncing?  Instead of serially copying one track at a time, or copying just a few tracks at a time, it copies all the music at the same time!  I'm not sure why it would do this, but, this is what it does.

Bugs:
1) Cannot delete tracks from iPod without crashing Amarok.  To reproduce: Delete some tracks from iPod, Delete some more tracks from iPod, Crash Amarok

2) Album art copied to iPod is poorly scaled such that it looks like a colored blob instead of the album

3) Doesn't fetch album art of all the albums, instead only one per artist.

4) Complains that pulseaudio is not installed (it isn't installed, but I don't need to know about that everytime I start it)

Likes:
1) Much faster about scanning my music library
2) No fiddling to get it to play mp3s (this might be the packaging)
3) Auto determination of output and output type

Summary:
I like Amarok specifically because it isn't an iTunes style mp3 player.  It seems a more natural evolution of xmms.  The playlist is central to the player and the collection, while robust, searchable, sortable, and groupable, is pushed the side.  I just upgraded to Fedora 10 and after fiddling with Amarok a bit went in search of a replacement: Banshee, Rhythmbox, and Songbird failed because they are too like iTunes; Exaile is like an Amarok clone, almost but not quite (tagging was really bad); and finally Audacious (too much like xmms).  I ended up compiling Amarok 1.4.10 for Fedora 10.  It works great except for the iPod part (the Hal stuff it wants to query appears to be missing).  Amarok 2 seems to be nothing more than just change for the sake of change.  No real reason.  The result is a significantly inferior product.  The new version is junk.  It is much like the whole KDE 4 fiasco, taking a perfectly working system and producing something that isn't nearly as useful.

Hopefully some of the development team reads this.  I know they will ignore the playlist comments (those are scatter across the forum already), but perhaps some of the other major issues will get the attention they need.

Thanks,
Chad Calkins

Have you checked http://bugs.kde.org to see whether any of your concerns have already been opened as bugs, or opened them yourself?

Also check out my blog:

http://amarok.kde.org/blog/archives/809 ... rok-2.html

I hope that the Amarok team is going to post news announcing Amarok 2 as their idea of a joke, because it is certainly my idea of one.

Amarok seems to have been infected by the KDE4 bug, where every single thing -HAS- to be changed, regardless of how much it will suck, and how much people will be **** off.

I don't think a Amarok2.1 will solve anything, except for the much-too-small play/skip buttons.

I was hoping for an Amarok1 with many high-requested improvements such as tabbed playlists, better "web2.0-style" tagging, better plugin architecture, jamendo, ampache, better support of songs with multiple artists and so on.

Now if you'll excuse me, I am going to go cry myself to sleep.

There there, pumpkin, you'll be ok. Worse things happen at sea.

Installed Amarok 2.0 coming from Wonderful 1.4 with my ipod classic, almost all my issues were ipod related to quote the op (Appears none of the formatting buttons on this forum work for me, in firefox 3)

"My iPod is now included in my music collection.  This is a huge issue, it makes it very very easy to delete music from my collection when my only intention is to delete music from my iPod (i.e. what, which collection am I in?  Is this my iPod?)  This is a very very bad UI design and will cause people to delete music accidentally."

YES! This is very annoying and makes it very hard to know which list you are working with!

"1) Cannot delete tracks from iPod without crashing Amarok.  To reproduce: Delete some tracks from iPod, Delete some more tracks from iPod, Crash Amarok"

and

"2) Album art copied to iPod is poorly scaled such that it looks like a colored blob instead of the album"

I experienced both these problems, album art is very ugly and copying lots of files (Ie an entire album or two) is very cumbersome often it just sits there and you are left wondering if its working or not.

Another issue i noticed is the lack of being able to create a playlist, i assume this will come back in time.

For now i have removed the Fedora provided Amarok2 and reverted back to Amarok 1.4 for the time being. I understand this is work in progress im just not used to losing functionality as i move up in build numbers

I agree, shameful and poorly executed ripoff of iTunes.  Maybe apple whores will like this version, but as someone who values originality and useability, I'll be sticking with 1.4 until a real release of Amarok comes out, and not just a shameful copy of another **** music program.

No ranting or ****, just my opinion, I hold the Amarok developers in the highest regard as v1.4 was simply awesome.

I don't really find any major bugs with 2.0 and realize many of the 1.4 features are headed into 2.1 etc.  However I must mention that 2.0's GUI layout is a step in the wrong direction IMO.  Amarok 1.4 was simple, fast and clean.  2.0 brings flash and clutter with album icons in the playlist, while offering information that is not needed, like previously played songs?  Isn't that simply the song just above the currently playing song?

I think offering a retro "skin" would satisfy the majority of the 2.0 GUI complains that are littered though the forums.

Andy

I wholeheartedly agree.  My biggest problem with 2.0 is the stupid playlist.  I can't do ANYTHING with it anymore!  What good is it if I can't sort it by artist/album/name/time/track number/etc.   Also, choosing "Display Cover" to show off the album art isn't showing the whole album cover.  This was a really cool feature that my friends were always amazed about.

I'll be upgrading back to 1.4 in a few minutes.