Sunday, February 14. 2010Amarok 2.3 - First Look
Amarok user and enthusiast Abhishek has made a great video, showing off some features of the upcoming Amarok 2.3.
Again, please remember that this is a beta release, and some things are not fully finished (e.g. the toolbar). Enjoy: Video: Amarok 2.3 First Look Trackbacks
Trackback specific URI for this entry
No Trackbacks
Comments
Display comments as
(Linear | Threaded)
Looking good! Still missing a "remove new flag" for a whole podcast (so all episodes below the icon) and no "copy podcast to device" in the episodes menu. New toolbar looks good!
The video is available at http://tinyogg.com/watch/UCCNd/ in Ogg Vorbis/Theora format as well.
(I see someone already submitted it there, but forgot to check the preference for highest quality available.)
What else would it be? Rick Astley - Never Gonna Give You Up
Ah yes. Gah. That was very obvious. Abhi has rick-rolled us!
More info about the song
(The song can be used as an audioswap on youtube's videos) Artist: Musicshake Song: Ocean Time: 01:49 Genre: Instrumental
Mhh.. no volume slider?
What if I have a touchpad without a scrollwheel function?
It also works without mouse wheel. The video didn't make this quite clear.
That's good - well it is a first look as stated in the video comment.
In general, please do not "hide" functionality. I don't know how it works, but if you need to press the button for about 1 second to adjust the volume, many people will not even find the feature
Why using no oxygen icons in toolbar?
Prev/Next buttons remplacement looks really bad IMO. Is alt toolbar always available?
Again: It's not fully finished yet.
How hard is it to read?
Yes. Phonon-VLC is under heavy development. Martin Sandsmark is working on that.
Some users have tested it and said it works pretty well (the latest version from Martin).
I'm waiting with pleasure this another step forward, 2.3, while I have fun with the current 2.2, thank you for all
Looks really interesting! I'm getting the impression that you developers are finally getting back to innovating now that most features from the 1.4.x series are available in 2.x. Most be fun to code on Amarok these days!
Assuming that you don't mind feedback on pre-releases, here are a couple of points (all IMHO): - The stop button is indeed over-rated. All iPods work find without. - It's a cool idea to merge the Prev/Next buttons into the progress bar, but it might indeed hurt discoverability. How about having small buttons next to the prev/next title on top of the progress bar? - How about grouping Play/Pause and Volume control on the left and having something uniquely Amarok on the right? I'm thinking along the lines of a Rediscover-Your-Music-Button. Up to you what that could really do, maybe a combination of plasmoid interaction and dynamic playlist magic. - I understood that there was a GSOC project on Phonon integration last year. Any news on when this will manifest itself in terms of support for visualizations? Thanks for the great work!
It is fun indeed. But also quite complicated... We're currently on a 6 weeks (!) release cycle, including features, and bug fixes. I've summed up our working style here:
http://amarok.kde.org/blog/archives/1142-A-reflection-How-we-made-Amarok-2.2.1.html
Will the new vlc-backend allow gapless playback? This is the one very important feature that I am missing in amarok.
just probably?
 my parties with amarok still waiting... (swear, that day I will posts a photobook!)
Looks amazing!
Amarok always pushes boundaries when it comes to music players. Others are just followers :>
Well, I guess you can see pretty clearly that the plasmoids in the middle are wasting lots of space on wide screens. I would much prefer to have the option to manually resize plasmoids and fit them to my preferences than the current solution of full width and automatic height adjustment to the content.
That would probably make a tabbed environment like the one you started with in amarok 2.0 more sensible than the current approach. Also, I'm not sure I like the disappearance of previous and next buttons. There's also a difference between stop and pause. Both buttons should be there. I understand it's work in progress, though.
@Jens Uhlenbrock
You DO ave tabbed interface. Just unlock the layout (View -> Lock layout). I do have tabbed the Current playlist and the media sources. Plenty of space eerywhere...
I know that there are tabs now. What I meant was the design in 2.0 with 4 different pages. Then I'd like a tab for each page and be able to freely add an arrange plasmoids on them. This way you can fill the space as you see fits to your screen and needs.
Now you have one long page with different plasmoids on it that have all the same width and the length is either predetermined or automatically adjusts to the circumstances. This approach - as I said - wastes really much space and is a lot less flexible. E.g. you cannot have the lyrics and wikipedia plasmoids at one glance. And these are basically the only ones I regularly use.
Nice updates! Lots of cool functionality. I really like the volume button. The "show in sources" is a great way to reconnect the playlist to the collection.
Anyway, nice updates. Inspirational stuff!
I love Amarok, but some feedback follows, all MHO of course.
Looking good, but i don't like that every release has the functionality moved all over the place. The play/pause/stop/prev/next butons are always moved, or disappearing, or changing. Controls should be in one place, together, and consistant from one release to the next. Make it look like Amarok, not like a new app each release. Brand loyalty comes from knowing what you're getting! Some suggestions: The 'next track' (and 'previous') part may benefit from at least some graphical >> button images and icons, to make them look clickable. Perhaps the play/pause/stop could go directly above the track title, with prev/next on the sides? How will the prev/next work when in Random mode? Will Amarok pre-select the next song? Will it be able to remember what it had played previously, and for how far back? Music and the playlist needs more focus. Wikipedia info is handy, but its not always what i want a music player for; I can open a browser for that if needed, especially if Amarok provided a link. Also some bands (QTip is one common example, I would bet Metric is another) bring up Wikipedia articles for unrelated topics; I don't know how to improve this, but maybe filtering for Music or Band would help. So, yes, love Amarok, but I dislike the inconsistancy. A remote control for my stereo has consistant buttons from one week to the next, why not software? In fact, most of my remotes are pretty much identical with these important buttons. Please, focus on features and stability (like Various Artist groupings, and transfers of playlists to media players), not on constant interface changes. Sorry for the gripes, and thanks for the hard work and great player.
This interface can't work with touch screen, you can't scroll. your going against the current KDE human interface guideline for MID/NetBook/Tablet.
On top of that, a play list with 5 more item than the screen height can fit almost bring amarok to an alt with the redmond (aka windows classic) KDE theme (installed by default). Making Amarok unusable do to response delay. I use 2.*, but I still think 1.4 was vastly superior. -Most- users, according to every forum topic in every forums, don't like the middle pane, you should really start working on making it the side panel instead of the central element. I love KDE, and I love Amarok, but performances and features design decision just make it feel wrong. I am not here to troll, you know I am not alone. I don't say drop the central Plasma engine, it is great for extensions, it offer capabilities similar to Firefox / XUL ones and have great potential, but should not be the central element, as it is not the main purpose of the application, nor the most important one. It go against HIG to force an element, useless for most users, to the front. It is how KDE4 became better in usability than 3.*: move away stuff that users does not need or want. In 2.2, you introduced the QDockWidget system to move things around, it is great, but default matter. About the performances problem, 1.4 worked great with the exact same layout I am using (I made 2.2 look like 1.4) and it just does not work, even if I have only 4 widget per playlist songs. It seem that a QTableWidget skinned to look like a QListWidget will always perform better than your custom layout and all those animations. Responsiveness is just not present and it make it unusable. I think that code should be cleaner for performances, event if it mean features regressions. So little performances is a no go. *Forum I am talking about: Phoronix, ArsTechnica, LinuxQuestions, YouTube, OSNews, Gentoo and Neowin. Those sample are the one I am talking about. Look at any KDE4 topics and similar comment will appear by individual users, not trolls, nor opinion spammer.
Good thing amarok is not designed for use on a netbook/tablet/MID.
seriously---one UI will not fit everything. we know this. The current UI WILL NOT work perfectly on small screens. That's why we need a new UI for devices like the n900 or small form factors. The same goes for touch-screen---amarok is not designed for use with touchscreens, as there are many things to be changed to optimize that use case.
Where is the stop button? And in random mode, is the Next "button" going to spoil the next song name? I like it when Amarok surprises me, that's what randomness is for!
And as many people already said, you really need to do something about the middle pane. I'd love to see both lyrics and Wikipedia but I can't because they're one above the other and both too tall to fit! D: At the same time, I don't like looking at that big empty rectangle of wasted space by the lyrics plasmoid, in which Wikipedia would fit perfectly (twice!). Also while you're at it, please fix the look of Wikipedia and other interface elements when using a dark color scheme like Obsidian Coast, it'd be nice.
There is usability problem with the current beta UI.
1] The menubar is not possible to get hided. 2] The play controls are scattered around the UI what makes Amarok terrible in fullscreen mode. Keep same subject functions grouped together, not scattered around the UI! 3] The Previous and Next functions should have buttons like play/pause and volume. And to be a better place'd they should be placed before(after the position bar if wanted to have that way. 4] The previus button is very close help and other menu so the menu should be possible to hide. 5] The play buttons could placed top(bottom) of the playlist itself. What would make it even more clear what to do. 6] The plasma view still is not good default. Hide it by default and allow those who want it to get it enabled. Focus to small screens and small window size. Not to full screen in Full HD monitors. The icons does look very good and the playlist funcionality as well. Good technical functions get added but the default UI should be thinked again. Mayby a someone could clone the GIT and actually make the other kind release. Packagers could make the default configs better by hiding plasma view etc. And last wish. Make the playlist buttons possible to hide as well from bottom of it. As well the menu bar! You are all guys doing great work. And these are being added as a wishes to BKO.
Sorry if that is a dummy question. Will this be the new Amarok release "2.3", or a "2.2.3". I had read the 2.2 series would be a long maintainable release.
2.3.
First we had planned to call it 2.2.3, but then we realized that there are so many changes, we might as well increase the major version. Note that due to our development process (with Git), the version number itself has little meaning to us developers. It's basically just a number...
Old good amarok from kde3 works pretty fast. This new amarok more and more resource demanding. Guys, it's just media player, why to eat 1Gb of memory? Why to start over 1 minute? I have 4Gb and Intel Q6600, i won't say it's low level box.
Sad, sad panda...
My Amarok (Debian Sid, KDE4) has over 20,000 songs and the whole system only has 1GB of RAM on a Pentium D setup, and Amarok doesn't take nearly this long to start nor use this many system resources. Perhaps something is amiss with your OS or with the way a previous Amarok setup was upgraded to the version that you're currently running?
11148 paul 40 0 1641m 506m 24m S 0 12.8 22:15.30 amarok
64k songs in the collection.
That is... definitely not normal. No idea what's wrong there, but there is something wrong
http://img709.imageshack.us/img709/889/theamarokiwantcommented.png
Look, I know you guys get it by now (I'd sort of think it impossible that you wouldn't). There are people that simply prefer how things used to be and no amount of nifty new features is going to dissuade them. Even I prefer the simplicity the old one displayed. Navigating and using amarok 2.x is clumsy and slow (button creep, guys. It's killing me slowly). The interface rearrangement lacks discoverability (what's it doing under "Playlist"?), and there's the conspicuous lack of a real "classic mode" as of yet. I appreciate that you're working on it; have rewritten the whole thing at this point. It just seems like it worthwhile and fairly trivial to make the final push and throw everyone who prefers Amarok 1.4 a bone. Any more, people aren't citing things like "It won't play"; it's all UI, and such small problems that they just a little more housekeeping: add a choice of "classic mode" to the first-run dialogue, fix the column sizing/sorting issue, finally decide what the buttons will look like once and for all. You know, little things that people have wanted since before 2.0. I have every faith that the team that delivered the thoroughly amazing Amarok 1.4 will pull through. I just wanted to chip in with reinforcement that with the way things are, you're really close to satisfying about the entirety of your old userbase.
Is there finally the possibility to synchronize playlists with a MTP device?
It's horrible that this feature is still missing. I'd like to finally switch from 1.4 to 2.x, but as long as I cannot sync my MTP device it has no practical sense. Please hurry to integrate this feature! Many users are missing it.
On fairly generic Kubuntu 9.10 instance, upgrade from posted beta repository only increases version to 2.2.2.90 and still shows it built on KDE 4.3.5.
See screenshot @ http://www.flickr.com/photos/brucewolfe/4363144961/ Please advise.
No worries, the strange version numbers are the result of technical things in the code.
They're "normal", so you have the right version
Here is a working URL for the pic. Some reason the public URL did work.
http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4051/4363144961_6651d6d429.jpg
I finally made the transition from Amarok 1.4 and I like the program. I have a question though, maybe it happend to someone else too. I don't think it is an amarok bug, but I find it strange: I have music, tagged in greek (non latin chars), nonetheless the encoding is UTF-8 and I am using only ID3V2 tags. So far so good. Practically everything shows up in amarok, as it supposed to, except for a handful of Titles which display ? in the fields (a question mark per character). I updated the Tags with easytag (linux) tag and rename (linux/wine) and it doesn't work for amarok. Using the amarok-integrated tag editor will do the trick UNTIL amarok rescans the whole collection, then it will redisplay the ? for the same files
Any Idea, anyone? Sorry, I know this is not the proper forum for something like this, but chances are higher that anyone just might know something
This this:
menu -> Settings -> Configure Amarok -> Collection -> [x] Enable character set detection... Then do a full rescan of the collection.
Thanks. Actually Charset detection was marked, so I UNmarked it and did a rescan. After that, I had double entries, so I removed my greek tracks and after the collection update I moved them back in and everything is OK now.
My guess --mind you, only a guess -- is that there was something going on with MySQL. But I will not test that theory, because presently I have about 60K of tracks in my collection and it is located on a ntfs-formatted external disc, so full scans always take ages, due to ntfs-3g and mysql. But thanks again, your hint solved my problem!
The new volume control is horrible. It's very easy to misclick and e.g. set the volume level instead of muting it, conversely, it's difficult to actually set the volume level when you want that (because of the small and round click zone, and the round movement required). See this thread for more: http://forum.kde.org/viewtopic.php?f=121&t=85937
I do like the new progress bar with the integrated next/previous buttons. I noticed one minor issue that could do with some polish: whenever I click the next or previous track, my mouse pointer changes to a horizontal resize pointer momentarily. This shouldn't happen until I start dragging, or at least hold down the pointer for a bit longer. I don't really see what's the point in dragging, but fortunately Amarok is intelligent enough to consider it a click if I only drag a little (i.e. I accidentally move the mouse a bit while clicking).
I agree! The rest ist pretty nice.
Specially the new progress bar is cool. I figured out some mouse pointer issues. Have to make a small list of these points
|
Amarok LinksCalendar
QuicksearchCategoriesSyndicate This BlogBlog AdministrationWe Listen To... Powered by
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
