Saturday, April 30. 2005amaroK, complex?
I've spent maybe 30% of my coding time for the last 20 months trying to make amaroK usable, simple, clear and logical (I'll break down the other 70% some other time). And I spend maybe half of my amaroK thinking time contemplating how amaroK could be made more intuitive. This is why I'm always pained to hear people describe it as the opposite. Especially with the launch of 1.2.3 I find it ever harder to understand what it is that people find difficult, unclear or complex about it. Not that everyone finds it sucky; nowadays it does seem that there are more people saying "amaroK is a joy to use!" than "amaroK sucks!" Which is very rewarding.
Hearing JRiddell say that #gnome-hackers think our startup wizard is scary is interesting. I assume they don't object to the wizard itself; being a music-library application it would be pretty non-intuitive to expect the user to use his own initiative to set up the library. What's scary about it? Is there too much text? Because we were trying to be thorough and helpful. It's funny how you have to be perfectly concise or people criticise you either way. There's always some issue that gets the most talk at any stage of amaroK's life. Pre 1.2.0 it was bugginess, pre 1.1.0 it was non-intuitiveness, pre 1.0.0 it was getting the damn thing installed, pre that I can't remember. Recently I've heard a surprising amount of "how do I put music in it!". I find this difficult to understand as it seems pretty obvious to me: It's the first menu item in the first menu, or use the filebrowser, or drag and drop to the playlist (it's even labelled "the playlist" in big letters on first-ever-run), or use the usual shortcut for open, CTRL-O. We even added a help text for 1.2.0 that shows in the playlist the first time you run it, it explains how to add music to the playlist. Probably it needs improvement. I really want XP style bubble help tips and have half written a cool class to do this. Then I'd add these to all the browsers, and widgets that have cool hidden features, and to stuff that could do with some further explanation. When questioning these people I have found many of them are used to using JuK and expect amaroK to be similar. Whatever, I'm going to spend some time figuring out how to make this step easier. It's funny, but once you've cracked these issues you only find out 2 months later when the complaints stop coming in. When we fixed the installation issues at pre-1.0.0 nobody came to the channel saying, "wow that was easy to install!"  I just noticed one day that I was spending a lot less time helping people fix their amaroK. But when you think about it, that's human nature really.I'd like to hear detailed arguments for what is complex about amaroK, if you have the time. Thanks! Trackbacks
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My 2 cent:
What about to develop a method to change the score of an mp3 in the context menu or even better in the docked icon? I'm used to create playlists based on the score of the music I'm hearing so I find annoying clicking the mp3 item with the right mouse button and then change file information. Doing this for many mp3s is a little frustrating.. and It seems a hidden feature for the first time user, at least it has been for me! GOo
This is a pretty good idea actually. The systray I think is a good place to edit/manipulate the current track info. Often you are just doing something else and realise a tag that just flashed in the OSD is wrong. I'll try to remember to add this.
Just to reassure you : I use amarok for several months now, and now I couldn't live without it. It's probably the best program I use under kde.
The only issue I have with amarok right now is that it loves to chew CPU when it has troubles streaming sound off the net. The rest of it is easy enough to work with, but perhaps I'm not a normal user. I've been using computers for somewhere around 20 years and I'm a programmer. I dunno, other than amarok going bang once in a while when a stream hiccups, or when it gets told stop and pause within a few milliseconds, life is good.
I do find it annoying that configuring the engine requires that you press apply after choosing an engine before you can set the settings for that engine.
> I do find it annoying that configuring the engine requires
> that you press apply after choosing an engine before > you can set the settings for that engine. Yeah, this is just us being lazy. I'll try to remember to fix this too.
I've run into problems when changing engines, like Gst -> xine, ending up with xine screaming about unavailable sound devices.
There are no such problems, when I first apply "no-engine" engine and then choose xine and apply it. Maybe amarok should do this intermediate switch internally? As a safety measure.
Given I've followed amarok closely and I have reported issues on the past too, I have to admit the progress made on amarok's usability is impressive.
Obviously, the more features an application got the more complex it will become. Some applications tend to become almost full Operating Systems and that makes things harder. I think amaroK devels have made a very good work on putting all those features in a comprehensible manner. Of course it's possible to improve things, but maybe the greatest mistake is ours, of users, who report usability problems and not give any solutions. Maybe we should ask ourselves... are there better solutions?
I'm thrilled by this response, so thanks!
 > Of course it's possible to improve things, but maybe the > greatest mistake is ours, of users, who report usability > problems and not give any solutions. Maybe we should > ask ourselves... are there better solutions? Yeah I think we're all guilty of this. It's easy to say "Well obviously it shouldn't be done this way!" but often when you take the time to find out everything about a feature or system you understand it is not so simple. You often have to compromise on many issues, and it's a challenge to get it right for as many people as possible. But it's good when you think you get it right. Insightful comment!
Ignore the #gnome-hackers - amaroK is an amazing program!
Having said that though, there are a couple of gripes I have with it: - I'd prefer if amaroK didn't automatically switch to the "Context" tab, when I hit play. Usually, I add a song to the playlist, then hit play before continuing to add songs - maybe amaroK could only switch to the "Context" tab if no songs have been added in the past few seconds? - It's hard to work out what the icons for the tabs refer to - I'd love to see text there too, or at least have an option to have it displayed (i.e. allowing m_tabBar in browserbar to have the KDEV3 style as well as the VSNET style).
> I'd prefer if amaroK didn't automatically switch to the
> "Context" tab, when I hit play. Usually, I add a song to > the playlist, then hit play before continuing to add songs > - maybe amaroK could only switch to the "Context" tab if > no songs have been added in the past few seconds? This is actually an option in the preferences. But I agree with you, it is annoying and it is a bug. The problem we have fixing this is a developer clash on what we want from this feature, and we've had problems since 1.1 getting it solved appropriately. I want it to figure out if you are doing something with the interface and not switch then. I'll keep trying to make it be clever. The reason it switches is that the context browser is cool and useful, and often you don't realise you want the info it provides until it's there in your face. But there's no need to be irritating. Ideally the context browser would be a separate panel, but then it would maybe take up too much space, so I don't know exactly how to fix this yet. > - It's hard to work out what the icons for the tabs refer > to - I'd love to see text there too The reason we haven't made this the default is because with most styles it's hard to figure out which tab is active when all the texts are shown. But I agree with you, it's far more useful to have the texts shown. One idea I have is making tooltips appear over all the tabs when the tab bar has focus. I'll try this out when I get a chance.
> The reason we haven't made this the default is because with
> most styles it's hard to figure out which tab is active when > all the texts are shown. But I agree with you, it's far more > useful to have the texts shown. One idea I have is making > tooltips appear over all the tabs when the tab bar has > focus. I'll try this out when I get a chance. I definitely think that having the texts, and thus larger tabs, would be much better. Tooltips are awkward and ambiguous (does clicking on the tooltip open the tab it describes or go through to click on the unseen thing underneath? or does clicking on one dismiss it?) Perhaps the tabbar could be changed to use the usual method of showing which tab is active -- removing the boundary lines between the active tab and the content area, so that it all seems to be "on the same page."
Sorry if this turns out to be a double post... Konq is/was giving me cache issues.
How about displaying the text for all tabs, and bolding the active tab's text?
>This is actually an option in the preferences. But I agree
> with you, it is annoying and it is a bug. The problem we > have fixing this is a developer clash on what we want > from this feature, and we've had problems since 1.1 > getting it solved appropriately. I want it to figure out if you > are doing something with the interface and not switch > then. I'll keep trying to make it be clever. Uhm, I also found that automatic swithing annoying: I normally have the "Lyrics" tab opened, and I definitely would like it to remain focused when switching from song to song, loading the lyrics of the next song. Apart from that minor problem, I can tell you that amarok is the best music player I've ever used, and don't bother aboput the wizzard: I found it helpful, actually. Absolutely no problem with it! Have a nice day =)
Maybe it would be a good idea to switch from the previous view to context after it was inactive for 15-30 secs or so?
I happened to start using Amarok today for the first time in earnest, and really like it. I don't remember being at all confused about how it worked, despite not really having used a database style media player before. It seems pretty easy to choose music either by album or playlist or song, or just open an external file.
The sheer number of extra features (such ability to retrieve album covers, lyrics, etc) means you can technically describe it as 'complex', in the sense of 'having several parts'. But that is very different from confusing, which I don't think it is at all. Attention to usability is really obvious actually - nice touches like having global shortcuts already set up, and customisable, so I don't have to go and use KHotKeys or something - thank you, this works a dream! So, I for one can't understand what the complaint is, and I'm really impressed and pleased with amarok. My only niggles are things that have been mentioned in the comments above already.
amaroK is one of the reasons I give to friends to switch to Linux and KDE. I show off how awesome the context browser is and just how nice things fit together. This program is one of, if not my number one, favorite application (of any desktop, of any OS). It's better than Firefox!
However, I do have a couple of things I'd like to mention (of course, I don't tell my friends this): - I know I could go and edit the sources myself, but maybe a GUI method of altering the scoring method would be nice? I noticed especially that short tracks get catapulted to the top immediately. - Score "decay." I've had the same tracks sitting at my top-10 forever. It'd be nice for scores to slowly decay over time when a song isn't played. This way, I don't have to manually go thru my top songs and set them to some arbitrary lower number. Just let the player do it slowly and automatically over time (giving other songs a chance to move up). - Smart-playlists seem broken? I've never been able to get these things to work properly or maybe there's a performance issue here. Whenever I try to have it give me say "all of the following: genre - R&B, never played, completely random, limit 50" or something it crashes the player. - Memory/CPU usage reduction would be (primarily memory) b/c for some reason, amaroK spawns three processes each taking up 10% of my memory (according to 'top'). - I recall reading in a changelog that there would be a "stop playing after current track" but I've never seen a plugin or menu listing for this. That is pretty much ALL of my complaints with amaroK. Otherwise, the interface is very intuitive, the feature set is amazing, and the plugin system is pretty neat. Plus, I use dcop and have an IRC announce script so that's a cool thing too. Keep up the good work!
-right click on the currently playing track to get the menu option to stop after it
-please make good backtraces for crashs, info on FAQ -all three of those 'processes' are pretty much using the same memory (the same 10%). And actually that 10% is counting shared libraries, so much of that is probably also being used by other programs as well. Really top should have some disclaimer that for memory usage its very misleading.
> I know I could go and edit the sources myself, but
> maybe a GUI method of altering the scoring method > would be nice? I noticed especially that short tracks get > catapulted to the top immediately. There's always been a "secret" method for doing this, you can inline edit the scores in the playlist. But now with amaroK 1.3-CVS you can edit the scores in the edit-tags dialog. I'd like to make it possible to edit tags in the context browser as well. Anywhere they are shown.> Score "decay." I've had the same tracks sitting at my > top-10 forever. It'd be nice for scores to slowly decay > over time when a song isn't played. This is an original and excellent idea! I'll suggest it to muesli. > Smart-playlists seem broken? I've never been able to > get these things to work properly or maybe there's a > performance issue here. Whenever I try to have it give > me say "all of the following: genre - R&B, never played, > completely random, limit 50" or something it crashes the > player. I think there's some unfixed crash bugs in smart playlists. I hope we can fix this and backport for 1.2.4. > Memory/CPU usage reduction would be (primarily > memory) b/c for some reason, amaroK spawns three > processes each taking up 10% of my memory (according > to 'top'). CPU use is good when amaroK is minimised, and memory use is pretty poor. I'd like to fix this but we generate a lot of image data with all the covers and it just hogs a lot of memory that doesn't get unallocated (due to issues with free()). I'm sure we can do better though, I'm just not yet sure where to start. OTOH I've recently worked out how to half amaroK's startup time! (provided you use small playlists).> I recall reading in a changelog that there would be a > "stop playing after current track" but I've never seen a > plugin or menu listing for this. Only available in the playlist's context menu. For 1.3 I'll redesign the playlist to use more actions and it'll be in the first menu probably. Thanks for your comments.
> There's always been a "secret"
method for doing this,> you can inline edit the scores in the playlist. But now with > amaroK 1.3-CVS you can edit the scores in the edit-tags > dialog. I'd like to make it possible to edit tags in the > context browser as well. Anywhere they are shown. Heh, I knew this . I guess I wasn't too clear on what I meant. I meant a way to change the actual method that amaroK assigns a score to a playing track. So, for example, there would be a type-in box and I could type:0.5*(percent_played) + 0.5*(previous_score) or something like that to determine how songs are scored. It seems that part of the current scoring algorithm is track-length dependent?
Yay for this idea! It would also be good if you could take into account play time too. It seems unfair that short tracks get a better score just because they could be listened to 5 times in another song's duration.
>> Score "decay." I've had the same tracks sitting at my
>> top-10 forever. It'd be nice for scores to slowly decay >> over time when a song isn't played. > This is an original and excellent idea! I'll suggest it to muesli. I'd love to see this as well!
> - Smart-playlists seem broken? I've never been able to get
> these things to work properly or maybe there's a > performance issue here. Whenever I try to have it give me > say "all of the following: genre - R&B, never played, > completely random, limit 50" or something it crashes the > player. Mhh, that should be fixed in the cvs since "today". If not write me. DanielW
Those gnome guys are crazy, your import wizard is heads and heels better than rhythmbox's. Rhythmbox give you no clue as to what it's doing, or any sign of progress. If it locks up importing a huge collection (as it has done to me) there's just no way to know, and this is *infuriating*. Amarok is so much better in this regard.
Amarok also has lots of features that I had waited patiently but in vain for in Rhythymbox. In place tag editing. Better (and faster) searching using a real database. Cover art. Sure there are a few pecadilloes, but overall, I am ecstatic to have found Amarok. I love it just the way it is
amarok is the best audio program i use under gnome..
some suggestions: 1. decoupling interface from backend, to allow us gtk user to use amarok without loading kdelibs. 2. integrate the cover manager with the rest of the player, and allow DnD from the cover manager to the playlist, or some other way (maybe as another browsing mode at the collectiong items? 3. integrate streaming media library. using an external tool like streamtuner with amarok seems redundant. 4. same goes with the visualizations. it opens an extra window, which in turn opens another extra window. it seems redundant. i think that the implemantation of visualizations the iTunes way is a good idea. 5. the startup wizards have (if i recall correctly) too much text in it. otherwise, it's quite important. other than those issues, amarok is the best player i've ever used. better than itunes, better that winamp, (and trivially better than windows media player 6..10) it's da rox0rs!
amarok is the best music entertainment system - i don't call it player. One thing I notice in latest cvs ist a wikipedia-tab on a prominent place. I think this is not good. A RMB menu "searching wikipedia" is fine but tab need valuable horizontal space from the playlist.
How to make amaroK better - not that easy I see some tech jargon like "URL" which is not very user friendly. Maybe some "What is this" info would also be nice. And the interface to external players looks like ipod-only. There are many more USB-massstorage devices out there. Of course you can manage these devices with konqi and kioslave - but this is like kio_camera vs digikam: The specialist is much more usable. So amaroK as a generic maybe hal-enabled platform für audio multimedia devices is an idea for the future. But please let this program be easy to use like now!Bye and thanks Thorsten P.S. The wizard in the extra-menu look wrong placed to me - its a one-time-thingy P.P.S. I wish that more blogs would allow posting of not logged-in users
> tab need valuable horizontal space from the playlist.
I also agree that we require the context browser to be too wide now. I want this changed, we need a solution other than tabs for the context browser. > The wizard in the extra-menu look wrong placed to me Yeah I think I will remove it and see what people say. Although it doesn't do any harm there, it doesn't make much sense. If someone really wants to run it still there is a command line switch for it, although I dunno why we have that.
There's already a plan to move the 'home' statistics to the collection browser. The 'home' statistics don't make a whole lot of sense in a /context/ browser anyways.
The command line switch is handy for b0rked amaroK's. I just like the wizard in the 'tools' because it makes debugging the wizard easier. That's the only time I've used it.
How about getting rid of the tabs, and putting links/buttons for home/lyrics/wikipedia/etc. in the HTML itself? That way they could be arranged in a grid and fit to width (eg 1x4, 2x2, or 4x1 depending on how much horizontal space there is), or something.
IMO, the first-run wizard does have too much text, but it didn't scare me until I got to the Database tab. I am new to linux and barely knew the difference between MySQL and SQLite. Any why would any new user care which they use or what the hostname and port is? This is a great advanced feature, but far too intimidating for someone new to linux. Get rid of the Database configuration in the wizard please!
Yeah I totally agree and didn't want this in the first place. Eean, what do you say now? Can we remove it? Just go with sqlite in the wizard the advanced user can change it later.
A user wanting to use mysql or postresql would have to scan their collection twice (or know to stop the collection scanning) if it was removed from the wizard. Its kind of a technical necesity that it be in the wizard, since the wizard happens before anything else. We can't forget there are not-advanced users who want to gain the advantage of a real database (at least, there are in #amarok).
I did try to make it clear that you could just click next and you'd be fine. Of course, users don't read very well, maybe that the text could be shortened. Of course, in KDE 4.0, hopefully klink (forget its new name) will sort out the whole database configuration thing for us.
klink's new name is Tenor
I agree with eean on this one, until Tenor can be used for our meta-data, we need this page in there... As eean (I think in jest, but still) said, we may need to do something to the text... It might do to simply add "If you are not sure, simply click next" in a paragraph of its own to the top of that text?
Yeah true. But we should make an attempt to hide it to make the wizard a little less scary I think. But yeah, scanning twice sucks.
The text of the database page has been reworded to be a lot shorter. "amaroK uses a database. Choose one [saying they can just click continue]." (oggb4mp3's idea). Perhaps a model of how to do things for other pages - basically give up trying to teach our users how amaroK works (which the database text kind of was doing before) and simply state what the decision is they need to make and a minimum amount of guidance.
I don't know how it can be hidden more then it is currently... sqlite-only users don't see it.
I just got my sister up and running with Kubuntu and she's never used linux before. She loves amarok and had the same criticism as I previously posed about getting rid of the database tab on the first-run wizard. Another thing she said was that she has no idea what "Search folders recursively" means. I suggest you change it to "Search subfolders as well" both in the first-run wizard, and the main settings.
I try not to let Microsoft influence my interface guidelines too much, but I find several places where they actually manage to get things right.
You can choose out of several alternatives: 1) Ask the user if they want a "Simple" (or some synonym) or "Advanced" setup in the first dialog. Simple removes recursive searching (because they probably want it), and also automatically sets up SQLite. 2) Put "(reccomended)" next to options that are confusing. e.g.: "SQLite (reccomended)" "MySQL" "PostgreSQL" etc.
I'd like to have amarok offer a way to store and access lyrics locally or even in the mysql database instead of retrieving them from the internet everytime, that would be great.
One "bug" I noticed when using amaroK on my notebook at work: I get my ip adress via dhcp at work and it's on another net than my sql database at home and amaroK takes ages to start if it even does, perhaps there could be one more check if the database is available to solve this issue. Besides that I didn't find amaroK confusing to use or understand and please go on expanding it's features, there's nearly no way it can be too complex
Yes, the database code is not very robust in general. amaroK was written with sqlite in mind, where one was able to assume the database was always there.
aseigo has replied: http://aseigo.blogspot.com/2005/04/amarok-first-impressions.html
I have replied: http://shadowconflict.blogspot.com/2005/04/amarok-is-complex.html
Maybe you can drop the undo / redo buttons at the buttom right corner. I never ever used them and if I will need them one day they are still present in the menu.
Hmm, I use the undo/redo buttons almost every day, when I accidentaly change the sort order of the playlist (when resizing a column).
Some suggestions (can't find amarok version in app);
- the cancel button in the setup wizard is much wider then the other buttons. Why? - The images to distinguish between xmms and juk setup are not very clear. Too much background and too much songs in there. - using xmms as an example could probably be replaced with 'like xmms or winamp'. - don't number your wizard pages if you don't say how many pages there are. And don't start with 0 - please make the 'collection' text a lot shorter (less of an advertisement and less technical stuff). Ask me for a suggestion if you are interrested. - why is the checkbox in the tree a V while my theme (plastic) shows an 'X' - move the options (checkboxes) on that same collection page left so your tree view is bigger. - disable cancel on the 'finish' page. On a different subject; the whole 'context' tab verses the 'Collection' tab have so many different concepts that it seems like one is not finished at all. Double click verses single click is just a quick example.
> the cancel button in the setup wizard is much wider then
> the other buttons. Why? I dunno but this is hardly a usability issue. I can look into it today though. > The images to distinguish between xmms and juk setup > are not very clear. Too much background and too much > songs in there. Debatable. But I would like better images too. So I agree. > using xmms as an example could probably be replaced > with 'like xmms or winamp'. Yeah good point. > don't number your wizard pages if you don't say how > many pages there are. And don't start with 0 We do say there are 3 steps on the first page. But I've never liked the numbers much. I'll try to improve this. > please make the 'collection' text a lot shorter (less of an > advertisement and less technical stuff). Ask me for a > suggestion if you are interrested. Yeah I'd like to do that. Suggestions are welcome, thanks > why is the checkbox in the tree a V while my theme > (plastic) shows an 'X' I'm not sure what you mean here. Can you post a screenie or something like that? > move the options (checkboxes) on that same collection page left so your tree view is bigger. I'll try but this is Qt layout's choices. > disable cancel on the 'finish' page. This seems like an extremely bad usability decision to me! Why on earth would we make it not possible to cancel at the last minute?! Ludicrous! > On a different subject; the whole 'context' tab verses > the 'Collection' tab have so many different concepts that > it seems like one is not finished at all. Double click > verses single click is just a quick example. Well in brief, this is because they are completely different. It's like the difference between a pushbutton and an icon that can be activated on the desktop. To be more verbose, I agree, but think this is just tough. To highlight your example, it depends on your single click setting, and really you are criticising the difference between using HTML and using normal controls. Since the context browser is an HTML document it uses single click behaviour. Also you should note that the Hand cursor is used to make it clear that only one click is required to activate the stuff in the context browser while it is the arrow cursor in the collection view which makes it clear that it is double click to activate. I agree that there are different concepts and this is not great, but I really don't know what to do about that. We can't even at a code level make it so you can double click not single click links in KHTML, and if we did that we'd get people claiming this was a stupid decision and we are being non-intuitive. So it seems like a lose-lose situation. My personal opinion is that it isn't so bad because the cursor changes between the hand and the arrow and if only KDE was consistent with this in general it would be clear if a single or double click was required.
I just installed 1.3 cvs.
In my opinion the tabs over in the context tab are very unhandy. 4 tabs are definitely to much in my opinon, 2 would not bother me. Why not put a lyrics symbol and a wikipedia symbol next to the musicbrainz symbol and the 3 symbols too under Albums by Artis right to the length of the songs? Aditonally that would require to have a backbutton from the wikipedia and lyrics tab. So you could easy get informations of songs you don't play.
CVS is always experimental, we tried the tab to see how it would feel, we don't like it either. We're frantically thinking up something to replace the tabs. I've never liked the tabs particularly as then you have tabs next to tabs. And also we are limited now, we can never add a new tab as it will be far too wide. Thanks.
what about some big buttons, the way Evolution
(the PIM) does for it's different components? i think it can solve the "too many tabs" problem.
I have two ideas about the tabs. Not the context browser tabs, but the ones on the side of the player.
1) move them to the top of the player going horizontally instead of vertically. They could be a good size with icons and text. This of course is similiar to the Windows Media Player 10. I hate saying saying "do this like Windows" but lets face it, it's an easy and OBVIOUS interface. But Windows Media Player BLOWS!! 2) Have buttons similiar to KDE PIM in the current location as the tabs. However, have that part of the window show nothing but the word "navigation" in a collapsed window. When the user moves the mouse over the window, the window immediately expands to reveal the navigation buttons. No clicking required. When the mouse is removed from the navigation window area, the window automatically collapses. Some may find this annoying. This is obviously much less user-friendly than the first suggestion, but on the first time doing it you know how to use it.
hm I'm surprised about this thread...
actually the main reason for me to use amaroK is because it has the best and simplest user interface I have ever seen in any player...
I agree. Perhaps this thread is a reflection on how surprising difficult it is to make an featureful media player with good usability.
I too think amaroK ist hands down the best music-managing software currently available. Thanks a lot for it.
The single worst gripe I have with it is the current rating system, which is too simple to really be useful. Case in point: Stopping the player shouldn't lower the playing song's rating. Switching tracks doesn't always imply I don't like the current song all that much -- I may just be acoustically browsing part of my collection. The obvious solution would be to decouple playlist manipulations and track switches from the rating system and have an explicit rating system, as others have suggested. While it may not work in practice to have the user vote "thumbs up" or "thumbs down" for the current songs of his or her own accord, maybe it would suffice to have a "thumbs down" option (bound to a hotkey and automatically skipping to the next track) that just lowers the rating (which would then start at a default value). I'm not sure what a mechanism to re-raise the rating if this was implemented might look like, however (aside from manually entering a higher score). Another minor issue is amaroK's in-built tag editing: I prefer to only have ID3v2 tags on MP3 files. Yet amaroK cannot be instructed as to what version of ID3 tags it writes. So I end up using EasyTag to tag the files, which is kind of cumbersome if want to merely change a song's genre. I'm aware that this probably is a taglib issue, but there sure is a way to instruct the latter as to what tags to write? Also, I'm aware that there's recently been some talk on the topic of artist tags. I too think that there definitely should be support for secondary artist tags as provided by the newer ID3v2 standards and OggVorbis. The single-genre limitation is bothersome too, in some cases, although I'm not sure the tag standards include fields that would solve that issue. But all in all, these are just minor issues that subtract little from the overall joy that is using amaroK (and showing it off to friends ).
I agree, on the one hand I do like the fact that scoring tracks is automated (it's a pain to manually rate thousands of songs). But this feature definitely gets in the way when I'm trying to find certain songs and end up dropping the score of half a CD when they shouldn't be. Maybe one solution to this is to separate Score and Play Count. When a track is listened to all the way through, increase the play count by one, otherwise do nothing with it. This allows an automated way to pick out your favorite tracks (pick the 20 most played) but avoids the problem of decreasing a score when you are browsing. The Score could then be made manual much like the iTunes 5-star system or maybe following one of the suggestions above. I'm pretty sure play count is already stored internally since it's used to calculate score so this change wouldn't be too hard to make.
As for general useablity, I think amaroK is by far the best music manager/player out there. Thanks for the excellent work!!
>I agree, on the one hand I do like the fact that scoring tracks is
>automated (it's a pain to manually rate thousands of songs). But this >feature definitely gets in the way when I'm trying to find certain >songs and end up dropping the score of half a CD when they >shouldn't be. Here, here Perhaps the score shouldnt go down when you are skipping a track. Sometimes a track has dead time in the middle of it (secret tracks), sometimes an mp3 is an entire album or a 20 minute Beethoven movement, and just because you only listened to half, doesnt mean that its a bad thing. If scores go up by the % played * length of song and scores go down as mentioned above as time goes by, or with an explicit thumbs down hot key, this could solve it. Also maybe you should use audioscrobber scores to set some base scores. If I come from another player or start using another computer, it would be cool if I could port my audioscrobbler information, so I could plug between my work computer and home computer. Keep up the Good Work!
The perceived complexity is from users who have experience or are coming from another music manager.
Both Juk, iTunes and Rhythmbox all use a different method of playing songs than Amarok, which in turn leads to confusion. Since there's no clear way to inform the user of this difference, it leads to users feeling stupid for lack of a better word. The 3 players above, herein referred to as juk, use the right main view as a dynamic display of the currently filtered songs. This feature is filled on by the "Collection" browser on the left side of the Amarok app. Further, amarok uses a tree menu which in itself isn't the most friendly widget available. This difference in effect switches how a user must think of their music. Instead of choosing songs based on a filter with a dynamically changed list, they must do that on the left side of Amarok and drag those songs into the "Play list." This creates an extra step. Another major difference is in the handling of play lists. Amarok excels at real-time play list management. Where a user can add, subtract and re-order their current play list very easily. Unfortunately for those who like to setup predefined play lists, amarok is very clunky. First, you must filter using the collection browser, drag to the play list, click on another tab, right click on current, choose save and then type a new name. Juk allows you to type a new name for the play list, filter in your main view, drag and drop into the new play list. Less steps to accomplish the same thing. Juk allows you to easily append songs to your play list while auto-saving it by simply dragging new songs onto the existing play list. Amarok requires you to in effect re-create the play list and save over the old one. More steps to do the same thing. These two major changes require the user to rethink everything and even relearn how to manage their music. Since everything is reversed from Juk, amarok feels clunky to use when the user has just switched. That first impression of being clunky or overly complex may turn some people off and make them go back to Juk. I came from rhythmbox, juk, itunes and when I first made the switch, I found amarok to be clunky. After I got used to it, I began to appreciate the way it was designed. I found they were actually better for me. This is why some people feel Amarok is complex. Those who were used to a program that did everything opposite no doubt feel amarok is a little unfriendly. Sorry for the long winded response.
The biggest problem with amaroK as far as I can see (aside from random crashes at startup) is that it is very difficult to edit playlists. Essentially impossible, in fact, unless I am missing something.
Here is what I want to be able to do, which I can't seem to be able to do. I suspect many people want this as well. I want to be able to create a large list of named playlists, and then choose one or more of these to play at any given time. I can do the latter quite easily, but creating and editing playlists is difficult: 1) I cannot see the order in which items will be played in the playlist brower (until it is loaded into current playlist) 2) I cannot change the order in which items will be played by dragging and dropping in the playlist browser (even if changed in current playlist of course, they are not altered in the permanent playlist) 3) I cannot drag and drop from one playlist to another in the playlist browser (even though for no reason, a lineis constantly redrawn indicating where the drop would take place ) 4) If I copy from the current playlist into a playlist in the playlist browser, the item goes in there, but only temporarily (it is not there after a restart, it is not actually stored in the playlist file) 5) Whether or not playlists are updated permanently seems to vary depending upon how they were created. 6) There is no clear distinction made between playlists that are automatically managed (partially) and those that have to be imported and explorted explicitly (which one should not have to do in order to get internal playlists saved) 7) If titles of items are changed, they do not take effect in the playlists in the playlist browser (there is no reason they could not easily do so, by getting the tag information instead of using the title stored in the m3u file which is now out of date -- it is not necessary to update all these files when a title is changed. (However, one more important thing, the option to change the underlying file name to make it more rational (even automatically via a standard format extracted from tag information) should be allowed, would require a scanning and altering of all these files, but that is still no big deal) Rythymbox handles the very basic playlists much better, but I dislike it because it does not allow tag editing, which is a very important feature. Handling these playlists basics is a very basic thing that I think should be addressed before lots of fancy stuff.
I personally like the way iTunes handles saved playlists, and I know many others who do as well. In iTunes, dragging a group of songs onto the playlist list on the left side creates a new playlist and immediately lets you name it. I think in amarok, dragging a group of songs from the main view to the playlist menu on the left should create a new playlist (stored in amarok's default playlist directory because many people don't care where their playlists are as long as they can access them from amarok) and let you name it with a popup input window or inside the playlist menu. And of course, playlist should save by default! You shouldn't have to right-click -> save to store changes!
Really hard to understand is the sound system area. When I switch to gstreamer or to xine I can change too many technical things. I understand as a software developer only a few of them.
Well, its our goal that the defaults be good enough and shouldn't have to learn anything about that stuff. But yes, especially with xine, there should probably be some changes.
Just wanted to say that I like AmaroK and didn't find it that difficult to figure out even though I have never really used a program like this before. I've just recently switched from Windows to Linux and I've been using Winamp and Foobar2k as music player.
Amarok is the definitive music library/player - no question
Everyone I told about it has converted instantly and they're eagerly checking for updates everyday - Ignore moany people - just be proud that you have created the best system bar none commercial or freeware! THANK YOU!!
I like and use amarok, but it has a steep initial learning curve.
For me at least, the unclear relationship between the main right panel, the Collection tab, and the Playlist tab is the main culprit. Here are some suggestions to lessen the learning curve. Suggestion 1: Make "All Collection" the default view for the right panel. When I began using amarok, I expected that the right panel would display either my entire collection or the current playlist. However, the default view of the right panel is blank. For a newcomer to amarok, this behavior can be a big roadblock. Once the user has added music, it should be glaringly obvious where that music is; listing it all in the right panel by default would accomplish this (and would match behavior in JuK and iTunes). Suggestion 2: Treat album and artist collections as playlists. A common user goal is to listen to an album. In amarok, this is not easy to do. A user must select all songs from the album, and then make a playlist (and to a beginning user, it's not obvious how to create a playlist); the user then must select the playlist. Why should the user have to do that when the album already exists in the Collection tab. I suggest that artists and albums in the Collection tab be treated as playlists. When a user double-clicks on an album, the songs in that album appear in the right panel, just as if a playlist with those songs were selected. Likewise, if a user double-clicks on an artist, all songs under that artist appear in the right panel. Suggestion 3: Merge the Collection and Playlist tabs. Amarok has three distinct mechanisms for grouping songs: playlists, smart playlists, and artist/album collections. It is not obvious how to create playlists. It is confusing to have 3 mechanisms with three separate views for accomplishing the same task. Merge the Collection and Playlist tabs into a single tab. Call the merged tab Playlists. The new tab should include the existing Artists/Albums (from the current Collection tab). Playlists and smart playlists should also be listed in this tab. Use icons to differentiate between Artist/Album playlists, regular playlists, and smart playlists. Keep the existing icons for Artists/Albums. Use the existing playlist icon for regular playlists. Use a new icon (or the playlist icon with a different color) for smart playlists. The three types of playlists accomplish different, but related tasks (Artist/Album - a default mechanism for playing an album or all of an artist's albums; regular playlist - a mechanism for playing an arbitrary list of songs; smart playlist - a mechanism for plaing a set of songs based on logic). These three types should all be listed in a single list in a single tab, and differentiated using icons. Suggestion 4: It should be obvious how to create a playlist Without reading the manual, the only obvious way for a newcomer to create a playlist is to click the "Create Smart-Playlist" button. This is poor design. A user should be able to figure out on their own how to create a playlist after playing around with the program for a minute. Even after reading the manual, the following steps are required to create a playlist: go to collections tab, select songs and drag them into the right panel, go to playlist menu and select "Save Playlist As...". This method has several flaws. 1) User must know that they can copy songs from the collection view to the right panel. This is not obvious. 2) In order to create a playlist within amarok, the user must save an external m3u file. If that m3u file is moved or deleted, amarok no longer knows about the playlist. 3) To delete a song from a playlist, the user highlights the song in the right panel, then hits delete. This can be scary, because the user may believe that this will delete the actual mp3 or ogg file. Better mechanism #1: The JuK or iTunes method: user highlights songs from the right panel list, then drags highlighted songs to the left panel (when playlist tab is selected), user is then prompted for a name for the new playlist. Better mechanism #2: user highlights songs from the right panel list, then clicks on a "Create Playlist" button, user is then prompted for a name for the new playlist. This button is greyed out when no songs are selected. Users will notice the button, and see that when songs are selected the button is usable. Alternatively, allow the user to click the button when not songs are selected; in that case display a pop-up window that tells the user to select songs first. Better mechanism #3: Same as #2, but have a "Create Playlist" menu entry under the Playlist menu. Better mechanism #4: Rename the "Add Playlist" button to "Import Playlist" to better reflect the fact that you are importing an existing, external playlist file rather than actually creating a new playlist. Amarok's playlist interface is powerful, but for the newcomer or person used to iTunes or JuK, the mechanism for creating an using playlists is far from intuitive. Implementing some or all of the changes described above would significantly improve the usability of amarok.
Your suggestions are all pretty obvious and will be implemented eventually.
A couple of ideas that would make my style of listening more usable. I tend to listen on the background and occasionally have an vague idea what I want to listen to.
1st. a helpful thing would be a global shortuct that would bring up a find box that would let me search my collection and checkboxes to select add found song as the next or last item into the current playlist. The window should probably include a textbox, a list of matching songs updated realtime and a couple of buttons for possible actions. It would be nice, if last couple levels of directory names could be included in the search as some songs aren't tagged (yet) but have useful metadata in directory names. Usecase would be something like: 1. press Win+F 2. enter parts of the lookup, until the list is narrow enough 3. use up/down keys (in which case focus should remain in the textbox) or mouse to select wanted song. 4. press enter to add as next track (or as options dictate). 2nd. a nice compact version of the playlist that pops up if I press a global hot key. Up-down for navigation, enter play selected, esc to close.
1. You seem to be trying to describe the playlist window, where that feature already exists
Set the Show/Hide Playlist shortcut to [win]f, and it ought to do just what you want to do. Start typing and it'll narrow down the selection, up/down keys let you select, enter will start the selected song, or if you press enter with the focus in the text box remove the filter and start the song at the top of the filtered list.Also, you seem to be describing XMMS' [j] feature, where our version is what I just told you about 2. See above
1. The playlist filter filters the playlist (obviusly), I wanted to filter the collection. Meanwhile I found that the collection filter in flat mode is almost what I have in mind. The issues I have with it:
o It needs up/down movement for playlist focus and typing to restore filter focus as with playlist filter o a key binding to enqueue selected as next track(s). (e.g. space for enqueue as next&play, ctrl+space - just enqueue as next, enter - enqueue as last & play, ctrl+enter - enqueue as last) o focus is the keyword. I don't want to touch the mouse. Ideally press a hot key, type a couple of words press enter and be done with it. Currently the focus is in whatever was last selected or if the context browser on track switch option is on, in the context browser. o If listening in the background while doing other work, having the full amarok window come up and dissapear is quite distracting (for me). A more compact version would be nice. And on the topic of playlist filter, move to end/move as next are things that would make managing the playlist a lot simpler. It's a lot like the xmms [j] feature, only better, because amarok has separated notions of a collection and a playlist, not an ugly mess of hvaing all tracks in the playlist. 2. That was just about a compact and pretty interface to the playlist. Not a full size window like main window. No UI cruft with toolbars, analyzers, sidebars, etc. Focus in the playlist on the playing song. Pressing enter, doubleclicking on a song or just losing focus would make it close. Maybe even displaying it only while the hot-key is held down and having the mousewheel set the selected track and mouse click making it play. TBH. I don't actually know exactly what I want :), just brainstorming here. What I really want is a VERY light UI to select songs to play next and switch the playing song. The usual interactions would be on the order of a second or two. Having the full amarok window jump out and disappear is not only extremely distracting, but has similar seizure triggering effects to the japanese cartoons
I still remembered: I was new to Linux, and was browsing KDE-apps.org. I used XMMS, and thought it was ok. Then I saw amaroK. I think the versio was 0.8-something. And I loved it.
Then 1.0 came, oh that was amazing. I will never run XMMS again. Sure, there are some annoying thing. Like many has said, the score. The scoring method could be improvede, and make changing the score easier. Another thing that users complain about: The "Current track"-marker in playlist. Gradient, and it flashes. Honestly, I don't like it; I thought it looked cooler before. Many users complain that amaroK isn't stable enough. I'm running CVS (or SVN or whatever it's called). Yeah, sometimes amaroK crashes for me, not not very often. And amaroK doesn't use too much CPU on my system. I think the developers are amazing - I love amaroK, and I'm sure 1.3 will rok! The CVS already do
There are quite a lot of posts asking for smaller or bigger changes to the current style of Collection/Playlist/Files Browsers on the left and the "audible" playlist on the right.
In many cases those changes are just a question of adoptation to some other systems and players. I, too, was used to something else (winamp, then xmms), but I felt that there is something wrong with the way they worked. As the collection grew bigger and bigger, it became even more boring to choose what to play and to make playlists - in the end - it was hard to "simply listen to music". What I felt was needed was a new, different paradigm of how music is stored and played on a PC. At such point, it is, of course, easy to say that "this is not good", "it souldn't be like this" and so on. What is needed instead is someone with a new vision - something that leads a persons mind into seeing new ways, out of the common frames of thinking - a new paradigm is needed. I didn't know what this new paradigm should be like, I just looked around for new software. No luck till I found amarok - I just felt that this is the way it should be. This is the new paradigm people will use, learn, get used to it and love. So - of course it might be a steep learning curve for some people, it could seem complex for others, some might want to revert it to some older approaches, but those are, mainly, noise and other fluctuations from the typical, medium or "average" user. And exactly this "average" (though it sounds quite vulgar) user will benefit the most from this new paradigm (amarok in this case). Ironically - it is so because it is intended to be - amarok is going the hard and painful route to a "typical average" functionality, usability and appearence. To round up my opinion - yes, there are some problems with playlists (saving etc.), but the general construction with those left-side browsers and the "audible" playlist is the key factor of this new paradigm. Playing back an audio file is an almost trivial issue nowadays - the tricky part is how we came to this song (file) and where does it lead us further. This is what the context browser is for, with all its consequences (lyrics, suggested songs, other albums, wikipedia etc.). What comes to my mind in regard to these context-derived functions is that it might, eventually, be an early herald of those "semantic grids" we are jet to see in near future. Being a lazy physics student I like thinking a lot about grand schemes of things, like paradigms, how they change our perception, how we end up doing things we could not even dream about a year ago, and how desperately people are trying to go forth. Really, really thank You for this new paradigm, for amaroK Matiss
I think Amorke have much futters behind the gui and must be first find from the user.
When you watch some windwos mp3 software like: musicmatch 8.2 (i use most time), itunes (nice filter, searchfunction), beoplayer, the most futers to use are in front window or one klick away.
First, I just want to say "Thanks" for Amarok, I really like it ! And I'm glad to hear that you take usability of Amarok into account.
But yes, I think it's not very easy to use (I'm not a beginner user !), it has so many features that sometimes I don't where I have to click even for simple things. I think Juk is simpler but has less features. Things I like in Juk : the "time bar" (the one which shows how many minutes of the track have been played) is much more bigger, it's not in the status bar and thus more visible and more usable. The volume bar should be more visible too, with a little icon of a speaker. And maybe it could be great to try to make the sidebar "cleaner" (I don't have a lot of ideas about it). I somehow want to thank you for your work !
First, I just want to say "Thanks" for Amarok, I really like it ! And I'm glad to hear that you take usability of Amarok into account.
But yes, I think it's not very easy to use (I'm not a beginner user !), it has so many features that sometimes I don't where I have to click even for simple things. I think Juk is simpler but has less features. Things I like in Juk : the "time bar" (the one which shows how many minutes of the track have been played) is much more bigger, it's not in the status bar and thus more visible and more usable. The volume bar should be more visible too, with a little icon of a speaker. And maybe it could be great to try to make the sidebar "cleaner" (I don't have a lot of ideas about it). I somehow want to thank you for your work !
Would it be possible to have amarok support different directories/collections simultaneously? You can sort-of do this now with playlists, but then the collection tab doesn't reflect the other playlists, which makes me wonder how a collection different from just a main, favoritised playlist.
I have a music folder, an audiobook folder, and a lectures folder (which holds podcasts; ideally I wouldn't be downloading these at all, except for caching which I know is implemented now). Presumably, others have lots of different directories for samples etc. that aren't organised under a top-level "audio" folder. How about merging the collection and playlists into one collection tab that groups by playlist? Also, I think you should be able to just click on groups in the collection tab to have everything in that group appear on the right, and start playing.
I did only found this post now though but I wanted to leave a reply, I hope you will see it.
I'm a Gnome user who is using amaroK because it's could not find any better music player/manager under Gnome`or KDE, seriously it rocks ! Somebody in previous comment said amaroK SEEMS complex because it's work differently than other music player not because you did a bad work on the UI, and I agree with that. The relation between the collection and the playlist is a bit hard to figure at first and I fear that if I didn't heard of amaroK first and know that I let you manage a music collection (and used vaguly similar software before), I would probably never understand the importance of the collection and would have never used amaroK. Well concerning the First Run Wizard since you asked comments about it, I will give you some as well as a few suggestions : Start Page : A little too much text, the first text bloc is a little confusing, but It's perhaps because I'm not a native english speaker. The first line should explain clearly where you are such as "Welcome to amaroK the music player". The logo in the right middle seems strange to me, it should at least be at the top, possibly in the left. In fact I don't like this logo much, it's the only place where you see it and it doesn't correspond to the Icon and about box image but I'm no graphist so I wont comment it. First page : Well for me the "XMMS mode" is pretty unuseful since I can access all it's functionnality from the tray icon. Furthermore it mask the importance of the Collection part of amaroK. I won't tell you to remove it but you should perhaps ask your community if this page is really useful. * Second page : - "Import playlist" checkbox : I wonder why any user would want to uncheck that, either the user don't use playlist (or don't even know what it is) and won't care, either he use them and will obviously want to keep them, (as he don't know if it will be useful or not later or if he can import them easily after) - "Watch folder for change" : idem. This one of the main feature of amaroK, who would not use that? In fact I don't even know any other way to add music in the collection than dropping them in my Music folder. IMO these two checkbox confuse the user and should be removed. In find the folder selector, useful and pratical. But that's probably because I already know my system and how this widget work (note : as a Gnome User I wonder if this widget is used widly in Kde) . A new user may be confused by /boot/, /bin, /dev, etc... so a good thing to do should probably to have is home folder open as he may not find it easily. Anyway if find this page should receive love and basic usability testing as it is the most important configuration step. Last page : THE controversial page I know that you won't remove it to not cause an uproar in the comunity but I have simple but important suggestion for you (in fact it was at first the point of this whole post)- Go back to the previous page and,in the right bottom corner (but upper than the next button), add a button called "Use an external database" which will popup the previously db configuration page. pretty simple it isn't? Hope this help.
First of all, thanks for the great player.
I love the way wikipedia searches are integrated and downloading of the album art is done. I just tried this player on SuSE 10.0 with KDE and am loving it. The version of amarok i'm using is 1.3.1 I was used to itunes and thought that it was great. amarok just blows itunes away One of the columns I would recommend adding would be to sort the collection based on the "composer" tag. I'm having some problems connecting to ipod shuffle to view the files. I could do it the first time but after I rebooted my system, my ipod is no longer visible within amarok. I think this might be a amarok bug since the mount command lists the ipod being mounted at /media/ipod & I can get to ipod files using ipod:/ in konqueror though. amarok complains that the media device is not mounted. Tag editing for real audio files could be included. |
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