Monday, July 30. 2007Sneak peak, pretty playlist, raw plasma
I thought it was time to post a screenshot of how Amarok2 development is moving along.
As my focus is on the service integration, I have chosen to show a few of the new things that are happening in this area, as well as some of the more general and cool stuff that is being worked on.  The current look of Amarok2 the following things are noteworthy: - The new playlist. I am absolutely in love with this thing! Service previews tracks (Magnatune and Jamendo) can now cache album covers on the fly so they show up even when you are streaming. This means that the services now appear really well integrated. - Magnatune genres are now used in a better way in the Magnatune list, and an artist can belong to several genres. This gets rid of the "Genre box" hack from the previous versions, - Purchasing from Magnatune now supports using gift card codes as an alternative to credit cards. For those coming to FrOSCon later this month, the Amarok team there might have a nice little surprise for visitors involving this!  - An opengl playground at the bottom with an experimental"CoverFlow" inspired album selector "CoverBling" is being worked on. Just playing around for now, so please don't flame it just yet!!! - The big central area has just been switched to using Plasma, the coll new desktop and widget technology in KDE4. As can be seen, it has not really been customized for Amarok yet, but it should allow for really neat context information. I plan on moving to small info view at the bottom of the Magnatune service out into the central context area where there is much more room for doing really interesting and interactive things. As you can hopefully tell, there is lots of interesting stuff going on, and even though nothing is really finished yet, there is a bunch of highly motivated developers coding too much and sleeping too little because they are passionate about Amarok. 
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Looks really nice!
Weird feeling - plasma in amarok that will be on plasma desktop WowSince plasma now supports openGL applets, what do you think about putting the "CoverBling" in it. (not flaming about CB, just expressing an idea )
it would be cool if there were an option to disable all musicstore-stuff, or it were loaded on explicit request to reduce memory usage.
also, I asked once if the model/view separation could be extended to dergee when we can unload the view while amarok is minimized to systray (maybe use shared plasma data engine for that). thanks.
The music stores, and services in general, are not initialized unless you actually enter the "Internet" tab, and even then, they are only fully created when you actually open one. So don't use them and they should not take up any memory
Ok, so I will have to correct myself slightly here. Currently the services are actually loaded on startup, but they do not do any of the expensive initializations until they are actually shown. Besides, they use a lazy loading scheme to fetch info from the database, meaning that until you actually enter them, no data is fetched, also, only when you expand a genre are the corresponding artists fetched into memory.
Ideally the view isn't taking up much memory. Currently I doubt it is
This "stealing engine from Plasma" is exciting stuff!
You guys had any neat ideas for what you will be using it? Is it "media station" "full-screen" control / visualization applet or an actual multi-applet space?
Its how we are implementing Amarok 2.0's new context browser. We using libplamsa for its whole plasmoid architecture, not to do full screen or something.
I still don't like the idea of playlist being to the right (I want it in the middle!), but other than that, it looks very good. And damn - Amarok + Plasma? You should defiantly add a warning of overheat (aka overhot
 ) when you ship 2.0.
I really like the your idea of using Plasma.
Getting CoverBling into it would be great. I think more projects should follow this step, so we might create a huge gallery of reusable Plasmaoids. So everyproject can take benefit out of it. I commited a proposal in this direction to the digiKam people already. Greetz Bernhard
The playlist looks somewhat distracting at the moment with a cover image for each entry and the unaligned text in the columns. But I am looking forward to see it in its final stage and try it out to let the experience change my first impression from your screenshot.
I hope there are non-coders working on that as well, because the UI is still horrible. The gray menu bar in the middle of the blue is out of place, the icons are archaic, still you cram confusingly some stuff to bottom, top, left, ride, tabs, buttons, sliders, ... It looks more like a control panel of a nuclear power plant than anything else.
Besides when we will be able to get video players and audio players integrated as well into something that knows how to switch context? I'd like to be able to buy them legally from the net, download, directly to the magnificent library (the sort of what is available for music) and actually enjoy of it. After all, they are all ENTERTAINMENT. We should have multimedia/entertainment players, not music and audio players!  This is one of the top-5 blockers to be able to solve the bug #1 ever.
I cant really decide if you are just trolling or not, but I'll bite.
Yes, there are non coders working on this, but this is a work in progress where focus is still on "making stuff work". We have not gotten to the "make it really pretty" part yet. With regards to icons, for some reason I was not using the new oxygen icons when that screenshot was taken, so I will concede you this one point, the icons does look archaic! With regards to "audio players vs. multimedia players" I think you fail to realize just how much "switching context" implies. Video and audio are, by their very nature, very different formats. For audio it makes sense to display visual metadata, for video you wan tit full screen most of the time, or at least in a window with minimal distractions. Name one good multimedia player out there that handles video and audio equally graceful. I am not saying that this cannot be done, but getting video right is at least as large a task as the entire Amarok development effort up to this point. As our resources in the Amarok team are limited, and given the choice between creating a half baked multimedia player, and a kick ass audio player, we chose the latter!
You are also missing the point that some people don't really care about video on a computer. So why use an app with a lot of extraneous stuff we don't need?
Can't wait till 2.0
I second these notions.
The UI is quite confusing even still, and cluttered. However, it does look like they have some neat ideas going in, and definite improvements in the whole user experience (buying music within the interface, eye candy). Loooking good, Plug on!
wow looks really nice a clean, i stopped using Amarok ages back because it started to get a wee bit bloated.
but i might go back to it having seen this
There's one thing that I wish Amarok did that it doesn't: *manage video files for my ipod*. This is the only task that I still need to do in other ways, and those other ways are tedious.
I don't need to watch the videos or even manage them well (no need to change their meta data, make playlists, etc); just a way to get them onto the ipod with the rest of my stuff. Lastly, I wish there were an easy way to migrate from Itunes to Amarok; I still have a bunch of playlists on my windows:itunes that I haven't figured out how to get into my ubuntu:amarok.
I know it's still early, and I'm not so concerned about things like quality of icons, etc.
But, is this where the design is headed? Seems like a lot of wasted space similar to iTunes or WMP. The player control bar for instance. I keep Amarok in as small a window as needed. Is it full screen or bust now? Is this usable on a 1024x768 notebook screen? [/knee-jerk caused by single screenshot]
yeah, top bar wasting space like crazy concerns me too. of course, it will be redesigned visually, but i'm not completely sure it will be compact enough
using 15" displays everywhere, i'd ask devs to try the app on smaller resolutions sometimes. it's similar to developers running their apps on slower computers =)
STOP SAYING "BLING"
PLEASE YOU FUCKING AWFUL SPAZ (AS OPPOSED TO GEEKS AND DWEEBS)
I don't want to sound like a little girl, but "OMG THAT LOOKS AWESOME!" Amarok is my favorite music player (with Rythmbox when I'm on Gnome) and I love all the new improvements coming along with KDE4!!!
Not to talk badly about something you guys put a lot of work into, but I'm failing to see the improvement. If I wanted to use iTunes I'd just run that instead. Amarok is still my favorite music player but this version looks like a lame ripoff of iTunes and heavy on bloat.
I disagree. I run Ubuntu and this is an improvement on the old Amarok if you ask me. Just because it borrows UI elements from iTunes doesn't mean it's just a rip-off. It's not like Apple doesn't know how to design an interface...
The only iTunes alike thing is having a toolbar at the top. The coverflow thing too of course, but that's hardly essential UI.
People who have nothing to contribute but whinging could at least explain themselves.
I don't think it's bad to include opengl in a soft now.
But I think it should be included as a plugin, like this everybody is happy
I really hope you can switch back to using a wide playlist. I can't stand narrow playlist windows. Might be nice for people who make up playlists but I just load my entire collection and put on shuffle or listen to an album here and there..
Would be impossible to scroll around with such a narrow playlist for that.
short answer : don't do that. longer answer : http://amarok.kde.org/wiki/Dynamic_Playlist_Walkthrough
The problem in Amarok 1.4.x is that this makes searching your music collection impossible.
I have a large music collection, that is constantly shown in the playlist. If I suddenly only wanted to listen to Creative Commons music, then all I would have to do was type "creative commons". If I did this in the 'collection' search bar, I would get absolutely no results, despite having some 2500 Creative Commons songs. Since the intelligent search is my favorite feature in Amarok, I wont be using dynamic playlists until it also supports fast, intelligent search.
which field does contain the string "creative commons" ?
if it is comment, you can use in the filter field comment:"creative commons" for other keywords, see http://amarok.kde.org/wiki/Keyword_Filtering - or just use filter building dialog (the button to the right of filter field). the thing is, collection filtering is as powerful as playlist filtering is, and it also is more robust and faster (especially true for large collections in mysql )
Not in comment. The playlist finds creative commons songs through the folder names, which I haven't found a way to make the collection database do automatically. The playlist is fairly flexible in what search terms are considered and what terms are ignored.
Having to use strings is not user friendly and advanced search doesn't give a good overview. Strings are only usable for power-users and a music-player should be one the least power-user centric application considering it might be used at parties where everyone has to understand how it works. It is also easier to get an overview of your songs using the playlist. The collection hides much of the information that is available in the playlist, and even though artist is the most useful information to go by if taken alone, its advantage is diminished when a portion of the tags are badly written. Since it is close to impossible for a large collection to keep all tags completely compliant to your own personal preferences, the disadvantages of using a large playlist has to be weighed with the disadvatages of using a large collection database. My point though is that there is advantages to using a full playlist at the moment and therefore also legitimate reasons to want to use it. Taken into consideration that dynamic playlist is a somewhat alien concept and (in my case) has a tendency to freeze Amarok, I find that refusing to acknowledge pure-playlist users isn't exactly helping anyone.
you can search on path, too (see the same link as previously
)you might also be interested in flat collection view, where you can enable whatever columns you want. oh, and check also the third collection view you can switch these with buttons at the top of the collection tab. i'm telling all this because large playlists in amarok are... discouraged. they are slow and have enough other problems.
Sigh.. well I know there are disadvantages with a large playlist, but in my opinion there are far more with collection browsing, and I think a large part (the majority?) of Amarok users would be saddened to see playlist options diminished in favor of the collection browser unless collection browsing optained some of the advantages playlists have now.
Apart from at the startup of Amarok, large playlists are actually faster for me than the default collection because less user interaction (typing or clicking) is required. I have looked into the three modes, and I can't say it looks like an improvement over the default mode. It still failed the simple 'Creative Commons' test and directory:"Creative Commons" certainly isn't an improvement over playlist in my mind, but rather something I might keep away from even if playlist wasn't there. I fear my issue is a question of displayed information and screen real-estate that can't be easily solved. So far I will keep with my playlist.
When are they going to add the no crash feature? That's what's desperately needed. I use Xmms the majority of the time as it actually works consistently when Amarok takes program execution literally.
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