Wednesday, October 8. 2008Missing features in Amarok 2 (Image copyright by steve) Today on IRC a user asked the following question: "Is there a list of 1.4 features that are still missing in Amarok 2?" As this question comes up rather frequently, I will try to shed some light on this topic here. First of all we have to make the following clear: Not all of Amarok 1.4's features will necessarily return in Amarok 2. Many features will be ported over, a lot of new features will be added, and some old features will simply be dumped for good. Amarok 2 isn't simply a souped up version of Amarok 1, but it's almost completely a new program, and you can't expect it to work exactly like 1.x. If we wanted that, we could simply have taken 1.x and stuck a big "2.0!" logo on it, and be done with it. Now that we have this out of the way, let's get to the meat: Features that will likely return in Amarok 2 Features which have been dumped. Good riddance! So, that's it for now. I've probably forgotten to mention some features, but feel free to add to this list in the comments section. We could then for instance compile a list on the wiki. Trackbacks
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Thank you for the honest communication. I guess much of the KDE 4 confusion could have been avoided, if there was such a list before the KDE 4.0 release.
Can you please add an enhancer like you can see here http://www.winamp.com/plugins/details/81361
This enhancer is for winamp but works great ones when I was using xp. But the great sound is still in my ears. Thanks.
hell yes. if you guys had something like jammix for amarok and milkdrop for the visualizations i would love you forever... winamp is hard to beat but amarok with those features sure would do nicely.
I'm also wondering about musicbrainz. I use it all the time. If there is something better, amarkok2 will rock my world.
I don't know what would be better than Musicbrainz from a tagging standpoint.
The thumbprinting system that Musicbrainz uses is only partly open, and the part that is open may fall short of the OSI definition of open and I'm pretty sure would fall short of the FSF definition of open. They didn't develop the thumbprinting system so that is not their fault, they made the choice on what to use based on what was available at the time. Last FM has been working with Musicbrainz, but is using a different thumbprinting system, which they claim is better, and I believe is more freely licensed, not sure from the other perspective if there is a part that is open and a part that is closed. Outside of that I know nothing.  And thanks for the list Mark, nice to have an idea of things that may be coming back in upcoming releases. Later, Seeker
I just think Discogs.com is far better than musicbrainz ... and easier to implement (:
I have two questions, if someone knows:
1. Will we have gapless playing? (This is one of the most important features for me) 2. Is the replay gain implementation native? Thanks
"1. Will we have gapless playing?"
Yes, gapless already works. "2. Is the replay gain implementation native?" Maybe? The question makes little sense.
Are you guys looking to just have the ability to read replaygain tags or do scanning as well? Personally, I would be satisfied with just the ability to read since easymp3gain looks like it's coming along nicely for scanning files.
> Yes, gapless already works.
I still hear little gap between tracks when listening to albums with mixed tracks. (Amarok2, KUbuntu Jaunty)
hi,
i have tried the first beta of amarok2 and have found that i miss some of the "excel look" features: for instance, i couldn't find how to display in amarok2 whether this or that song was mp3 or flac, what its bitrate was, etc. In amarok1, i had just added the corresponding columns. Is it possible/planned to have these possibilities in amarok2 as well?
i will just direct you to the post i prepared in expectance of this and similar replies
http://amarok.kde.org/blog/archives/810-The-Old-style-Playlist-Is-Dead,-Long-Live-The-Old-style-Playlist.html
whaaaaaaaaaaaat ?
You should be extremely grateful to the amarok dev team that it even displays the track title in the playlist! If you want a totally configurable excel look, I suggest running foobar2000 with wine.
I really liked the "excel" style playlist in Amarok 1.4. Why remove it? Can't this be an option? It seem much more powerful than the Current Amarok 2 Beta 2 playlist. It looks like i'll be going back to Amarok 1.4.9 till this issue is resolved and hopefully will. If you you guys can add it as a plugin that would be great and satisfy both parties. I really appreciate all the works thats been going into Amarok 2, but quite a few features in Amarok 1.4.9 seemed alot nicer. Can you guys please implement it or at least a plugin to go to the old style playlist???
Thanks, Zubin Singh Parihar
I'm with you there - the "detail view" layout is far more powerful for organising stuff quickly (ie. select a bunch of songs>operate on them). Can be especially useful for changing the varying names of a band over a number of tracks to a single (correct) name.
Cool, I was working on this for the next issue of the Insider. Now I can just link to this blog post
I'm not happy with all the changes, but thank goodness for a new scripting engine. The old scripting engine was really unstable (worked about as well as SuperKaramba's scripts).
What kind of database WILL Amarok support?
Which, to be more exact, in Amarok-coding-terms is exactly the same thing - this is also the reason the choice was made: Internal and external DB support, using a single code-path.
Hi,
Can't we use Kexi database engine for accessing all sorts of databases? http://kexi-project.org/wiki/wikiview/index.php@KexiFeatures.html "Supported Database Engines SQLite - file based (version 2.8 and 3.2) - the default built-in databse format allowing to store al lthe data and design in a single file that can be easily e-mailed or published in the Internet; requires no maintenance and installation. MySQL servers. PostgreSQL servers." May be you can work with them or ask them to create a single database interface which can be used by all image, audio and video people just like phonon. Just an idea 
There is one feature that I can think of that you left out: playlist filtering. From what I hear playlist filtering is gone, but some sort of playlist search system will replace it. I don't know the details, in fact I am very interested in hearing details on how this will work.
Also, do you have a tentative timeline for any of these features? For instance which ones are probably going to make it into 2.0, which are probably going to be held back until 2.1, which are going to be held back further. As for Francisco's ReplayGain question, I think he was referring to how Amarok 1.x only had ReplayGain support from a script. Support for ReplayGain was not built-in to Amarok 1. I was wondering the same thing, whether Amarok will have built-in ReplayGain support or whether it will require a script or other add-on to work.
Note that Amarok 2 scripts work totally different than Amarok 1 scripts:
They run in-process, this means there is absolutely no delay. You will not notice any difference from "native" code. http://amarok.kde.org/wiki/Development/Scripting_HowTo_2.0
Thats good to know, but there was an additional problem with the scripted version of ReplayGain, and it's that we loose control over the master volume of the application.
If the implementation is not done as a script I guess we will be able to use this master volume control as a master volume regardless if we use replay gain or not. Well, that's a question actually...
Yea I agree, Amarok 1.4 couldn't be said to have replaygain support. And that a script isn't the correct place to have support for it.
I'd be interesting in knowing if there's an idea of when features will return. I'm particularly interested in label support.
Here are mine 2 cents:
# Old style playlist, "Excel Look" Yeah, the old one wasn't so nice & HIG friendly, The album pic & the grouping of tracks of the same album in parent/child grouping, wich make it easier to look at your collection. However, more flexible playlist is a must. # Support for Amarok 1 scripts Dooh, Amarok2 is to different for backward compitability. # Multiple databases (SQLite and PostGreSQL) The only problem here is that some distro's ship mysql & mysqle in the same package,. thus making it a heavy dep, but this should get fixed by time. # Player Window (this can be implemented as a Plasmoid) + a million of this one, just imagine what kind of cool new stuff can be done with this, new kind of frontends,lots of different UI designs, better media center support and stuff. # MusicBrainz (we have plans for something better) I'm waiting to see about this one, the old one was boring to use without a batch mode, but it was usefull # Slowness with large collections grin Nothing new to me, i used mysql server ))Kudos for all the good work & keep Ama(rocking)
Yes, I am wondering about "something better" than MusicBrainz too.
False.
http://blog.last.fm/2008/03/25/fingerprinting-and-metadata-progress-report
Well, that's OK for me. Another question is whether Amarok supports mp3 TPE2 (album artist) tag now?
Last'fm's metadata is in a horrible shape though, and Musicbrainz is far more suited for editing their data. Also, the part of the fingerprinting that's needed for looking up tracks is open source: http://wiki.musicbrainz.org/HowPUIDsWork#head-ca5aa98ce700760356db3d9a76d386d62b62d932
Off course, the technology does come from a mainly closed-source company, so if you're an open-source zealot you may not like it, but in that case you'd rather use Gnome anyway.
False hey?
Last.fm have developed their own [i]fingerprinting system[/i] but they still link those fingerprints to data sourced from MusicBrainz and Discogs, as it refers to in that link you posted. http://blog.musicbrainz.org/?p=294
I think that lots of the difficulties for most of this missing features are because of Phonon. I dunno... I think that phonon needs more polishing before amarok2 can implement most of it.
Cheers
Yea thats the case for visualizations. We plan on digging into Phonon code once Amarok 2 is out of the door.
I am sad to see PostgreSQL support being dropped
 A good abstraction layer could support many databases. (Was one point for Open Source not freedom of choice?)
There aren't any good C++ database abstraction layers. Amarok 1.4 had to roll-its-own which caused a lot of bugs since we're not SQL experts.
Even qt has a db abstraction layer. what´s wrong with that?
And you can freely choose to implement "a good abstraction layer [that] could support many databases."
We have freely chosen not to do that for a variety of reasons.. the primary one being: Amarok devs want to code on a music player, not a database abstraction layer. A similar example is the use of Phonon. We natively only support phonon as a media playing engine, but Phonon happens to support other backends.
sorry, that came off very cross.. i didn't mean it like that heh.
all I meant was: there is a whole bunch to supporting and maintaining various backends and databases, most of which isn't really what devs are interested in doing, so by slimming down things like that, we have more time and energy to spend on other - cooler - features.
Phonon itself is a abstraction layer to other multimedia backends as i understood.
It´s so sad, as with AFT it looks promising to use a centralized DB.
"(Was one point for Open Source not freedom of choice?)"
No, you misunderstand. Open Source does not mean that the user can dictate the developers how to design their application.
I'm running yesterdays SVN version and what I am missing the most is how the Collection is sorted. Compared to Amarok 1.4 there is no option to group effectively Various Artists records. So grouping all VA albums under one entry, like in 1.4, is not there anymore. Because all the VA records I have the Collection list is a few hundred entries long and I cannot find things easily.
Especially when I do not know what I would like to listen to, so search does not help, browsing through whole collection is a real pain. This is the thing that annoys me everytime I try to find something. Besides of that I like it a lot, thanks! waldek
I agree even with latest SVN the collection list is just terribly confusing and seems to be designed for people who have "a bunch of songs" instead of albums (which may contains songs by different people, but which go together as a compilation or a mix)
Regarding cover art - Amarok 1.4 has the ability to create a .directory file with the icon image pointing to the cover art cache.
Directories then display the cover art image within Konqueror or Dolphin. I had patched my install to copy the cover art into the same directory as the album and rename it folder.jpg. This enables non KDE systems to make use of the image, e.g when I share my music collection to other devices such as XBMC. Does Amarok 2 have anything resembling this? I'd like to push my patch upstream, but I'm expecting the code in trunk to be very different to Amarok 1.4. Thanks, Paul
what about moodbar? are there plans to (re)implement it? or can it done by scripts?
Yep, there are some plans to implement something similar. Possibly in 2.1.
Yea, moodbar was so highly useful for finding parts of a song to listen to.
I really hope you implement moodbar sooner than 2.1
I think it was a really awesome feature and it's innovations like these that really set amarok apart.
How about sorting by Genre then Album?
http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3030/2929386474_f310e8a4fc.jpg?v=0 Albums are not together. WHY!?
Those are two tracks from different albums. Tracks are only grouped into albums when multiple tracks from the same album are next to each other in the playlist.
I know, I was only complaining that If you choose to sort by genre, you cant have your albums together like a sane playlist (by DEFAULT).
I have way too many albums for each genre to move it all around everytime I switch genres. I was merely calling for sorting by Genre/Album or at the very least, a more flexible sorting setter.
hmm. does this mean i have to run a mysql server if i want to have amarok running?
Nope! Amarok 2 uses an embedded version of Amarok, so the user has to do zero installation (of mysql) or configuration.
You won't even know mysql is in the backend.
Will Amarok 2.0 have a feature similar to Apple's Genius, or Pandora in function?
(I do realize that both these use vastly different approaches. I'm only interested in the final result of "smartly" generating playlists from the songs I already have.) P.s.: What's wrong with Musicbrainz? Hopefully the new feature will include an extensive database with even more songs than Musicbrainz. Btw. Please update the Amarok Facebook page. It could use some progress updates.
I was looking for the equalizer,the wan none... now you say it will return so you never implemented in betas. The EQ is a must and would like to see it in the final.A great music player but without an EQ is useless.
Thanks for you great effort.
I think last.fm is more accurate than MusicBrainz. It also provides genre information, year, etc.
I've been hoping for a better alternative to MusicBrainz in Amarok
It would be nice if the replacement for MusicBrainz uses acoustic fingerprints, as well as, International Standard Recording Code (ISRC) and places the ISRC in the metadata of the file.
From Wikipedia: "Note that an ISRC code identifies a particular recording, not the song itself. Therefore, different recordings, edits and remixes of the same song will each have their own ISRC code." ... "The Red Book CD digital audio standard enables the encoding of ISRCs onto CDs."
What about "burn playlist to CD"? I like to set up a smart playlist to give myself a random selection of my favorite tracks, then burn to CD in K3B to listen in my car.
For that matter, what about smart playlists? The dynamic playlists are nice, but you can't change the number of tracks displayed.
PLEASE KEEP THE CROSSFADE ON MANUAL TRACK CHANGE!!!!!!!!
its so important for testing out ideas for DJing, and it makes amarok unique! most other players crosssfade only on auto track change.
Yes, could we pleasepleaseplease have cross-fading on auto and manual song change??
I really miss the search bar for playlist filtering (as mentioned above somewhere in the comments)
The ability to type X AND Y really helped me change the playlist according to my mood. I really hope that this is added back soon. I am using Amarok Beta 2 for OS X. It works fine on my gentoo box.
Lookng forward to the final release. f10 have included the beta release, and it seems a lot happier with larger collections
Fade on close is broken, so I welcome its return later on in the release schedule Gnome seems a bit unhappy with it - the keyboard shortcuts don't get passed across when it's running in the tray. I'll put that down to gnome/kdeisms though!
OMFG it's so annoying that my album with many artists is seperated instead of together!!!
This will be fixed in one of the first coming bugfix releases.
It would be OK for me that the player window is replaced by plasmoid - but will I be able to make such a plasmoid appear above windows? E. g. I listen to music, and do something else in a maximalized window, but want to control the player. A solution is to put the plasmoid on the panel - in this case, can I make it appear only when Amarok is running?
> Features which have been dumped. Good
> riddance! > > # Old style playlist, "Excel Look" > If that means what I think it means, I'm pretty gutted. I just installed Mandriva 2009, which came with Amarok 1.98 - hmmm, I thought, this is a really buggy early rough-cut, let's see how much they've fixed in the real v2". Well, sorry, but if I can't edit playlists, show multiple fields (and sort on them)... what's the point of organising digital audio at all? 8. I can't import my old playlists? The collection list in 1.9.8 is also profoundly broken (listing artists from compilations, giving me an unusable list of hundreds of artists, most of whom I don't recognise - yes, I have a lot of 'various artists' compilations - but having seen the above comment about "good riddance to playlist editor", I don't think there's much point my bothering to try 2.0 at all. I just downgraded to 1.4.10, but when support for that ends I'll just have to go fishing on freshmeat again
Update: I am now v 2.2.0, as a result of upgrading to Mandriva 2010 which ships it by default. I now find Amarok just-about usable! And so I am using it. This makes me happy.
My earlier comments about the foolishness of releasing something that's not even feature complete (except as an alpha, beta, PoC or whatever) still stand, though! Ten years ago I was happy to spend an evening grovelling over makefiles and error logs, and trying to install obscure library dependencies. These days... not so much. The major annoyance for me now, FWIW, are: performance - switching from "local files" to "playlists" is ridiculously slow (I just timed it: 5 seconds. It should be one click and 0.5s at most. Secondly, ^s no longer saves a Playlist; instead, there's a small button bearing an obscure icon that took me days to stumble over. Not being able to import old playlists is still a massive fail. New playlists' default name is a datestamp, which is completely bizarre and unintuitive. Finally, perf opening a folder in the playlists pane is also horribly slow. (Lenovo Thinkpad R60, 1Gb RAM, Intel Core 2 T5600 1.83GHz, kernel 2.6.31.6 .)
Please bring back the Various Artists label for folders with multiple artists in it (or with the same album-tag). I don't want to do it all by hand
Please bring back equalizer, all my songs sound horrible as compared to my vista with SRS audio enhancer
The one thing that keeps me running Amarok 1 is the inability of Amarok 2 to create playlists based on the last written date of the file. I add a lot of songs to my database. I like to have playlists that have all the songs added in the last week or month or x months. I mean added to my disk not the Amarok database because if I have to rescan the whole list, then the database lists them as all being added on the same day.
Damn! Amarok used to be the best music player,now I think amarok 2 should be named as Amarok -2 or amarok 1.X Beta 1000 you can't say "hey here is the new AMAROK, rock with us" while there's a lot of functionality missed, hope you can put an option to get the old play list view it wasn't very pretty but the new one isn't either and it's just and of course drop out that thing on the middle of amarok, that horrible place where the applets are, it would be better to put some tab instead of the "< page >" controls. and finally make fonts and icons smaller
ideas:
plugin for youtube videos, so that you just need to hit one button to watch the video of the present playing song Top tracks by "this artist"; like in Banshee * Pictures to the artists/song from google or so on amm, i think that were all my ideas. I'll come back if i get new ones...
Without a multiband equalizer Amarok 2 is useless. I hope one of the other *nix music players like Songbird or Banshee comes out with a multiband equalizer fuction before Amarok 1.4 becomes obsolete.
I like a THUNDERING bass on my music. Gonna stink having to boot in to M$ Windows to get a decent music player if the missing features from Amarok version 1.4 aren't ported in to version 2.X >:-((
Hello Jen Cato, I dont agree with you that you said (Without a multiband equalizer Amarok 2 is useless) I know there is something missing in Amarok 2 but we can't say useless.
It's not useless w/o an equalizer, but I agree with others in this post that the audio experience is terrible w/o one. I can't think of a single person I know who listens to music on their computer, car, iPod, etc. with the equalizer flat.
I'm hopeful for Amarok 2's future since it seems to have a solid foundation and is headed in the right track (much the same way KDE was with 4.0). I'll just wait until Amarok 2.1 or 2.2 before I try again to make it my primary audio player.
Heh, could it be that all of your friends are ricers? :p
I don't know anyone who uses an EQ. Round here it's seen as a toy for those with bad music taste.
Why don't you hope that it comes back into Amarok 2 before 1.4 becomes obsolote? It is in the "will likely return" list.
I'm wondering if it would be possible to bring back the grouping-by-letter support in the collection.
It is a little thing that makes a big difference in large collections
Yes, we already have this feature planned for one of the upcoming releases.
It's on our TODO
Hi, I've just tried amarok2 but i decided to fall back to 1.4 until labels are implemented. if the motto was indeed rediscover your music (with a large collection), i'll soon lose sight of it if i can't use the labels i've been patiently tagging on songs. The system isn't perfect in 1.4 though (like impossible mass unlabelling) so i hope it'll improve some more.
Keep up the good work though. 2 looks very promising.
Add support for album art embedded in the ID3 tag.
I made the decision a while ago to standardize on embedded album art, as the increased portability of the music files outweighed the sacrificed drive space. It'd be great if Amarok added this support back into version 2...
I've just made the decision to standardise on embedded album art. Last night I tagged the whole collection with the script in 1.4. However, if your collection is already tagged, you just need it for new ones. In this case I recommend EasyTag. But yes, both Amaroks are missing many tagging features.
I'm boning up on Python, PyQt, and Amarok2 is my itch to scratch.
You may wish to bone up on your QtScript skills in stead if you're going to be working with Amarok 2
QtScript? I thot that Python was the main language for Amarok2. I've never heard of QtScript. Oh, I just looked--it's Javascript. Yeah, I know Javascript too. Not sure why they'd want to go with that tho, python is better. On the the other hand, at least it's not VB. I don't want to ever touch that again.
The main thing that I'm interested in is collection management: *multiple collections. *rsyncing collections. *industrial strength tag editing *honoring band tags to fix the various artists problem. The rsyncing thing is what I'm occupied with at the moment--tho, I'm just getting started. Any insights welcome... like how to git the bloody repo to work, for example.
@mahasmoot
Pop onto #amarok on irc.freenode.net and ask these questions, or email the amarok mailing list amarok@kde.org (make sure and subscribe first https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/amarok) I'd be more than happy to help you with some of your ideas (I've been meaning to get to a couple of them anyway), but this blog-post comment thread is no place for devs to assist you I'm Ramblurr on irc, /query me
> Features which have been dumped. Good riddance!
> > Slowness with large collections grin I feel a huge slowdown still with "Update Collection". There used to be two options, one to rebuild (slow) and one to update (much faster). Currently I only get the slow one
And finally, it fails to make the tea and clean my toilet. Come on, people, surely you can see that most of these feature requests are completely obscure and unnecessary, apart from mine of course... :>
Can you please add a feature to Amarok to allows audio files to be sped up or slowed down? This would be extremely useful to individuals who record lectures, and need to change the speed at which information is presented in order to better understand it.
Thanks!
Are there plans to re-implement the "Suggested tracks" dynamic playlist?
That was by far my favourite feature of 1.x. The new implmentation relies too heavily on having all your music tagged properly for it to be of any real use and the "play similar artists from last.fm" is good, but not what I'm looking for.
I loved the "delete files" in the right-click-menu in the old playlist. That and the more flexible exel-styled playlist are the only things i miss.
It's still the best musicplayer around...
The "delete files" feature is THE reason why I am still using 1.4.10 .
Please provide it in the next version it can't be that hard to implement.
is the "intellingent playlists" feature in amarok 2?
I used to label my favorite musics and then searched them throught that feature! thanks!
I'm sad, I just loved "excel" view, and specifically "Iteratively assign track numbers", simple and fantastic...
I was working with Amarok14... but those changing Amazon API's... can't get covers on 1.4 and can't work on 2.2 :S... Would it be useful if I (lied and) said that i'm gonna kill myself in order to restore some of those useful organizing features? I'm taking those pills, please restore those excel features, i'm dying, i'm dyiiiiing... (Had to try it, sorry)
Really,really i missed the CTL+H to shake/randomize the playlist because i have more control than another random options.
Another feature i love it is right click -> repeat track
We (all students of engineering college) agree with Jen Cato, We hate to use Win**** OS . We are into quality of music, but since new version of Amarok lacks the Graphic Equalizer we feel like being compelled to play our tracks in Win**** based players.
We all kindly request to developers to bring back this one feature (equalizers) as soon as possible. Regards Billy, Eddie and all Students.
OK its boring a question ....
BUT whats about the "super fingerprint mega thing" from lastfm (music[br|p]ain) IM MISSING IT !! (but ok the discogs skript is good when you now what you are playing and when you have the full album)
Last time i tried (2.1) it didn't even display the total time of the tracks in the "playlist". Version 2 should never have been a simple continuation of the program but should have been given a new name (amarok2 would have been fine). It is increasingly difficult sticking with 1.4 while trying to keep the rest of my system (debian testing) updated because of dependency problems.
The playlist pane does now include the track time, along with several other commonly used fields. It took a hell of a lot of trial-and-error hunting for buttons/icons lurking around the UI to work out how, though. (The right-hand-most of the six icon/buttons directly below the playlist, the on-hover pop-up text is "Playlist layout".)
Will iPod functionality be returned to Amarok 2, as all the other similar software does a very bad job compared to Amarok 1.4
Is iPod support coming into Amarok2?
All the similar software for linux is inferior to Amarok 1.4.x and I can no longer easily maintain my iPod.
I used to be able to add/remove files to my iPod, but somehow, the only program that was able to do so also messed it up. Most of the default playlists (including one of the most essential ones to me, Recently Added) were removed, and now it doesn't even DETECT my iPod. It is a Nano 3rd gen.
What is wrong with ipod support in amarok2?
I can just drag albums or songs from my collection in amarok2 to my ipod. if you are in you collection there is a button on top of your collection list. Hit it and you see there are more devices than your collection drive.
I am using 2.3 beta 1 and still very much miss:
Musicbrainz (or something better) automatic reencoding to supported codecs when copying to music players Are these still on the agenda?
Why is it not possible to do something like musicbrainz? Musicbrains was still better then nothing to have. How much we have to spend to get this back?
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