I`ve been using xmms for a long time, but as I see now xmms v1 dies more and more. I`ve recently decided to give amarok a try as a it becomes popular. My first impression is that it`s playlist/music collection management is clumsy. I am going to use a couple of quotes from the front page of amarok`s website, as I just want to share my first expressions and as there is a SoC project for the playlist.
Fron page says "Amarok is the music player for Linux and Unix with an intuitive interface. Amarok makes playing the music you love easier than ever before - and looks good doing it.", well it`s not so intuitive for me :) and you will just see why. First step after installing it: tell the program where to look for music. Then I would like the collection to get updated every once and a while as I may add more music in those directories, so I tell it it to automatically rescan the dirs. So far so good, but I have an external disk. So if I try using amarok when the ext. disk is not connected to my laptop, I end up waiting some minutes until it rescans everything (searching through the collection is boviously impossible, which is unpleasant when I want to play something, the reason I had started the payer for). Going home, plugging the drive, rescanning again ....... same problem: long time not being able to search for anything, not to mention reindexing 70G mp3s. Next step, disable automatic rescanning, then I loose the ability to get my collection refreshed, I have to do it manually, it also takes some time, searching disabled too, the while window is freezes during the rescan (maybe my T40 is too old for this).
So after all this comes the idea: would it be possible to do background rescanning of the whole collection, without affecting the searching window and the whole app`s performance at all? Torrent clients do this fo reindexing shares, I think it`s quite preasant. Also don`t delete file`s info, just mark it as "not there" in the first, and may be second rescan (torrents do this too, I find it quite nice).
Collection searches:
* It doesn`t seem to find everything that I find with xmms searches. I haven`t bothered to tind out exactly what is being miss when searching.
* I seem not to be able to find where to choose tags/filenames encoding, or font encoding. I can choose fonts, but cannot choose encoding. Maybe it`s there but I don`t see it. But I have about 20G of music (with tags written in cp1251) that I cannot just search through/see song titles. I`ll probably have to write a script to traverse the whole data and recode tags in utf-8, but don`t have time for this now.
Nevertheless the idea: can you add an option to chose font encoding, not just fontname? Maybe some day in 10 years everybody will be using utf-8, but it`s not the case now :) and it would be nice having this as an option.
* Searching takes too long and freeses the search tab while typing. I`m sure that it`s due to my 20th century hardware (IBM T40 laptop with 1.5GHz processor and 1G of RAM). I have about 60-70G of mp3s but I find searching takes too much time, as I intend to buy sime 500G disk soon and fill it with music.
Idea: Optimize searching algorithms? same applies to the playlist tab
* Since people ( in this case I, suppose others too ) have a fair amount of badly tagged files, it would be nice it the search unfolds results with only one 1 hit in an artist/album. Example: I have 10 files for author AAAA, some are tagged as having author AAaAA, AcAAA, AccAAA (this applies to album names too). If I want to see all the files found in the search I have to unfold all of them (having to click 2*(10-15) times on the pluses to unfold everything. It would be nice it it unfolds authomatically for just 1 (or 2-3) hit per album/author.
No I will comment on the concept of the payer itself, maybe it`s not the place to do it here. But I`ll give it a shot:
"A miracle in software engineering - we added less people to an early software project and made it later, disproving the Mythical Man-Month."
After reading this, and the link in wikipedia I stopped on "Conceptual Integrity" and remembered my first impression 1-2 months ago when I ran amarok for the first time. It has many features, many tabs, many buttons..... It`s too complicated for just a player! It was hard to get myself used to using it for just playing music (how to I search, how I move files around, how to browse the disk). That`s what I thought first, then I found out it can look for lyrics, shows some fancy stuff, OSD annoyed me, so I`ve dissabled it :)
Maybe I`m just used to the "keep it simple" lifestyle and old winamp/xmms outlook ( simple playlist and just a player, nothing more).
So final thoughts: keep it simple guys :) introducing fancy stuff, think about people having lots of music and not so fast computers. "Amarok is the music player for Linux and Unix with an intuitive interface." -> take a look at your dvd/mp3/cd player :) it has intuitive interface (with just a few buttons).
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Just a quick comment on the playlist
I`ve been using xmms for a long time, but as I see now xmms v1 dies more and more. I`ve recently decided to give amarok a try as a it becomes popular. My first impression is that it`s playlist/music collection management is clumsy. I am going to use a couple of quotes from the front page of amarok`s website, as I just want to share my first expressions and as there is a SoC project for the playlist.
Fron page says "Amarok is the music player for Linux and Unix with an intuitive interface. Amarok makes playing the music you love easier than ever before - and looks good doing it.", well it`s not so intuitive for me :) and you will just see why. First step after installing it: tell the program where to look for music. Then I would like the collection to get updated every once and a while as I may add more music in those directories, so I tell it it to automatically rescan the dirs. So far so good, but I have an external disk. So if I try using amarok when the ext. disk is not connected to my laptop, I end up waiting some minutes until it rescans everything (searching through the collection is boviously impossible, which is unpleasant when I want to play something, the reason I had started the payer for). Going home, plugging the drive, rescanning again ....... same problem: long time not being able to search for anything, not to mention reindexing 70G mp3s. Next step, disable automatic rescanning, then I loose the ability to get my collection refreshed, I have to do it manually, it also takes some time, searching disabled too, the while window is freezes during the rescan (maybe my T40 is too old for this).
So after all this comes the idea: would it be possible to do background rescanning of the whole collection, without affecting the searching window and the whole app`s performance at all? Torrent clients do this fo reindexing shares, I think it`s quite preasant. Also don`t delete file`s info, just mark it as "not there" in the first, and may be second rescan (torrents do this too, I find it quite nice).
Collection searches:
* It doesn`t seem to find everything that I find with xmms searches. I haven`t bothered to tind out exactly what is being miss when searching.
* I seem not to be able to find where to choose tags/filenames encoding, or font encoding. I can choose fonts, but cannot choose encoding. Maybe it`s there but I don`t see it. But I have about 20G of music (with tags written in cp1251) that I cannot just search through/see song titles. I`ll probably have to write a script to traverse the whole data and recode tags in utf-8, but don`t have time for this now.
Nevertheless the idea: can you add an option to chose font encoding, not just fontname? Maybe some day in 10 years everybody will be using utf-8, but it`s not the case now :) and it would be nice having this as an option.
* Searching takes too long and freeses the search tab while typing. I`m sure that it`s due to my 20th century hardware (IBM T40 laptop with 1.5GHz processor and 1G of RAM). I have about 60-70G of mp3s but I find searching takes too much time, as I intend to buy sime 500G disk soon and fill it with music.
Idea: Optimize searching algorithms? same applies to the playlist tab
* Since people ( in this case I, suppose others too ) have a fair amount of badly tagged files, it would be nice it the search unfolds results with only one 1 hit in an artist/album. Example: I have 10 files for author AAAA, some are tagged as having author AAaAA, AcAAA, AccAAA (this applies to album names too). If I want to see all the files found in the search I have to unfold all of them (having to click 2*(10-15) times on the pluses to unfold everything. It would be nice it it unfolds authomatically for just 1 (or 2-3) hit per album/author.
No I will comment on the concept of the payer itself, maybe it`s not the place to do it here. But I`ll give it a shot:
"A miracle in software engineering - we added less people to an early software project and made it later, disproving the Mythical Man-Month."
After reading this, and the link in wikipedia I stopped on "Conceptual Integrity" and remembered my first impression 1-2 months ago when I ran amarok for the first time. It has many features, many tabs, many buttons..... It`s too complicated for just a player! It was hard to get myself used to using it for just playing music (how to I search, how I move files around, how to browse the disk). That`s what I thought first, then I found out it can look for lyrics, shows some fancy stuff, OSD annoyed me, so I`ve dissabled it :)
Maybe I`m just used to the "keep it simple" lifestyle and old winamp/xmms outlook ( simple playlist and just a player, nothing more).
So final thoughts: keep it simple guys :) introducing fancy stuff, think about people having lots of music and not so fast computers. "Amarok is the music player for Linux and Unix with an intuitive interface." -> take a look at your dvd/mp3/cd player :) it has intuitive interface (with just a few buttons).