Amarok Insider - Issue 13

I'm the developer of am4rok. it doesn't work since you reworked the dbus api, and i've not updated it yet because i'm trying to get a way to go beyond the limits of the new api (e.g. get lyrics). but the last time i tried it the "now playing" plasmoid worked with amarok.

I love Amarok 1.4. Its the best music player for linux I know of because:
* you can manage a large music collection
* share the database with other users

But I am not sure what Amarok2 is.

I personally do not like it very much mainly because of the castrated database support - no support for a external PostgreSQL db anymore :-(

Or is it possible to share the embedded mysql database with other users by e.g. putting it onto an NFS-server?

Come on, guys! Why so huge buttons? We're not blind. Please make them smaller and simpler (those round overlapping things are not looking good, believe me). I appreciate all your design work, but there is really more you can improve.
The play/stop and friends along with time line and volume control must be moved to the bottom. Imagine that amarok is minimized to tray and playing, you want to change volume or switch to next track or rewind or fast forward. Then first you click the tray icon and then... you need to move the mouse cursor through the whole screen to those controls. Of course some have tray bar at the top of the screen, but the majority does not. Besides, this way you won't break the old users' UI interaction habits. And yes, volume bar must be right aligned with time line, if it's above.

Sorry I'm going to be quite harsh later on in this message, so let me be clear right off: I really see a lot of potential for Amarok 2 to be better than Amarok 1.4. Looking at some of the things that you guys are trying especially with things like dynamic playlists ... they're really impressive.

This is a bit of constructive and very specific criticism on the UI. I know how much effort something like this takes, so don't think I'm trying to be mean or diminish your efforts at all.

Starting from the top.

1. The buttons at the top look squashed together. Having them overlapping doesn't seem to work with the style chosen.

   There's quite a few problems with the depth:

   • The overlapping makes it appear that the play button is in front of the stop button and previous button, which are in turn in front of the next button.
   • The previous and next buttons have harsher gradients than the play and stop buttons, which makes them appear *in front* of the play and stop buttons, a contradiction from the first point.
   • The buttons are exactly the same size, indicating no depth, which is a another contradiction again.
   • When the mouse hovers over a button, it increases in size, which makes it seem like it's coming closer. Say you're hovering over the Stop button, it's now bigger than the play button - it should be closer than the play button. Yet it's behind the play button. It looks really weird.
   • The gradients give a "light over here" look, yet the light's in a slightly different place for each button.
   • There are no shadows or steeper gradients caused by the bubbles in front. Since there are no shadows, they can't be at different depths, but since there are no steeper gradients caused by the overlapping buttons, they can't be at the same depth.

   Boiling it all down, the lighting and depth signals in the buttons contradict eachother and themselves. There's no consistency there.

   Here's some more problems:

   • The outer bubble for the previous button has a specular lighting gradient, but none of the others do.
   • The outer bubbles on all of them have diffuse light gradients, making them look like bubbles (which is why I'm calling them bubbles). Bubbles are curved, yet the signs on them are straight which makes it look like they should be on a flat surface... but they have specular gradients on them as well, meaning they would be curved!
   • The stop and play buttons touch the signs on the previous and next buttons. This makes it kind of hard to see them clearly.
   • I have no idea what the grey around the buttons is supposed to be. I have three ideas:
     • The gap between the button and the flat outer surface. But this can't be right, because when you hover over the button the gap goes outwards! Gaps just don't behave like that.
     • Shadows. But this can't be right - the gradients make it appear that the light is coming from above. There are several other problems with this theory as well. The shadows are all even, and don't follow the gradients at all, creating a contradiction. The shadows are opaque, not translucent. When the user hovers over a button, the button comes forward, which should make the shadow blurrier, but it suddenly becomes sharp!
     • An out of focus object which goes in focus when the button comes forward. But that means the focus is in for play, out for out of focus grey around play, then in again for the buttons behind it, then out, in and out again for the next button.
     • As it stands the grey just looks odd.

   I would like to see more care being taken for the depths of the buttons, taking into account the problems above. If there are gradients indicating depth or lighting, they should be consistent and realistic.

2. I would like to see more consistency with the spacing. The following spaces seem a bit random:
   • The spaces between the buttons and the top, the buttons and the side, the buttons and the bottom
   • The spaces between the button and the time passed, the bottom and the time bar, and the right and the time left
   • The spaces between the time passed, the time bar, and the time remaining
   • The spaces between the top and the volume, the volume icon and the bar, the volume bar and the time bar, and the volume bar and the right
   • The spaces between the frame and the widgets around them

   When you have spacing like that, they should be consistent with eachother. For instance, I would have all of those spaces except for the space between the volume bar and the right and the space between the volume bar and the time bar exactly equal.

3. The volume bar should be aligned with the rest of the widgets (perhaps have the right of the time bar align with the right of the volume bar?), and should be the same size as the time bar in height. It currently looks random.
4. Now for the middle. I'd prefer to have some way to display only the playlist, and move the widgets out of the way. The playlist is the only necessary part of the application and the most important part. This is my opinion of course, but Amarok is a music player and the playlist serves the core purpose of the application, so I'd say that would be a shared opinion. The problem is that when the window is made quite small the centre pane takes alot of the room available, and the playlist is contracted. The centre pane is also something that is not constantly looked at, so having a way of bringing it up quickly, but having it out of the way most of the time seems like it would make sense.

   I would say put it as one of the left tabs, as unless I'm not mistaken you're not likely to be looking at one of the other tabs at the same time as the centre pane.

5. The applets in the centre pane all have a different depth to the depths of the widgets in the rest of the app (i.e. the frame has a different/sharper gradient).
6. The buttons on the centre pane overlap the applets in there. It makes it hard to read the bottom lyrics, and it clashes quite badly. Same with the add/remove applet menus there - they're hard to read when the background is translucent and you have a text applet behind them. A white lyrics applet under the menus makes it almost impossible.
7. This may be me being slightly blind here, but the bottom and top of the playlist seems slightly out of line with the applet pane and the left tabs pane. I think it may just be an optical illusion caused by the differing frame depths.
8. Every second line of the playlist is exactly the same colour as the background of the buttons on the bottom of the playlist. If the second line is the bottom track displayed, then it makes it appear as if the buttons on the bottom have something to do with that track. I would rather either move the buttons to below the playlist frame, or have the background for the buttons be different a shade.
9. There should be a space between the end of the line time (i.e. when it says 16 tracks (32:22) ) and the right of the window.

Well that's a long post. I hope this is at least slightly helpful.

Hi guys!

I just started to use amarok2 beta3 (from kubuntu 8.10), but I've got a few how-to questions (maybe should you consider making these features easier to use , if exist?):
- how can I add a directory, which contains all my mp3s to the playlist so the playlist (not the collection) is automatically updated whenever I add some mp3 to the directory?
- how can I find a song in the playlist and jump to it immediately?

I must admit that the features you added to this quite useful music player, like lyrics and cover finder makes this program the best amongst the other players. Thanks for your efforts! :)

Visko

does anyone know why amarok does not start under windows after doubleclicking the amarokicon?

I am using amarok2 since Archlinux moved to KDE4.

I think the iPod (or any mp3player) control (load and unload music at iPod or iRiver,...) is a real issue. I am using a gtk application for this task today.

Thanks a lot for this great software. It's the best.

To be honest I'm quite pissed from the "grayness" of KDE4. The Oxygen theme is too much grey. It seems like the applications are all developed using Tcl/Tk!

I hoped for Amarok to be a bit more colorful (as it was in some of the old incarnations of the interface) but it seems like I'll have to surrender to the great grayness of KDE4 even on Amarok :-(

My two Cents

Bye

Marcello

I'd like to see (and be able to use) the last.fm buttons with non-last.fm stream data playing. I thought I read somewhere that this was going to be implemented due to the support of the new last.fm API. Anyway, it'd be awesome.

P.S. Songbird does it already ;)

Cool,

When is the windows version finally coming out? I'm so sick and tired of iTunes. iTunes doesn't even understand that an album with one name can have 40 songs in it. Instead I have 40 albums with the exact same name... *grr*.

Oh, will Amarok 2.0 have something similar to "Genius" <-- just working better though.
For some reason iTunes doesn't realize there is music outside of the Apple universe. (most European Techno and Trance falls into that category. :( )
Hence it won't support cover art, "Genius", or anything else that's useful..

I'm really hoping Amarok 2.0 will be better.

There is a lot of buzz going on around it at my school. (especially the prospect of a Windows and Mac OS-X version.)