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It was just a beginning

This is the first time I've actually gotten around to posting anything on the internet. I've been working on Amarok since we started on the 2.0 adventure, and have stuck my nose in most of Amarok since then. I'm hoping to write a series of posts about some of the cool things in Amarok 2, and some of the cooler things to come. Today I'm going to preview 2.0.1, because as we said earlier, 2.0 was just a beginning, and the evolution is already going full speed.

Amarok's code was in a feature freeze for a while before 2.0 was released. There were all sorts of changes in the code, and all sorts of annoying bugs that needed to be fixed. Fixing bugs is no where near as fun as adding new features, and we needed to stop adding features to let the code settle down. This left Amarok 2 missing some very useful features that Amarok 1.4 had. The good news is, many of these features have returned in 2.0.1

2.0.1 brings back searching in the playlist, as Nikolaj wrote here. Since then, Nikolaj has taken it a step further and added filtering as well as searching, which provides the opportunity to use it much as it was used in 1.4. Seb has also merged his support for queueing, another big feature that was missing in 2.0. In addition, "Stop after Current track" functionality is slowing making it's way back into svn. This is one of those features that is much more useful that it sounds and I've been missing it since it disappeared during 2.0 development.

In addition, media device support is improving. Alejandro has been making all sorts of improvements to ipod and mtp device support. We have plans to add support for generic media devices, and probably others as well. This is a great opportunity for new contributers, as this code is fairly self-contained and requires a device to use (and test) it. If anyone is interested in contributing to Amarok, this would be a great place to start.

I've re-added custom sorting to the collection browser as well. This is something that I don't use all that much, but it's nice to be able to change the sorting order in the collection. In addition, we've fixed somewhere between fifteen and twenty-five bugs already, and will probably fix more before 2.0.1 is officially released in a few weeks.

The other place my focus has been recently is on the windows version of Amarok. It's definitely usable now. I've fixed most of the annoying issues, and I can use it as my primary music player for local and remote music. I'll end this post with a screenshot of Amarok 2.0.1 on windows, and encourage you to try it!

评论

Thanks for re-adding the

Thanks for re-adding the playlist filter and sorting options. It's good to be able to sort by year again:

http://img81.imageshack.us/img81/7808/quick1vj7.png

I missed it...

Another thing: will we be able to show BIGGER covers again? there used to be this option for the cover size but it got removed...why? :( I love cover arts and want to see them BIG! (300px or higher)

Will this come back? Hmmm.....

Hey nice to see all those

Hey

nice to see all those improvements. But why is in your screenshot of Amarok2 the Program called a beta? Is Amarok still beta on Win?

Lately, I had the chance to try Amarok as a jukebox on a party. Unfortunately, most people were rather confused by its program layout and its behaviour. They recommended to switch to iTunes, but I will go on promoting the program. Maybe I have to explain better how to use it.

keep going on!

Yes, amarok is still

Yes, amarok is still considered beta on windows. It has not recieved anywhere near as much testing, and until recently it still needed a lot of attention.

As far as people recommending you switch to itunes... people are always going to want to use what they are familiar with. We can't do anything about that. I think that Amarok is fairly easy to use if you take a few minutes to play with it, but I'm sure theres improvements we can make.

Features

Well the new features do sound nice, specially stop after this track.

But to the thing I miss the most is a usable collection database, one you don't have to delete and start from scratch each time you want to add something to it. Just added a directory containing two new albums and ended up with a complete mess. Albums and songs spread all over the place, whole or parts of albums showing up under wrong artist all through the collection. That new albums get added to the wrong place I can somewhat accept, but not that the whole collection get mangled. Restarting Amarok even changed the already mangled collection, perhaps to the better but not by much.

Guess I'll have to remove everything and add it from scratch again. Lots of manual tweaking of cover art etc, so it's not fun even with my limited collection.

Well, as awesome as we amarok

Well, as awesome as we amarok developers are, I have bad news for you.

I failed mind reading :(

This is the first I've heard of this issue, and I have not seen anything like this on our bug tracker (http://bugs.kde.org). The chances of an issue being fixed increase exponentially when we learn of an issue.

Please file a bug and include all the information you can about this, and it will be looked at.

It's not an uncommon action

It's not an uncommon action even if I don't do it that often, so I would have suspected that perhaps some of the developers had tried it at one point, but I digress.

Happened twice for me in the alphas, but stuff like that is not uncommon when running alpha software:-) Seems like I have not added anything to my collection since I needed to redo it after the database back-end changes. I more or less assumed it was fixed during the database rewrite.

Obviously I'm going to report the issue, but last night I needed to go to bed. Recreating the database and the steps to reproduce the bug to make a good bug report was not something I wanted to start doing then. Besides I was a little pissed and the timing of your blog was excellent:-)

But before I start, any tips to which files to remove to start the collection from scratch? I would like the cover art at least to remain, so I hoped not to remove everything Amarok in .kde. Will my currently messed up database be of any use when trying to fix the problem?

Removing collection

Try this:

rm -rf $HOME/.kde/share/apps/amarok/mysqle

This was fun

Here it is, Bug 178973. Enjoy.

Hmm.

With playlist filtering, queuing, and stop after track all back in 2.0 might actually be usable for me again. I'll have to try it out. I'm curious. (It's like 2.0.1 is the real 2.0!)

Rating

Ah finally the wanted features for Amarok2. I miss now only a one feature, stars of rating on the playlist. I want to see all the song ratings when I look playlist and currently only way is to start playing song to see it. Why to have a rating if you can not see them on the playlist or on the database? If the only way to see stars are playing the song, that is gone wrong direction. Problem is that playlist size is limited because user can not remove/hide the plasma-area on the middle, because resizing panels does not allow hiding it completly.