Amarok 2: Visual Changelog
[ Saturday, 24 May 2008, Bastion ]
Amarok multimedia player is one of the best programs of its kind not only for Linux but for any operating system nowadays. It has been created as a KDE component. Most people hoped to have Amarok 2.0 included in KDE 4.0, which hasn’t happened. It’s hard to predict if it finds its way into KDE 4.1 stable, but it’s still worth taking a look at the current progress of this great multimedia player
Phonoceum
The main development goal for 1.x branch was to support a few audio engines. Due to this requirement, Amarok had to ship with separate components for xine and gstreamer engines. This solution had obvious flaws, since any small API change in any of those engines required a change in Amarok’s code. The fix for all those turned up to be Phonon, the new KDE 4 audio framework. Thanks to Phonon, Amarok 2 does not have to worry about engines support anymore, which means more time for its developers to work on actual features. Another positive side-effect is that Amarok 2 will be able to serve not only music and audio streams but also video. You should not however expect advanced features like DVD support or subtitles, but rather a very basic implementation for those who don’t want to launch a separate app just to see a video clip of their favorite band.
Vector interface
Amarok 2 like most of the KDE 4 apps uses vector graphics to render its interface. The use of SVG makes it easier to create themes. It’s actually pretty hard to follow the interface changes since there’s been a lot of them recently. Every time I launch a new version, Amarok looks different. For the time being however, Amarok looks like this:
Amarok 2
The main window has been divided into three columns (before: two):
- On the left side we can notice familiar tabs.
- In the middle the context view resides, which takes up the most space being a container for Plasma applets. It’s supposed to display information about the currently played track, such as its title, similar/recommended tracks, the lyrics or information about the artist.
- On the right side, you can see the playlist. One of its innovations is the option to shrink the tracks belonging to a single record. There is also a traditional alternative, for those who don’t like the new looks of the playlist view. It’s not however identical with the one we know from the 1.x series.
Fortunately you can alter the width of each column.
Simple playlist
Menu
The menu bar has been reorganized to save space. Or something. I’m not sure if it’s the developer’s decision or it’s just because the work is in progress and not all the features are present.
Menu bar: Amarok
Menu bar: Playlist
Menu bar: Tools
Menu bar: Settings
From the known tools we have the cover manager and script manager. I haven’t noticed the audio equalizer, visualizer and the statistics, yet. I hope those features will eventually make it to the stable edition.
Script manager
Cover manager
Internet services
Except for audio streams, Amarok 2 offers a cool feature of integration with multiple Internet services. The Magnatune shop support has been there for a while. Now we have a few more options, like Jamendo, MP3Tunes, Shoutcast, OMPL and a very successful Last.fm. Enjoy, listen and buy DRM-free music now, straight from Amarok 2!
Internet services
Last.fm
Magnatune shop
Configuration options
As the traditional last part of my reviews, here are a few screenshots of the configuration options:
Configuration: General
Configuration: Playback
Configuration: On Screen Display
Configuration: Collection
Configuration: Internet Services
Configuration: Media Devices
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19 Comments
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Can anybody recognize the font of “Here goes release name” on the splash screen screenshot? Thanks
The font is Blue Highway from searchfreefonts. Being more specific, it’s the normal variation (second on this page: http://www.searchfreefonts.com/search/?q=blue+highway) with 90% height.
All of these superfluous features, yet still no gapless playback? No thanks.
Your superfluous features are other people’s must haves. And vice-versa. For me gapless playback is far from essential.
One thing thing OSS has plenty of is music players. It seems like many developers would rather write their own player than make an existing one better.
There are limitations on making existing players better. When the Amarok community responds to feature requests about improving the player window with “we’re getting rid of the player window” or “nobody uses the player window” then you’re banging your head against the wall.
When you’re dismissed as summarily as this, then of course people are going to write their own players. If you can’t play ball with a group of kids, go find a different ball game.
Amarok just seems to be even more bloatier and mega-hungry on the screen real-estate than before. If it can’t be made to show something as simple and useful as iTunes’ mini browser (with genre, artist, album) whereby it will just continue playing the next track in the filterest list (rather than having to drag songs into the playing area all the time) then Amarok is just another sledge-hammer solution to a problem that doesn’t have to be this complicated.
Getting rid of the player window (or at least neglecting it to death) also means I’ll never use it. I’m not having that crap-big window on screen all the time, and the OSD is just an irritating poor substitute.
Amarok 2 is a step back for this program. Amarok on KDE3 was near perfect, they should have simply polished it more for the KDE4 release. But they are trying to re-invent the wheel. Amarok 2 has too much wasted space. Why does the progress bar need to stretch along the whole window? The Plasma applets look ugly and the whole theme is inconsistent. I really hope someone forks over the project and ports Amarok 1 to QT4.
Amarok is improving as a music-buying platform, while degrading it as a player. The devs are acting as whe only thing a person has to do in his/her life is to stare in front of Amarok all the day long listening and buying music from Magnatunes, while looking at musicians’/bands’ Wikipedia pages and other useless gadgets, as if kde4 hadn’t Plasma already.
Point said, I simply _love_ Amarok 1.4.9 and how it enables me to _manage_ my music, edit tags (libtunepimp to the rescue), reorganize them and make me feel enpowered by OSS software. It’s a shame some really nice improvements found in Amarok2 (as the faster music database lookup and Phonon integration) are sorely crippled by the bad (albeit beautiful) user interface. Sadly, for those ones who say “Amarok 1.4.9 will not vanish! Simply use it!”, it _will_ bitrot and be so ugly as a Gtk+1.0 application as the time goes.
xmms still looks good to me and plays just fine.
using it right now to listen to my old kosmic tunes.
Amarok can display itself in Kicker, in SuperKaramba, through a notice in chat, through a plugins, etc. It is very easy to use and powerful, but display options are not one of its weaknesses.
Whether I click on a file name in a Krusader window or click a link on a Firefox page pointing to a .wav or a .mp3 I want that file in my loudspeakers immediately. If anything is already playing then stop that instantly. And when a file stops playing naturally then just keep quiet!
Amarok gave me that a number of versions ago but then changed behaviour to adding my clicks to a playing list and insisting on first completing playing everything previously clicked on.
So I changed to XMMS. I wonder how long that will be usable.
I don’t want my screen filled with eye-candy. All I want is one selected sound file in my loudspeakers.
Where do I go for a simple player?
For a simple player, try VLC. It plays anything you throw at it. Music, Video, DVD. You name it it plays it. And only a simple playlist will give you exactly what you want. No good if you want a media library, or visualistations, or anything fancy. But as a simple player its perfect!
Before i realised the limitations of the video player window, I was seriously considering using the underlying library for my own, more fully featured media player!
“Where do I go for a simple player?”
If existing ones do not suit you, you could always try command line tools like mpg123/mpg321 or mp3blaster and program your Krusader so it launches those when you click an mp3.
I figure it’s not that hard to do if you spend some time on it.
If you are using Amarok and want a “simple player” - then you are entirely missing the point of Amarok. There are plenty of nice simple Winamp-like players out there !
Why cant amarok use the darn systemfont in the gui.. I hate that large clumsy font.
Maybe it looks huge, but it will be polished in future. KDE 4 isnt nicely looking yet (but did it stepped back? no!)
Amarok 2 is future.
kool appearance of Amarok 2.When it’ll be released?
ОЯЕБУ!11 КОМРАДЕ ОН КРАСИВ ЭТОТ ЛИНАКС!
Чому амароке, моке наше фсио. песпесты, риале!