“Everyone is born unique, but so many die as copies.”

“If anyone knows of any good way to cause deep emotional discomfort to the jerks making amarok; please do let me know.”

Oh yes, I am sure we really deserve that for working hard, in our free time, on a program (and code) that we then give away for free. How dare we not make the application exactly the way _you_ want it? How dare we stick to our guns by making a new framework that we think can in time become much better than Amarok 1.4.x even if it takes a little time instead of just pushing forwards with the same, deeply flawed and close to unmaintainable codebase of 1.4.x?

But of course, you know better, we sat down and decided to spend 2+ years of our lives actively destroying the project that we all care very deeply about…. right?

At this point I could point out that the Amarok 1.4.10 you love is still available, I could tell you that just like the initial KDE 4.0.x releases was a bit rough, Amarok 2 will take a little time to settle as it was a huge rewrite and that 2.1.0 is coming along very nicely, but this has already been done many times, and frankly, your post, with its quite personal attacks does not really warrant such a reply.

You are very free to not like Amarok 2 in its current form, or ever. We were very clear that some people who really liked the “old” Amarok would not adjust well to the new one. Alas, such is the price of trying to do something new.

But could we pretty please lay off the personal attacks?

Mr. Nielsen, not only have you exaggerated Cygnostik’s reaction to the half-assed Amarok 2.0 release, you’ve also clearly not examined what he said about it. The problems with Amarok 2 are not about personal requests for functionality, they’re about requests for functionality that were not only already present in the prior family of Amarok release, but pretty much across all media players OS and Internet-wide.

I just experienced this for myself after installing Jaunty Jackelope Kubuntu 9.04 this weekend. Amarok won’t update the song info on an OGG or MP3 stream to the current song being played. That was working just fine on Wednesday last week when I was running Kubuntu 8.01 with Amarok 1.4.

Let’s be clear about one thing, and one thing that a vast majority of the internet agrees on: releasing broken betaware as a succesor to previously more stable and more functional software is a bad idea and generally in poor taste. KDE did this with the initial 4.0 “stable” release that in fact was so buggy and unfit for mass adoption it turned a whole community adamant about sticking with 3.5 or moving over to Gnome altogether.

Following KDE 4′s example in that instance will never be a good idea because, as Amarok has forced Cygnostik and I to do, it only causes people to lose faith in your development goals and seek alternatives that provide the minimum – the MINIMUM, Mr. Nielsen – of functionality they once had with prior releases. If your’e going to break your product, please just fix it before release. Hold closed betas. Demonstrate to the users you actually have progress in mind by showcasing a refined product, not something that will limit a user’s ability to user the it the same way they did before. There’s a large margin of difference between deprecating old features and breaking standards.

It’s not about the flavour of the design or the layout or *how* Amarok 2 accomplishes its tasks, it’s whether or not it accomplishes certain tasks at all, especially those it may have once been able to do before being ‘improved’ into a broken paradigm. This isn’t personal at all, it’s communal: I sincerely hope that in the same way Microsoft has failed to gain market with Vista the way it did with XP, that other media players for KDE/Linux will now pick up the pace of development where Amarok has instead chosen to snub its users.

This isn’t personal at all, it’s business. It’s professionalism and consumerism at its utmost: the Amarok team has released a poor product in place of one with apparently superior functionality and stability. Not an opinion, not a personal attack, just a sad reality. I’m sure the Amarok team thinks the re-write will be ultimately beneficial in the same way it was supposed to be for KDE4, but even I made sure to not even try KDE4 until 4.1 because of the well-documented issues and glaring reviews. Apparently these reactions were not enough to teach the KDE a team a thing or two about not only how to improve their wares but realzie when it might be an appropriate time to release them and not force users to be unwilling and/or unknowing beta testers.

Honestly, I hope Amarok doesn’t get fixed and it stays the frustrating piece of broken bloatware it has become. It’s the same kind of complacency that allows users to tolerate that kind of thing that keeps them using Windows.

Bahah! Nice rant Nikolaj! Shouldn’t you be fixing this piece of junk instead of highlighting your inability to contribute anything of value, to a donating user no less?!

@centerNegative

“Mr. Nielsen, not only have you exaggerated Cygnostik’s reaction to the half-assed Amarok 2.0 release, you’ve also clearly not examined what he said about it. The problems with Amarok 2 are not about personal requests for functionality, they’re about requests for functionality that were not only already present in the prior family of Amarok release, but pretty much across all media players OS and Internet-wide.”

I have now read the original post again several times, and apparently you can see specifics in it that I simply cannot. There is not a single actionable piece of constructive criticism in there. There is nothing where I can say, good point, I will go fix that right away. The parts about Amarok 2 boils down to: “They’ve entirely ruined it. Made it uglier, removed any of the features I used except for the ones that they kept which don’t work anymore… It’s just an all around disaster”

Why is it uglier ( and more importantly what can be done to improve it? ) what specific features that you depend on are missing? Which ones that are there are broken?

These would have been things that we could act on. I would not at all mind having a discussion about what is currently broken and what can be done about it, but that requires a much greater level of specifics. Likely however we already know many of these tings as other users have reported them in ways that meant we could start improving them. If you look at the changelog for the recently released Beta 1 of Amarok 2.1.0 ( http://amarok.kde.org/en/releases/2.1/beta/1 ) you will likely see that a great deal of these issues have already been addressed. 2.1.0 still has its sore spots though, mainly media device support and general interface, but we are already working on these for 2.2.

As for the discussion about whether it was wrong to release KDE 4.0 that is enough to fill out several comment threads on several blogs (and has already, many times over).

Personally I think much of the responsibility for users getting shell shocked lies with the distros. How many distros did you see ship with the 2.6.0 linux kernel right off the bat? As developers, our job is to create software and make it available, the job of the distros is to pick the software that is right for their users. It seems to me that the “ooooh, its new and shiny” got the better of many of them, both in the case of KDE 4.0.0 and Amarok 2.0.0. I do think that KDE 4.2.x is perfectly ready for general use by now however. For Amarok 2.0.x it had likely been better if the distros defaulted to 1.4.10 and kept 2.0.x optional for users who wanted to try/use it. A bit more on this point in my reply to Cygnostik below…

@Cygnostik

“Anyone who’d call that a “Personal” attack… Well you’re excused because you don’t know me and haven’t any way to tell that was practically a compliment and if I intended personal you’d have fucking known it.”

I’ll point out the little nugget that got me all fired up again:

“If anyone knows of any good way to cause deep emotional discomfort to the jerks making amarok; please do let me know.”

If that is not a personal attack ( I sure feels like one ), then I don’t know what criteria you think a post has to meet to qualify. Perhaps you are right however and I really don’t _want_ to know what meets your standards for this.

Please realize that we are doing the very best we can to make Amarok 2 the best music player ever. A lot of people are putting and enormous amount of effort into into this application. We released 2.0.0 because we, after almost 2 years of work, had something that was stable and, for many cases, usable, although not on feature parity with 2.0.0.

As for having this upgrade forced on you, I will actually concede you this point. It likely would have been a good idea for many distros to keep 1.4.x around for a while yet. Unfortunately we do not have much influence on this. ( One distro actually decided to ship with an early Beta, now _that_ was seriously broken… ). We tried to make it very clear what Amarok 2.0.0 was and also what it was not. The original release announcement for Amarok 2.0.0 contained this bit:

“It is important to note that Amarok 2.0 is a beginning, not an end. Because of the major changes required, not all features from the 1.4 are in Amarok 2. Many of these missing features, like queueing and filtering in the playlist, will return within a few releases. Other features, such as visualizations and support for portable media players, require improvements in the underlying KDE infrastructure. They will return as KDE4′s support improves. Some features, such as the player window or support for databases other than MySQL, have been removed because either they posed insurmountable programming problems, or they didn’t fit our design decisions about how to distinguish Amarok in a saturated market of music players. ”

Oh, we do appreciate the donation!

- Nikolaj

Mr. Cygnostik sir, I too feel the pain that is Amarok 2. This pain has pushed me to find a way to bring the old Amarok back from its early grave. In my half crazed search to resurrect the newly deceased I have found a way.

http://nomad.ca/blog/2009/apr/3/amarok-14-jaunty-ubuntu-904/

And in response to Mr. “Developer” Dude, I must also point you to the aforementioned link. Not only to remind you how good the old amarok infact was, but to also direct you to the comments there, left by end-users not unlike cygnostik and me, a great majority of which entail something along the lines of -

“ZOMG, Amarok2 is teh lamzors! Who in their right mind would releaz these clearly broken warez?!

OK, to be fair on both sides, Amarok 2 is not only an abhorrent development over its predecessor but Canonical must share some of the responsibility for even including the dreaded app in the latest Kubuntu distro.

Heretic, you are completely awesome for sharing that. I just got that done tonight and it worked instantaneously and flawlessly. Having only opened Amarok 2 once before immediately closing it in shock and disgust, it will now easily become a distant, fading memory.

I must now go heap the requisite praise upon that blog post for they are clearly doing great works in the name of Humanity.

Sadly Amarok 2 sucks balls….

Attempts to downplay how bad Amarok 2 is are simply futile. Amarok 1.4 is the best music management/player I have ever used. Amarok 2 is like a dumbed-down, half-assed, shareware app that I might have downloaded to my Windows box back in 96. So much of the functionality just vanished completely. The bloody menus and tabs *just aren’t there*. My immediate reaction was WTF is this shit?!!! I immediately became convinced that Microsoft or Apple, or some other evil empire has some deadly grip on the necks of KDE and Amarok developers. I hate Amarok 2 in the same way I hate KDE 4.2. Well, I hated KDE 4.2 first, but it was the Amarok 2 experience that had me scrambling to install gnome. I’ve since found that link above and got Amarok 1.4 back. Never again will I use KDE and I will never use Amarok 2. It’s not personal, I just hate it.

I appreciate the effort of Amarok’s developers, but they should know that releasing this working version would cause this reaction.

I was looking for a replacement instead of Amarok2.1 and I found GMusicBrowser (http://squentin.free.fr/gmusicbrowser/gmusicbrowser.html). Which is very very simple player but still it has more functions than Amarok 2.1. For the first time it’s hard to find out how it works but you can make from it any music player layout you like, even Amarok2 layout but with one difference – it plays music, reads ID3 tags and it doesn’t crash your system

I dropped Amarok 2.1 for Songbird in a mater of SECONDS. Ive never dumped any program that quickly. Not even KDE 4.0 Gold release. We apreaciate your effort, but not listening to comments and picking out insuts to avoid the comments is just side stepping. Dont become the government!!! There will be insults in most rants, thats just the nature of the beast.