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

Though if I didn’t NEED to listen to ebm-radio.com *all* the time I’d surely prefer amarok 1.4 for the last.fm functionality.

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.

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?!

“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