What happened to Amarok?
Amarok used to be the best music player you could find anywhere. When I bought a second-hand macbook I was all excited because I could finally see what all the fuss about this magical iTunes thingy was. A few days of playing and I wanted Amarok again.1
A few days ago I upgraded my work machine and laptop to the latest Ubuntu version. A bunch of things didn’t go so smoothly. I’m considering switching my work machine from KDE to Gnome, but the one that really makes me angry is Amarok. [Edit: Nikolaj Hald Nielsen from the Amarok team comments below, pointing out that some of the things I thought were missing are still there, just in places I wasn’t looking. My bad — 2.0.2 still isn’t a dream but it’s less broken than I thought. And apparently 2.1 is on the way, which is good news.]
Forget all the user interface changes. (I think some of them are dumb, but that’s something to argue about.) Forget the simple features from the previous version that aren’t there (yet?) in Amarok 2. (I don’t want the year to show in my collection listing… well, I can put up with it, since there doesn’t seem to be any way to change it.) Amarok 2 forgets everything Amarok 1 knew.
Let me repeat that. Amarok 2 forgets everything that Amarok 1 knew about your collection. It forgets which albums are supposed to be listed under “Various Artists”.2 I presume it forgets all the statistics it should have built up about which tracks you listen to most often. (This isn’t a problem for me, since I don’t use the features that would depend on those statistics.)3 I suspect it forgets the covers you’ve downloaded, although that’s just a deja-vu-based suspicion –I’m pretty sure I already downloaded this cover?– rather than something I’ve checked.4
[Edit: Well, here’s egg on my face. Yes, Amarok 2 doesn’t use the 1.4 database… but there’s an import function to transfer your old data to the new format/location/whatever-it-is. Under Settings->Collection, there’s an “Import Collection” button which does the job. (At first this didn’t work, but googling the error told me I had to install the package libqt4-sql-sqlite which fixed things.)]
If this is a bug, then I forgive everything. Bugs happen. But if this is a deliberate decision, then I’m disgusted. Strike that. Of course it isn’t a deliberate decision: nobody writing software decides “I want my users to have to tell my software again something that it already knows.” But software that doesn’t carry user data over an upgrade must be designed by someone who isn’t designing for the user. Nobody did this “deliberately”, but somebody managed to avoid noticing that it would cause problems. That’s … impressive, in the wrong way.
[Edit: well, apparently not. The only slip-up is the developers not imagining that somebody –like me– might not realise the option exists. A first-run wizard might be handy for this, but that’s a much more minor issue.]
One of the wonderful things about the-Amarok-that-is-no-more is how it handled pluggable media. I carry my music on an external usb drive. Before the upgrade, if I fired up Amarok without the drive being plugged in my library would appear just like normal, but with the files that weren’t accessible greyed-out. Plug in the drive, and like magic the grey turns to black; very elegant, I must say. And of course Amarok 2 doesn’t work that way.
Now I appreciate that setting this up is no trivial matter. I presume that KDE 4 changes all sorts of things, at fundamental levels conceivably to do with auto-detection of USB drives and scanning and so on and so forth. I understand that the Amarok that comes with KDE 4 might have to do this a little differently. What I don’t understand is how Amarok 2 can be considered an upgrade.
Consider. This putative “upgrade” disables the following functionality (that I have noticed):
- Collection responding to attachment of pluggable media without slow rescan
- User-controlled sort order for collection (artist/album, year/artist, genre/year/album, etc.)
- Various interesting ‘smart playlist’ features5
A user nonetheless wishing to continue will have to re-enter certain data: I think covers, certainly ‘Various Artists’ tags. The statistics from previous listening would seem to be completely lost (unless the database is intact, and someone clever can pull out the data — here’s hoping).
What kind of an ‘upgrade’ is this?
As I understand it, what to do with Amarok 2 and the Ubuntu Jaunty release must have been quite a difficult question. Jaunty had to go, and Amarok wasn’t ready… But the new Amarok has all sorts of great features that the public has to see! (The interface has some stylish new elements. I can imagine that the code making them possible is a much more significant change that how they end up looking.) But the Amarok crew made the wrong decision.
They decided to ship incomplete software, and the decision was taken so late that the transition from old to new version (database update and so on) didn’t get any attention. Wrong decision. [Edit: the transition bit isn’t true. I still don’t like the decision to ship 2.0.2 with Jaunty, but it’s not the wreck I thought it was.]
I’ll stick to Amarok for a while. The design still rocks (despite some backsliding).6 And of course it’s free.7 But I hope the authors will get their act together reasonably soon…
Notes:
- A couple of weeks of playing and it hit home that I would have to pay for updates… and so I went back to Linux, and got Amarok back. [↪]
- And if you start going through your collection putting them back in, you find pretty quickly that after adding an album to ‘various artists’ the collection recalculates its display. And resets to the top. Which is a pain if you were somewhere in the B section, especially given that the collection no longer marks letters (it’s just a long list in alphabetical order). [↪]
- And Amarok 2 doesn’t appear to have the features that would depend on those features, anyway. [↪]
- I guess it just doesn’t look at the old database, or expects a different database format, or something. Frustrating that all those album covers are somewhere, locked in a database rather than accessible as files… [↪]
- Here’s the only genuinely constructive suggestion in this entire post (as opposed to “the old way was better” or “whatever you just did, don’t do it”): smart playlist algorithms are the sort of thing that a community can write. With an API making the data reasonably available, and an enthusiastic community, I would expect great things here. It doesn’t need to be (indeed, it shouldn’t be) built into the app. [↪]
- Letter indicators in the collection were a good idea. (They can be placed left of the artist name, to avoid taking up an extra line.) Why give every artist a head-shaped logo, if every artist has the same logo? I’d like to be able to close the central panel, rather than just leaving it empty and reasonably small. [↪]
- Which makes all the complaints sound like unreasonable whinging. Of course, since I didn’t pay for Amarok, I don’t have the leverage a disappointed customer at say Starbucks would have: the makers of Amarok have no reason to have to pay attention to me. On the other hand they should, since I’m (a) exactly in their target audience (Amarok-lovers) and (b) dissatisfied. But, it’s true, you get what you pay for. All I can say is, I had expected Amarok to be better than that. [↪]
Comments
Didn't I send you a link to a PPA where you can get the versions of amarok as it's updated? I'm sure I saw that somewhere and sent it to you. Maybe I'm wrong.
While its true that Amarok 2.0.2 does not automatically import your Amarok 1 collection, in the settings->collection page there is an option to run a collection importer that should correctly import covers, various artist settings and so on. Since this is script based, it is possible to create importers for collections from other apps, and there is actually also an importer for iTunes collections.
As for having this upgrade happen when installing Jaunty, the Amarok team would have preferred that Jaunty had kept Amarok 1.4.10 as the default and offered Amarok 2.0.2 as an optional update as we realize that it does not have feature parity with the 1.4.x version (yet). However this is not our call to make but that of the Ubuntu packagers. What is even more frustrating for us is that we almost have Amarok 2.1.0 ready for release, which is all around a much better Amarok than 2.0.2, fixing many bugs and bringing back many features, but we were unable to get it ready in time for inclusion in Jaunty. There is a beta available now with an experimental PPA for installing it on Jaunty.
All in all we are very aware of the shortcomings of the 2.0.2 version of Amarok, and are working hard on fixing them. 2.1.0 is going to be a major step forward, bringing back a lot of the missing features as well as adding some unique new ones that are possible because of the new framework. There are still a few things missing, such as better device support, but we are already working on these, and have a Goggle Summer of Code project for fixing this.
I'll try to answer a few of your specific points:
User controlled sort order in the collection should still be there even if the interface for it changed a bit.
5) We have one default implementation built in, but it is actually possible to write your own using scripts, there is already an alternative version available on kde-apps.org ( you can install it using the script manager within Amarok . In general the scripting interface in AMarok 2 is very powerful compared to the previous version and allows for some amazing stuff.
6) Yes!! We want those back to. Unfortunately it has proven a bit harder to do with the new codebase than we had expected.
7) We really do try to listen to our users and respond to blogs like yours that while critical are definitely not trolling or just throwing flames and we agree on many of the issues and are working to fix them.
Ryan: It sounds like you miss a completely different set of features to the ones I miss, which is interesting. Makes me realise anew how much is in there.
Robin: you did. It was the PPA version that didn't deal properly with my usb drive, but KDE4 has been so flakey that I'm not even sure that that's Amarok's fault. Note my new conciliatory tone, because...
Nikolaj: now I feel like a right jerk. There is an import function. It didn't even occur to me there might be... what a jerk. Thanks for your response, I've edited some bits into the post. I still don't see how to alter the collection sort order, but that's a seriously minor point besides having all my long-hoarded data back. In my chastened state I'm now off to check out the roadmap for 2.x.x development, which of course I should have done first.
tikitu: No need to feel like a jerk. That you did not find this, arguably pretty well hidden feature, actually highlights another issue that we are working on; making a proper "first run" guide for Amarok 2 (we actually have a prototype of something quite cool running for this)
As for the roadmap for future versions, there is not really one place to go for that, but the changelog (http://amarok.kde.org/en/releases/2.1/beta/1) for 2.1.0 Beta 1 gives a nice overview, and you can find a lot of discussion about what features are being planned/worked on in our blogs (http://amarok.kde.org/en/PlanetAmarok)
Oh, the deal with the usb drive is actually Amaroks fault. The Google Summer of Code student who re-added support for media devices last year did not get around to usb mass storage devices. He is back this year to finish up the job though!
I had a look at the changelog... and now feel even more of a jerk. It's easy to lose sight of the sheer magnitude of work, mainly invisible, going on behind each release. Almost all the things I'm annoyed about are apparently either sorted out in 2.1 or at least being worked on. (The usb issue is a pain, and might even send me back to 1.4 until it's sorted out.)
I think I would have been justified in a bit of angry flaming if there wasn't any import-from-1.4 functionality. Since there is, though, the tone of my post isn't at all justified. I apologise.
I'm still not completely sold on the UI changes, but that's an entirely different issue (and one that I'll air over at your place, if I come up with anything constructive).
[...] embarassed myself by mouthing off about Amarok without checking the state of play properly, I’m belatedly [...]
tikitu: Regarding the gui, you will be happy to know that there are (literally right now) 14 of us sitting around a table in Berlin at a lager Amarok developer sprint, discussing the short and long term plans for the Amarok 2 gui. There should be a flurry of blog posts from this event hitting the Amarok blog aggregator soon.
Coolness. Now that I've started looking around, I've seen some very cool mockups.
I completely agree. I just rebuilt my machine with the new version and it's like having both arms lopped off.
The lack of information displayed in the playlist makes organising and checking on tag information nearly impossible.
I also can't 'stage' things using the Files option and clean up tags etc. before moving them to my collection. It appears you can't do anything with 'Files' except add them to the collection - despite being able to drag and drop them anywhere - nothing happens.
I've already given up using it as I can't do all the things I relied upon in the old version to manage my music. I could learn to put up with it if the features where still there in a different spot, but most are gone!
I too hope they'll get all these features back in.