Amarok 2.2 – Reloaded, revamped, rethinked, reeverything!
I have a little secret to share with you, Amarok 2.2 Beta 1 is almost out!! shhhh, don’t tell anyone, it might scare the little puppy ๐
Are you curious to what incredible and life changing goodies it will bring to your life? Do you?
Then keep on reading…
First off, i’m pleased to announce that the amarok devs have ears, that’s right, they actually LISTEN to user requests, and so, they added a much asked feature to amarok 2.2, the ability to change the layout has you see fit. the following screenshot shows MY amarok 2.2 git build with MY way of organizing the myriad of information that amarok provides.
AS you can see for yourself, i organized the playbar below, and added two tabs (yes, you can do that and much more), one with the collection browser and other with the info center (which was revamped BTW).
Thats good for keeping us busy for half an hour, but there will be a time when you eventually will have the urge to actually LISTEN to some music.
Well, the playlist was revamped also, a lot of functionality was added and/or tossed around, so lets see some new features.
There are 2 new buttons to the right, and they add some nice features.
The one at the utmost right allows you to determine what tag will sort your playlist (this is all dynamic BTW).
The second one is a revamped way of organizing an configuring something that was introduced in amarok 2.1, the layout manager.
Next on the list, one of my preferred features and a pet peeve that got added recently, the ability to change the playlist tags (including ratings) without the need to open the evil (evil in the sense of too much bloody mouse clicks) tag editor. Justble) click once, the playlist item will then change aspects and will allow you to change the SENSIBLE tags (tags like music time won’t be changeable).
Under the hood, the amarokers did even a more splendid job. Now and for all times to come, the local browser is not for local content anymore, it allows ipods, etc like it did, but also cds are treated as removable collections and the great new advent of VFAT devices (you know , those chinese kinda-alike ipods that you and me own?).
You can even mix and match by drag and drop between them, truly life changing ๐
But amarok was never JUST to play or organize music, but everything musica related, lyrics, wikipedia info, ratings, etc etc.
Well now we have photos and videos pulled on the fly by several sources, thanks to the KDE infrastructure magic you can even PLAY THE VIDEOS inside amarok itself, just drag them to the playlist or doble click them (same behaviour) and you are done!!!
Now, lets get serious here. Are you one of those sorting freaks, that index your refrigerator eggs, and catalong girlfriends/boyfriends by age, size and height? Well, then this feature is for you!!!
Sort your brains out, with this new playlist sorting, never ending, all you can eat sorting mechanism.
But what about me, the “OMG i can’t decide what i want to listen!!!” type of person?
Well, in amarok 2.2, the dynamic playlists are even more dynamic, powerfull and PINK!
Ok, maybe not PINK ๐ but even more powerful then in 2.1, that’s for sure ๐
Another thing that you will notice eventually is a little button, with two stripes that pratically shows up everywhere in the layout.
What does it do? Well, in one word… Bookmarks… which are now much more that just that, you can bookmark virtually everything amarok can put his paws onto. Seeing to believing.
If you click on the bookmark manager you get…
Also, thanks to the new tagging/indexing system that the amarokers developed, each song has its own unique identifier inside the tag, so if you move your music around, amarok WILL recognize it and hunt it down.
All the plasmoids got some love too, the current track allows you to dran and drop the cover, the album is more alike the 1.4 one, the lyrics are editable on the fly, the wiki got the same features 1.4 add (artist, albm, etc).
Well, this are some of the MANY MANY changes amarokers are doing to the mighty wolf.
And this is only a beta ๐ expect them to keep coming your way.
My only question at this point is!
CAN YOU TAKE IT???
Enjoy!
50 thoughts on “Amarok 2.2 – Reloaded, revamped, rethinked, reeverything!”
Leave a Reply
Filed under: Uncategorized - @ 01/09/2009 18:28
Than you for the very nice preview of Amarok 2.2 Beta1. We have worked very hard on it and hope that it will answer many of the comments and critiques that people have had about Amarok 2 so far. ๐
Wow! That’s an awesome review. Thanks so much. I shared it with people following Amarok on identi.ca and twitter.
Thanks for that review and even more to that developers who made this possible!
Are those … pubes?
illogic-al, always finding the heart of a blog. Like a shark smelling blood.
Thanks for the great article. I posted it on the Amarok fan page on facebook. ๐
I… want… EQUALIZER BACK!
Actually equalizer will come back eventually. Amarokers didnt included it yet because its a phonon problem, not an amarok one. since amarok 2.x switched to the KDE 4.x infrastructure, it depends on phonon backends capabilities. The good news is that one of the GSOC projects was precisely an equalizer for phonon/amarok, and the guy involved sucessfully completed the task, so you will see it eventually (my best guess is amarok 2.3 and kde 4.4).
best regards
Equalizer is already in Amarok, just needs latest phonon snapshot so doesn’t work on every machine atm. ๐
I am using 2.2 trunk and equalizer is already there. But you have got to have the latest phonon snapshot (trunk) compiled too.
By the way, equalizer is working perfectly.. ๐
Finally..:D Thanks for article, can’t wait to test it. One question: Will amarok ever have (I mean in near future) browsing collection in panes like in winamp, rythmbox, banshee etc.? It’s just essential to easy manage collection (you see everything like bitrate etc) and much easier to browse then in side panel. But anyway I like this flexible interface!
And by the way… what is the name of debug packet in Kubuntu (to report possible bugs)?
So u mean it will start working better that v1.4 ?
When will I see projectM integrated into Amarok???
This makes me feel like KDE is my next Desktop env ! Well done it looks sooooo nice.
Just a question though: for the podcast, does Amarok displays a visible description of all the files in a feed ? Last time I checked it was not possible (as in many music player except Winamp !), but I find it very usefull to have a description of the episode in order to judge if its worth spending my time listening to it.
There are a lot of podcast features still missing. Some of this you should see back before 2.2 final is released, but I can’t promise anything.
Whether this will include descriptions depends on the the need for new translatable strings, since we are in string freeze ATM.
We are still looking for contributors for the podcast features. As you might be able to tell.
It looks interesting. I’m still not convinced but I’ll give it a shot. I’ve become a Songbird user but dislike the iTunes clone style. Amarok 1.4 was great it was so sad to see it butchered.
Does it or will it support iPod Touch. My son had to go back to Windows so he could load/unload his iPod collection.
There is support for it in the code. I don’t know the specifics to get it working though. Ask aumuell on #amarok (irc.freenode.net)
How does it fare handling ipods. I used to use Amarok 1.4 for managing my ipod and found it the best but have found 2 to be unsatisfactory. Why are are all ipod managers so bad?
Great news. Is Amarok 2.2 able to use sqlite now instead of mysql?
I’d also like to know if Amarok 2.2 has sqlite support. I don’t have large music collection and it’s strikes me that I have to run a Mysql database in order to use media player.
You don’t have to do anything since we use an embedded mysql server.
@Florin: we decided to focus on only one sql implementation because it has proven to be a support nightmare in the past. Since mysqle has the same convenience as sqlite but is a lot faster the decision was easy.
Moodbar, I miss you. I’d love to see you again in 2.x.
I just want to be able to play a directory – even if the tracks haven’t been tagged correctly.
Shine On You Crazy Amarok Devs!
Along with all of the others I was pretty sad/disappointed in the first iteration of Amarok2. Fell in with the crowd. Found the instructions to roll back to v1.4 and even downloaded the files. But… Then… As I was on a forum that was hotly venting. reading the points made, I realized something. I have been using Amarok for a long time before v2 came out and the thing that impressed me so much, as my first few months and years of Amarok use wore on, was that the Amarok Devs were constantly pushing updates and polishing the code. READ MY POST here : http://vivapinkfloyd.blogspot.com/2009/03/review-amarok-202-better-than-14.html . Here we are 6 months later, never rolled back to 1.4, enjoying the updates so far, and looking forward to trying out 2.2.
Six months from now, it will be even better.
Does it support libre.fm?
I was openminded about your review until I saw that you listen to Nickelback.
does the FAT volume manager works for external HDs too?
i love this site
Wow, im being serious. The amarok devs have to be some of the greatest coders out there. I don’t think ANY program could compare to what 2.2 is bringing
This site rocks!
Now, if they finally fix the importing of your old Amarok 1.4 MySQL collection database working, I’ll consider upgrading to Amarok 2.
In default of such basic features, thanks, but no thanks.
That is obviously a bug we need to fix and I think there has been some progress on that.
Here is one that turned up in my searches:
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=174269
Hey can you please contact me ? ๐ Can’t find your contact information ๐
Cool site, love the info. I do a lot of research online on a daily basis and for the most part, people lack substance but, I just wanted to make a quick comment to say I’m glad I found your blog. Thanks,
A definite great read…:)
-Bill-Bartmann
Thanks a lot, excellent and brilliant review.
I have a question, this version of amarok, support scrobbling the music that i listen in my iPod??? in amarok 1.4, that features works very well, but until now, the new Amarok 2.X don’t support that option.
P.D.: Sorry, i don’t speak English…
Very nice site!
I donโt usually reply to posts but I will in this case, great info…I will add a backlink and bookmark your site. Keep up the good work!
cool
For the equalizer, try this solution:
http://slaykristian.wordpress.com/2009/10/14/amarok-2-2-su-jaunty-con-equalizzatore-funzionante/
Bye!
(This link is wrote in italian language. The real intresting part are the commands for ubuntu shell. These are the same for all countries…)