[Feedback] Various Issues

[Daniel Winter]

On Monday 28 July 2008 03:11:55 cybersmoker at gmail.com wrote:
> cybersmoker sent a message using the contact form at
> http://amarok.kde.org/en/contact.
>
> I love Amarok and may even continue to despite the following issues:

You are talking about Amarok 2.0 or Amarok 1.4 here? It's hard to answer if 
that is not clear.

> 1) When I edit the tags of some files, the location in the database does
> not change

When you tag them within Amarok that should happen without any extra 
rescan/update of your collection.

When you change the tags with an external application you have to do an update 
in Amarok. (select update collection). There maybe problems with that in 
Amarok  2 at the moment. Sometimes it works better to select "Rescan 
Collection"

Please have in mind that Amarok 2 (if you are using that) it not yet released. 
There are alpha releases and the nighty builds from neon. That is work in 
development so well bugs and problems are to be expected. 

If you want to help to improve it reports bugs on bugs.kde.org. (please say 
which version you are using)


> 2) Some / most albums are imported to collection into the Various category
> and are not updated

Amarok 2 or Amarok 1.4? 

And then that may happen because poorly tagged files. So you should look it 
your file tags are causing that.  If you are using some version of Amarok 2 and 
your tags are in good state please report on bugs.kde.org with more details. 
(An example of artist/albums names and their position on disk which has that 
problems)

> 3) The latest version of Amarok I have to build??? Why isn't it in the
> repository?

Again are we talking about 1.4 or 2?

The latest released version of Amarok 1.4 is 1.4.9.1 .

I believe most distributions should ship this by now. But also here: The 
Amarok devs do not release that packages. They only release and provide the 
source package from which the Distributions (like Ubuntu, Fedora and so on) 
create binary packages.   

So if your distribution doesn't ship with the latest version ask them (their 
forum or their support chat for example)

For Amarok 2: There is no final version released yet.  The latest release is 
Amarok 2 alpha 2.  I am not sure if their are any offical packages from the 
distributions for.

There is Project Neon. With that the Amarok Team released daily build (from 
current SVN developer version) packages for some distributions (at the moment 
only Ubuntu/Kubuntu I think, but not complete sure here).

And for most distributions there should be at least inofficial repos which 
provide packages for Amarok 2 alpha 2.   

If that is no option you could build from source (alpha 2 or svn trunk). 

> The other media players interface runs much slower. Maybe they do not have
> a database at the heart? I do not know. But the issues listed above make it
> very difficult to enjoy using Amarok to the full and recommending it to
> others.

For Amarok 1.4:

If you have a very big collection try to switch to Mysql Database.  That could 
give you a notable perforcmance increase.

For Amarok 2:

Amarok 2 is a lot faster for me with the same collection size. So it should 
not be slow. 

If you use a nvidia graphiccard that could cause a slow UI of Amaork 2. 

See details and ways to improve it on:

http://techbase.kde.org/User:Lemma/GPU-Performance

> PS. I will uninstall Amarok if I get a canned response like look at our
> user forum crap. As far as I am concerned, these issues should not even
> exist.

Ok, sorry that sentence makes me question why I did take the time here to 
answer you.  

You get Amarok tfor free. Most of the devs are working in there part time on 
it. So you can not expect to get free support. But I know that they will try 
to help you as good as they can when you provide all the needed informations. 
And when I look at the forums I believe they together with the users are doing 
a good job.

And yes your problems should not even exist. But as long you not eve say which 
version you are using, we can not help you.

If you have problems with a recent build of Amarok 2 report them with enough 
detail on http://bugs.kde.org. That will help to fix them and so improve Amarok 
for your needs. 

Development on Amarok 1.4 has stopped so reporting bugs for that is most 
likely wasted time.

DanielW