amarok 1.4

[Paul Hartman]

On Wed, Jul 15, 2009 at 7:07 PM, Christopher
Stark<christopherstark at gmx.de> wrote:
>
> I'm a happy Amarok 1.4 user and I'm terrified when I look at Amarok 2!

Luckily we are free to use the old version. I have gone back and forth
between 1 and 2 a couple times trying to figure out which one I
prefer.

I prefer the overall UI of Amarok1, it "feels" faster (no, I haven't
done any benchmarks), and I think its collection and playlist views
are better. Also, its handling of audio CDs and mp3/cue, which I
expect Amarok2 to eventually catch up to.

I am using Amarok2 primarily because of its handling of last.fm
streams which Amarok1 never played properly for me. I have it
minimized 99% of the time, so the UI is not really very important to
me either way. As long as I press "Play" and sound comes out of the
speakers, that's the most important thing to me. I'm using KDE4 so
having the "native" Amarok2 is preferable to me for that reason, too.

> How can you  turn a almost perfect program into a terrible Itunes-clone?
> The first thing which is really bad is this weird column in the center of
> the window, one cannot get rid of. Then there are a thousand functions
> missing.

Sure you can get rid of the middle column (which I did, because it was
nearly always empty and wasted space). Configure Amarok -> General ->
Hide Context View

> Please take into account what what Linux-users want and please don't aim at
> the dumbest users on earth as the target group for this program.

While I've been plenty critical of Amarok2 (and KDE4) as an end user,
probably much of which was just the shock of change, I sincerely
believe the foundation upon which these products are being built will
allow them to do things the older versions never would have been able
to do. (In addition, Qt4>Qt3) Also, if they are written in a more
programmer-friendly way, that will encourage future volunteers to
contribute and perhaps retain people that otherwise would have become
frustrated with it, as I gather may have been the case with the
previous versions of Amarok.

> I hope there are developers out there who will continue developing "Amarok
> 1.4." AS IT IS (which definitely is a program that is a hundred thousand
> times better, more extensible and more comfortable).

If you make any improvements to Amarok 1.4 please publish the patches
so the rest of us to try it out.  :)