amarok 1.4

[Jeff Mitchell]

Paul Hartman wrote:
> 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.

Yes -- we have never said that A2 wasn't lacking features of A1, but the
vast majority of them have been or are working their way back.

(Audio CD handling will be back better than ever in A2.2, or in SVN
trunk right now if you care to use that.)

> 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.

If you (generic user, not you specifically) have the UI minimized the
vast majority of the time, and listen to lots of Internet audio, I
honestly don't know why you'd prefer 1.4. The reason being that the
support for all sorts of wonderful audio sources is vastly improved in
A2. A1 had last.fm and Magnatune...A2 has last.fm, Jamendo, BBC,
Librivox, Magnatune, MP3Tunes, Ampache, and all sorts of things you can
add via simple scripts.

TBH, maybe this is my and your use case, but I think that most people
don't have the music player up all the time when listening to
music...they have it on while doing other things on the computer. So I
think many of the UI complaints are a bit overrated (which is not to say
they're not valid, just that they're not as big a deal as some people
make them out to be).

>> 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.

Yep. For fun we sometimes have people that have joined us for A2 go back
and look at A1 code. It takes them a week before they are able to speak
again, and the haunted look never leaves their eyes.

> 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.

Yes, everything is much more modular, which means you can hack on a part
of Amarok without necessarily having to understand the entire program,
which is massive.

--Jeff

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