[Feedback] What did you do with Amarok?

[Marc Hollenbach]

Hi,

I think the big picture got lost in this discussion - it is not so much
about missing features than about missing functionality.
More and more users are just users no specialists or geeks like it used to
be in the past. More and more people get hold of Netbooks or Laptops
Desktops and Servers running on Linux due to the great work of the distros
to deliver a pretty pain free installation even next to windows. There is a
huge difference to the older group - they want to use a computer to do what
they always did with their computers in the past. I may can explain to them
that this is no I-tunes clone and therefore the cover switch mode is not
existing, but when It's hard to create and sort play lists or you are having
difficulties scanning your library to get some music at all playing, than
this is a bout functionality not missing features.

My girlfriend has a Bar and needed some replacement of the Music-PC.
They have been using I-tunes for the time before and had no intention to
switch to something else... I convinced them that free software is an
alternative and installed the latest LTS Version of Ubuntu, added some
Amarok, Ruby, Codecs and added the last.fm account data.
I told them with every song you listen the Player will understand better
what you want to listen. They liked the idea and they had at least a hundred
questions concerning the player. None of them needed any support from devs
or forums. Feature wise like a Microsoft product, 1000 of functions, but not
used due to the fact that they haven't been explained or well positioned.
After 3 months of complains I was thru and the staff was happy using Amarok.

One girl likes to work on her play list every day and needed some help in
saving them without duplicating them. All of them had a problem with the
tab's and drag 'n drop is still a problem. They prefer the double or even
triple click on the artist name... (a windows asking them what they really
want would be so cool, but this not a feature request)

The library is about 35000 Songs ripped by me slowly one by one from Cd's.
Amarok helped me to keep the tags up to date with a perfect list view, which
was even customisable and had nice shortcuts for non mouse users. I allowed
the staff to rip Cd's themselves, but before adding them finally to the
library I was keeping them for tagging reasons in a separated folder. When I
was done I added them to local collection and the database was clean.

GREAT WORK! Two staff members wanted to get rid of their windows and have
Amarok!!! (Which I unfortunately did for them)

The drama started when they did upgrade their Ubuntus and got in contact
with KDE4 and Amarok 2.0 with poor sound support due to Ubuntu. They also
couldn't use their I-Pods anymore. They found Amarok changing their play
list (forgetting that the played with the dynamic play list feature last
night) and they also realized that some songs did not show up anymore and
that they made even a bigger mess using the functions that are there, but
not or still poorly working. (add/ to collection)

I kept images of their windows machines and reinstalled them, I'm not able
and willing to do software support - I'm a newbie myself and not so
confident to convince them to try again.

For the shop I have had no other way then going bad to 1.4
I did not check any bug reports, but for me the collections scanner is just
too sensitive when it comes to corrupted files. It a murder job to find
singles files within more than 40000 files now, just to scan your
collection. I did it and replaced them all with perfect copies. It took me
more than a month and still I could not explain what the mid pane is good
for. They say they can surf to their favourite web pages to listen to web
radio and do not need Amarok for that. They also couldn't make sense of the
play list sorting - yes that one girl has a "standard-play-list" with 1800
files. She used to play that list over and over just changing the sorting of
the playlist.

On the laptop I have my Amarok 2.1.1 on Jaunty now with the feeling that
most of the things are improving a lot in short time, but a lot was lost
Therefore it needs a killer feature for me to get back to them with Amarok
2.x in the Bar. My two friends are lost - they will get some windows 7 and
be happy with i-tunes again :-( Overall I have to say that Amarok 2 goes
towards a good direction, but sometimes I experience it still as not as much
as pleasure than it could/should/will! be.

Thank you for reading, keep up your work and help me giving them a killer
application that Amarok used to be!

Marc
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