Amarok 2.0.1.1 Feedback

[Hakan Bayindir]

Hi all,

My name is Hakan. I'm a regular Linux and Amarok user and work as a  
Linux system administrator and programmer. I'm also a music addict who  
listens to music nearly 10 hours / day. I use Amarok to organize my  
whole collection and to load my mp3 player with tunes. I'm using  
latest Amarok at home and latest Amarok2 at my office computer. Since  
Debian is my distro of choice, I obtain my software via debian  
repositories.

I'm using amarok2 at my office computer since I noticed its release.  
I've written a big feedback about that release which Jeff forwarded  
here. Since I've used the 2.0.1.1 for some time I think I can give  
some feedback about that release.

The first problem, which is persisting from initial release, is the  
file locking problem. Amarok2 keeps all items in the playlist open  
hence locking them. Amarok was only locking the file which it  
currently played. This minor difference results in a big behavior  
difference: I cannot unmount my mobile disk while Amarok2 is open  
since I carry all my music wih my mobile disk. I need to empty  
playlist and wait for locks to expire or quit Amarok2 before  
unmounting my disk. In amarok, I stop the track and unmount which is  
not only more practical but more elegant, nice and expected behavior.

The second problem is also a side-effect of the file handling code and  
effects the behavior of the collections. As I mentioned before, my  
whole music collection is stored on my mobile disk which I mount every  
morning and unmount every evening. In old amarok, when I mount a disk  
which is in my collections setup, the part of the collection  
automatically appears. Same behaviour is also applicable when I remove  
disks from system. Files just disappear and their entries in playlist  
if any, greys out. Amarok2 doesn't work like this. When I remove a  
disk (with any method mentioned above), the part of that collection  
disappears but never comes back as I mount my disk back. Another  
strange problem is, when I add songs from that removable collection,  
their times always show as 0:00 but the progress bar at the top works  
ok.

Song queueing is a bit of a story too. Code tends to be unstable when  
songs are queued at the end of the songs. When you queue a song when  
nearing its end (last ~40 seconds or so), next song starts to play and  
your queue is played after that song. Again original amarok doesn't do  
this. As I mentioned before I use amarok2 at my office PC where I  
spend most of my time. Sometimes I need to leave my desk or need to  
pause amarok for a long time. After some long pauses, amarok doesn't  
start to play. I need to kill amarok and restart it since it doesn't  
respond to quit command too. I have no idea why this happens...  Also  
when I return to my music from a long pause, I generally tap meta+X on  
amarok but meta+X is not present in amarok 2. I start the song with  
meta+C, return to previous song with meta+Z and jump to beginning of  
the next song with meta+B. I think meta+X should be re-implemented as  
play/pause.  On a side note, amarok2 doesn't show that it'll stop  
playing after playing a certain track.

Also, will last.fm support come back? It's not listed in any of the  
feature lists (will / won't come back list published at http://amarok.kde.org/blog/archives/809-Missing-features-in-Amarok-2.html) 
  and I use it regularly.

Besides that, I believe that amarok2 will leave the original amarok  
clearly in the dust but it needs some of the features of the old  
amarok and the stability of it but I know that that'll happen too.

Thanks for writing such a great application and keep up the good work.

Cheers,

Hakan Bayindir.

P.S: If you reply this mail, please add me to the recipients list  
because I'm not subscribed to the list. Thanks.