possible improvement / wish list!

[Myriam Schweingruber]

Hi Steve,

On Sun, Nov 7, 2010 at 04:06, <stevehowe at email.com> wrote:
>
> Hello again!
> Thanks for your incredibly quick and detailed reply.
> I've been playing further and reading the Amarok web pages. Sometimes it was good to discover I wasn't the only one to have a particular problem but more often I've discovered interesting features.
> Being new to Linux, when I tried to get to the Amarok Handbook through the Help menu, being told that:
> "Could not launch the KDE Help Centre:
>  Could not find service 'khelpcenter'."
> was less than helpful, though the apparent indecision on the spelling of centre/center was mildly amusing.

Funny, I never was aware of that. It shows how many different people
are working on KDE, since the spelling is different in various parts
of the world. Also one is the user visible name of the application,
the second is the application name itself.

Could it possibly take one directly to a web page - possibly local?

We are still working on the Handbook, but you can have a look at the
Quick Start Guide here:
http://userbase.kde.org/Amarok/QuickStartGuide. It will be part of the
next release.

> So far though I'm impressed with Linux (Ubuntu 10.10 in my case) and Amarok despite its occasional crashes for no discernible reason (getting rarer, also for no discernible reason!  )

Well, Amarok is a quite big application, and it also relies on other
parts of KDE like Phonon, Solid or kdelibs. Most crashes are corner
cases and not always reproducible by the developers, so it's rather
hard to fix.
If you want to be sure to get a valid feedback for the developers you
should also install the debugging packages like amarok-dbg and
phonon-dbg, so next time you get a crash the data will be more useful.

> I still hope to be able to get to the bottom of why I cannot seem to update lyrics, and what the "Album Artist" field in playlists is supposed to do - it appears to always produce a blank space,

You mean editing the Lyrics? There was a bug which didn't save the
edited lyrics on song change so the edited lyrics were lost, which is
already fixed in the next version, to be released early 2011.
As for the 'Album Artist' tag: it is only needed for albums that are
compilations and marked under Various Artists in the Collection
Browser on the left. You can make a playlist layout for that specific
case where you add this field and will see a content.

> but these are small quibbles; having tried a few media players Amarok is easily my favourite - I'm thoroughly enjoying it.

Nice to hear :)

> Thanks to your help I've got the playlist looking much more how I wanted as you can see from the attached jpg. The cursor points vaguely at the sort of thing I'd like to be able to avoid - I have 3 Horses Brawl albums and it would be nice if it only told me once that the artist was Horses Brawl. I can see problems though in that my wish only makes sense because the list is primarily ordered by artist. The way it works seem perfectly sensible really.

What you could try to do is set the grouping in the playlist layout to
artist instead of album, but then you will not see the album name
anymore. Not necessarily what you want to achieve I guess.


Regards, Myriam.
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