Amarok 2.8 "Return To the Origin" Released 99
jrepin writes "Music player Amarok 2.8 has been released and it brings a fancy audio analyzer visualization applet, smooth fade-out when pausing music, many UI improvements and visual tweaks including better support for alternate color themes, significantly enhanced MusicBrainz tagger, power management awareness with a pair of new configuration options, and performance optimizations and responsiveness tuning all over Amarok."
Twice as good as 1.4 (Score:4, Interesting)
Irony: every major version after 1.4 has been worse than it
Re:Twice as good as 1.4 (Score:5, Insightful)
It is a shame that they ruined what was once the best music player you could get.
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I don't see how adding a bunch of new features is a "Return to the Origin"...
It triggers a reset of The Matrix, which is just the next version of the same trap, none of it reflecting reality.
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I don't see how adding a bunch of new features is a "Return to the Origin"...
Same old bloat.
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If it's lack of bloat you want, then I have just the thing. I wrote up a little Tcl/Tk script (less than a screenful long) that simply displays all the songs it finds on my PC using locatedb and has a small search box that lets you narrow the search down. Takes less than a second to start, finds all my music without me having to add it to some special folder or import it, and uses almost no resources cause it plays the music with mpg123.
Feel free to email me for it - my website hoster is having trouble with
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hah, exactly the same for me :)
was a user of amarok 1.4, tried to use amarok 2 for several months... moved to clementine eventually.
too bad clem isn't as good as amarok 1.4 was (for example, editing tags of a track does not update that in the collection db, and some other slight annoyances)
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I did too, and never looked back.
I believe Clementine is a fork of Amarok 1.4, which was the last version I really liked. My experiences with 2.x were not good.
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The most recent version prior to this one was fairly usable, but you are right its been a long road to stability. They keep adding stuff till its designed and releasing stuff till its debugged.
And any suggestions are met with surly put-downs and childish insults.
I almost hesitate to upgrade because I've been so often disappointed.
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Just tried no play a CD with Amarok on Fedora - it just segfaulted. What a fancy audio visualization :(
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Maybe any of these work:
https://github.com/Razor-qt/razor-qt/wiki/3rd-party-applications [github.com]
Now to find a distribution which actually have them all packaged...
Bah (Score:2, Insightful)
I ditched Amarok over a year ago. Once they lost the option to make it a small interface similar to xmms I got rid of it. Even on a quad core with 8gb of ram the thing froze, couldn't handle large play lists and just sucked.
people still care about visualization? (Score:4, Insightful)
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lol :)
i think a nice looking visualiser is a plus :)
I imagine one can do pretty insane things with todays hardware :)
As for "heavily-stimulating dept." it got me thinking of:
"The isolated, the decisive, victory stimulated
The non-simulated patterns of flight originated
Now I'm a carnivore on a tour of duty
My band of brothers in full metal jackets establish cruelty
Black magic conjurer, attack through the monitor
Destruction of assumption, one thing I can promise ya
Impact, crash, with cold shards of glass
Rituali
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Hey, back in the 90s I loved Winamp's visualizations, especially Milkdrop's (which was later made an official part of the program). At that point, probably the only "drugs" I had taken were caffeine, cold/flu/pain medicine, and (if you consider them drugs) vaccinations. Years have gone by, and while I haven't been able to properly use Winamp since 2006 (since I switched full-time from Windows to Linux), the only additions you can really add to the list are good ol' marijuana and alcohol. But if I still u
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Not until the entire audio layer in Linux works better with more hardware, including pro stuff like Avid, Focusrite, MOTU, etc.
It's still too fussy to get good audio out of Linux. Though I realize it's not entirely the fault of Linux.
It's great for streaming samples, rendering, etc, but not for actually playing or producing audio, without a whole lot of fiddling.
Really? My lubuntu install plays audio just fine with no problems. Just because you have issues doesn't mean everyone does.
Re: Not yet (Score:1)
Well just because you can't get it working... Jack is one of the most powerful tools you can have at your disposal for audio production.
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Also found Amarok to be buggy, now listen using Audacious with a winamp skin I've used since the 90's (tubeamp).
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Well just because you can't get it working... Jack is one of the most powerful tools you can have at your disposal for audio production.
Now if only the tools used to control it weren't complete and utter unmitigated shit, you might really have something there. Trying to figure out why JACK won't do what I want it to do which it claims to do is an exercise in frustration which exceeds even pulseaudio.
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I would like consumer stuff to work properly too, like the Xonar DX.
Not for me (Score:4, Interesting)
I've been quite happy using Audacious in Lubuntu compared to say in the past when i've tried Clementine and Amarok and I found they both felt bloated almost like iTunes for windows.
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I like these articles about Amarok because they inevitably lead to people discussing the alternatives, and sometimes I'll give one of them a try.
Personally I've been on Banshee for the last year or so. It's got a simple UI that reminds me of an early version of iTunes. Not too many frills, but I can pick the columns I want, and it can sync with music players. Playlist modification is simple enough as well. I personally don't need much more than that.
I just hope they don't screw it up.
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I like these articles about Amarok because they inevitably lead to people discussing the alternatives, and sometimes I'll give one of them a try.
One of my favourite players is Herrie. Playlist management is simple enough to do in text mode.
OTOH, I still maintain my textmode frontend to Audacious [github.com], because the Python code makes it easy to add custom functions. As a theatre sound guy, I don't want to futz around with a mouse in the midst of a play.
Text-mode players such as these are also convenient over ssh - it's quite neat to manage the player with a phone/tablet from the dance floor...
Huh. (Score:4, Insightful)
Am I the only one who stuck with Foobar2000 back in the day, once Winamp self destructed?
I mean I have the rather... shoddy... Google Play Music on my Android Tablet, but on the PC, Foobar2000 does everything I thought I needed. Is there a compelling reason to try Clementine / Amarok?
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Foobar2000 alternative for Linux would be deadbeef.
http://deadbeef.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net]
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Foobar2000 alternative for Linux would be deadbeef.
Simply incredible. They take a bad name and make it even worse.
It's probably a reference to DEADBEEF, the coding term. To quote Wikipedia [wikipedia.org]:
"0xDEADBEEF ("dead beef") is frequently used to indicate a software crash or deadlock in embedded systems. DEADBEEF was originally used to mark newly allocated areas of memory that had not yet been initialized -- when scanning a memory dump, it is easy to see the DEADBEEF. It is used by IBM RS/6000 systems, Mac OS on 32-bit PowerPC processors and the Commodore Amiga as a magic debug value. On Sun Microsystems' Solaris, it marks free
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I prefer Aqualung.
http://aqualung.factorial.hu/ [factorial.hu]
Looks old-school.
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once Winamp self destructed
Just curious, how exactly did that happen? I'm using Winamp Lite, which still looks and works just like the 2.x series of Winamp, even though it is the latest version. You have to scroll down a little on the Winamp download page to find it, but there it is. For me this is still the perfect interface, clean and simple.
Winamp Lite is an afterthought. Originally you had no choice but to stick with the increasingly "AOL-afied" Winamp releases they put out. They got really quite bad at the low point, I don't know if it ever recovered or not.
Heck I didn't even know about Winamp Lite until just now, heh.
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I should probably ask, what's wrong with modern versions of Winamp? It's my premier player in Windows because it's brimming with functionality, various bits of which I do use from time to time.
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Funny thing happened last night. I tried to use the convert option to output spc chiptunes to wav files. My goal was to convert this to an mp3 ringtone for android.
I usually go to a place called output plugins in the complicated gui but I have forgotten how to use the program over time. So I saw a convert option and felt surprised it had ogg and mp3 support!
What is bad about this apparent improvement? The old option is probably there, but the new one asked me to BUY pro if I want any stream output to the
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*raises hand*
It's $20 for a perpetual license and I had the money. *shrug*
Amarok - still my favourite player (Score:5, Informative)
With all the Amarok 2.x haters that show up to complain any time it's mentioned, you'd think Amarok 2 is the worst thing ever, on par with iTunes, but it's not. It's still a damn good client, and I prefer it over the 1.4 series (or Clementine) for varous reasons.
Amarok's smart playlist functionality has improved a lot since 1.4, and is miles ahead of Clementine, for example, allowing you to set up complex rule chains for creating random playlists that continually trim old entries and add new as you listen. Clementine finally got Amarok 1.4's smart playlists back, but they're completely overshadowed by the Amarok 2 series version.
UI flexibility is another thing I prefer; Amarok uses KDE's dockable panels model, so you can modify the interface to have as many or as few panels as you want, and even add and remove tabs to each frame. The default is a three-panel setup that works fine on widescreen, but I trim it down to a two panel layout with various tabs on the left panel. Meanwhile, Clementine offers very little flexibility in appearance, staying true to Amarok 1.4, so it's "my way or the highway". Great fit for the GNOME folks, I guess.
It also has some interesting features for finding lyrics, artist info, etc., though I use them infrequently and can't say much about them, other than they seem to work and would be useful to someone that uses them more.
People complain about the extra features and the flexibility, but that's sort of the point of Amarok. If you don't want that, stick with Foobar or mpd (which I also use, they have their places as does Amarok).
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Yeah, I don't get the hate either. I love the 2.x series. And with MTP support, its brain dead easy to transfer music between my computer and phone. It just works.
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Amarok never recovered after 2.0.
If Amarok was so bad, why is it so popular?
According to https://www.ohloh.net/p/amarok [ohloh.net] it has a rating of 4.5/5.0 and "High Activity" with 56 current contributors (400 overall; not even counting translations as they are in another repo (SVN not git)). That's a lot for only a music player.
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You need to set -semantic-desktop for kdelibs and systemsettings
solves the problem and even keeps strigi off the build.
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I guess I wasn't clear. I've had "-semantic-desktop" set globally (in make.conf) all along. I dumped Amarok when it started insisting it wanted kedlibs(+semantic-desktop), and nepomuk (which I refuse to install) as well.
That's broken packaging on Gentoo's side. File a Gentoo bug report.
This is why I use and contribute to Nightingale (Score:4, Informative)
We almost have gstreamer 1.0 and xulrunner 9 working with it...from there it's upgrading some other stuff and getting it stable, and we'll be golden. All of you are free to join and help us develop!
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there is one and it's called QMMP that uses QT4 and is a clone of xmmp and is what I use as clementine failed on me, amarok 2 stinks, nitghtengale fails to build along with a rash of others that simply don't do what I want and that's play my music.
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While it's still a < 1.0 release, it gets the job done (it plays
Also, there are a fair amount of skins for it, as it accepts skins for Audacity or XMMS.
At the moment I use one which replicates exactly the good old WinAmp 1.0. Hell, it even has the WinAmp name on each window... For the curious, here it is [gnome-look.org]
Re: Crappy players (Score:2)
I have over 4000 tracks in amorok On shuffle right now...
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To me, the Winamp clone was Audacious (down to the winamp 2.x UI clone compatible with skins, like winamp 5.x). Then I got fed up with it. I still recommend it if your window manager doesn't have the bug with the sub windows in winamp 2 mode (developers says it's the window managers's fault and wontfix, and they appear to be technically right but it sucks on Mate or LXDE or at least last times I tried it). The worst stuff is what they pay attention to, the gtk3 interface, (non skinnable) looks good but suck
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Why cant any one make a freaking working music player for linux just like winamp classic is?
I have enough karma, so I'll go ahead and say it: People with proper creative vision are repelled by the whole "Linux desktop" morass. I have to wonder if anyone who worked on Amarok 1.x felt they had been undermined; I know a lot of KDE users did.
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Why don't you just try xmms2? It does all that shit.
Personally I use rhythmbox. It's my answer to banshee, because it does all the same crap and doesn't give your system Mono.
I assure you that it can handle more than 500 tracks. I can literally just shuffle play through my entire music collection. It has literally never crashed on me.
I've tried amarok, songbird, banshee, lots of others. All sucked. Rhythmbox sucks least
Oldfield (Score:2, Offtopic)
Am I the only one who saw the headline and thought wow has Mike released another 60 minute masterpiece, but sadly its just a new version of a music player :(
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gawd (Score:1)
ui improvements and visualizations, what is this? 1996?
here is what I want a music player to do, play music and get the fuck out of the way, there is like 5 controls and they are already on everyone's keyboard, why even HAVE a UI anymore?
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And the key improvements are? (Score:2)
* A fancy audio analyzer visualization applet
* Smooth fade-out when pausing music
* Many UI improvements and visual tweaks including better support for alternate color themes
With priorities like this, we can expect a decent application in about two decades I guess.
"Return to the Origin" How they taunt us! (Score:1)
Amarok: Full-screen or unusable (Score:1)
Is it just me who thinks Amarok is a ridiculous piece of software which is bloated to the max, yet misses basic features or makes them hard to use ? For me, the previous version was an example of everything that can be wrong with audio players. Let's see what this one has to offer.
No thanks! (Score:2)
I prefer moc [daper.net]. It doesn't waste CPU time with silly and useless animations, and it works from the console.
Library Management and auto tag/filename (Score:2)
Literally, the sheet music :-) (Score:1)