You may have already noticed, that we have released Amarok 2, beta 2. This is a very exciting release for us as we have put an incredible amount of effort into features and bug fixes. This release pushes most of the significant work which was discussed or achieved during Akademy, such as changes to the Amarok core which will bring significant stability improvements and improved user experience.
We’ve made a rather large change with the removal of SQLite as our database backend, opting instead for the MySQL-embedded platform. As I know that many users might not be able to rationalise this change, allow me to explain. MySQL-embedded provides users with the performance boost of a standalone server without actually needing to run the server and without needing to bother with the rather complex procedures of intialising a database, users and permissions. It was also important for us to only support one database backend as we were constantly plagued with problems across different databases. Using MySQL-embedded will thus make it very easy for us to support standalone MySQL servers (in the future) for those that already have these services running, or may want to share databases over a network.
Notable mentions include improved scripting support, the return of lyric fetching and incremental scanner support. It’s important to remember that Amarok 2.0 will not be at feature parity with 1.4 as most of the code base has been rewritten. Many of the features that are not present have simply not been reimplemented due to lack of developer time, or we are unable to complete due to current technical limitations (such as equalisers, visualisations, replay gain).
We hope you enjoy this release.
16 Comments
This version is great! The only problems I’m having right now is that the plasma canvas on the center doens’t scale very well on my little EeePC (it crops instead of scale)
And something I never understood is how can the overall theme get so awesome while the toolbar regressed to a “not so nice state”..
Are you guys planning on something like get hot new stuff for amarok themes? I made some changes on the toolbar but it was very boring to maintain, because everytime I updated my installation my theme got overrided, and isn’t very easy to send it to my friends
Oh yeah, I also miss queue thingy, but I can live without that for some more months
Thanks for all the great work guys, you rock!
What about postgresql? This is the database I normally use. I am enjoying Amarok 1.92.
Just a question: why choose mysql/embedded instead of firebird/embedded (www.firebirdsql.org)?
Why is there a technical problem with replaygain?
At least gstreamer supports it just fine and has a phonon backened…
@Michael I. Wright
No, Amarok 2 will not support Postgresql. Primarily this is because it was getting a real problem maintaining several different databases with each their “dialect” of sql.
It will work with the embedded mysql and be able to connect to an external mysql server ( although not in the initial release )
@ZeD
Primarily because mysql embedded allows us to very easily configure it to connect to an external mysql database server, something that many user are requesting, while still allowing us to have a configuration free embedded database “out of the box”
@Rasi
I am not an expert on this, but as I understand it, there are certain functions available in gstreamer, xine and friends that are simply not exposed in the Phonon API yet. Since we rely on phonon ( in order to avoid having to maintain multiple separate backends ), we can not offer this functionality until Phonon offers the needed interfaces. This is being worked on in Phonon though, so it should happen sometime in the not too distant future.
Man, I hear about SQL dialect problems way too often. Isn’t there a subset of the standard that is both sufficient and implemented in every database that matters? In my PHP hacking endeavours long ago I’ve never used anything specific AFAIK. Is there really something more complicated than join that you really need?
Also, MySQL is one of the least standards compliant databases out there so it’s unfortunate that it is often the first choice – which means that everything else won’t work by default.
Guy you’re doing a great job…thanks for this great app!
@Rasi: ReplayGain tag support is limited at best in TagLib.
@Andreas: Yes, but unfortunately it is not good enough – each database implements it’s own select feature set, some introducing their own syntax.
Did you have any problems with Sqlite or was it more a strategic decision to go with MySql since it would easier allow support for a database server later on?
/Sam
@Sam: SQLite has scalability issues with huge data sets. For Amarok this means that you would experience poor performance with a huge music collection.
Amarok is not working here, opensuse 11. No collection after the scanning
@Mark: I’m curious, which scalability issues specifically?
Personally, the lack of Postgres support is a showstopper for me. I take care to do maintenance on my databases, I want to be able to index things as necessary, and I’ve standardized on Postgres to do so.
Please consider re-adding Postgres support at some time in the future.
I agree with Nadrek
Maybe an external python module to Amarok would do. Maybe using sqlalchemy (http://sqlalchemy.org) which rocks (it takes care of many dialect aspects, and python code is so much easier to mantain/customize)