A few weeks ago I started working on improving a few little niggling problems that I’ve been having with Amarok recently. Here’s a brief overview of what I’ve done.
Prettier Collection Browser
A image is really the best way to show this:
You can see that each collection uses more space to make it easier to find and select/expand, a descriptive icon and the number of tracks in each collection.
Better Compilation Support
Various artist handling has been poor through Amarok 2, but we’re looking at remedies. Thanks to Michael Quinn, we have a patch that already vastly improves the detection of compilations during a collections can. You can see these albums in the screenshot above, too.
Improved iPodding
This mainly involves artwork support – writing and reading artwork to and from an iPod works nicely now. So, if you use your iPod as your main collection, you’ll be able to see your artwork now. There’s still no way to do a batch artwork update, but that’s certainly on the cards.
I don’t like to tease too much — so to save you asking, Amarok 2.1 beta 1 should be available for widespread testing within a fortnight. Lap it up when it arrives!
20 Comments
looks nice!
Just one question, is it possible to get that “alphabet” view back from 1.4? where the artists in the collection are regrouped after the first letter? made it easier to find your way around in a big collection.
cool! a nice add would be something showing how much free space there is on media devices, it’s one of the few things I really miss from 1.4
The screen shot looks nice.
I also agree with Beat Wolf, I too miss the alphabet view
Nice work and I’m looking forward to 2.1!
@Beat Wolf: Not yet, but we have this on our TODO for a later version.
One problem: With the growing usage of Amarok in e.g. Asian countries, you’re running into trouble when a language consists of thousands of symbols, like the Chinese language. We will have to come up with a solution for that, because you can hardly show so many categories in the collection.
I really appreciate the work on ‘Various Artist’ albums. The site I buy my music from (zunior.com) gives away a free ten song sampler every two weeks. I’ve now collected at least 50 of these. As a result, my artists list is now 70% artists I don’t really know with only one or two songs each. Getting those tucked neatly under ‘Various Artists’ again will make my collection much more usable.
Thanks.
The “alphabet” would be great.
And im painly missing the great podcast-ipod sync functionality.
Something interesting would be to handle multiple artists for a song, like with multiple entries in the treeview and way to input these different artists.
The next Amarok seems to be shaping up nicely and this post even addresses my chief complaints with the initial 2.x release right away (compilation and iPod support). Kudos to the dev team and Mr. Quinn!
By the way, what’s the status on compilations that span multiple discs, do they still get listed numerous times in the Various Artists category?
Does this mean the orgy of “Show in Various Artists” clicking needed after a collection rescan is no longer necessary?
FWIW the VA heuristics in SqueezeCenter work fairly reliably. If more help is needed I could at least summarize how that works..
Would it be possible to configure multiple local collections? Because i don’t want to mess up my anime music (a lot of) with classic (also a lot of) and other misc stuff. Would be great for me to have 3 different local collections.
I’m still on 1.4 because without Ipod Synching it wouldn’t be what I need in a player. Is there any news on that front as it looks like I won’t be able to install the newer distros due to this as they don’t seem to have 1.4.
The collection browser looks good, I take it the search is unified between all storage devices?
Can I suggest making these plus/minus characters a bit bigger or even web 2.0 size. They’re ridiculously small and annoying. thanks
A-m-a-z-i-n-g
Really, it’s absolutely cool! Thank you really much, amarok devs!
Don’t take this as a troll/flamebait, but how hard would it be to add a feature somewhere to deactivate the Middle Panel Plasma thingy?
It seems a little logical feature to be had, a lot of people hate it / don’t use it at all.
n00bzor, try using the Bespin widget style. It includes a few hacks to customize Amarok, including one to hide the middle panel.
Also, on the update: FINALLY!
I have a fairly complete OCRemix collection, which means my “Game” genre currently features something like 900 copies of the EXACT F**KING SAME ALBUM! I was under the impression that nobody was doing anything about it, and was just about to give in to despair. You’ve saved me.
The Grand Unified Compilation Bug get some action during the week was great to see. Thanks a whole heap to Michael Quinn and other contributors to that patch, as it’s by far the biggest pain point in Amarok 2 for me personally.
Really good, thank you.
What about to add a visual feedback (near the icon for example) of the collapsed/expanded collection?
now I’m still waiting the crossfade feature to make a party with amarok2, right now I can use the amazing amarok2 only for myself …
Please please please make the middle plasma panel optional!
I don’t know if Seb is still checking this, but I concur with Will Stephenson. The Various Artists support is broken — whenever I try to make an album set to Various Artists, it results in an album for each unique Artist – Album pair showing up under Various Artists, instead of just one album under it. And I have to set “Show under Various Artists” for each said Artist – Album pair, which is entirely unreasonable for huge collections like OCReMix.
Does this need a bug? Am I just out of my mind? This seems like a really obvious problem to me after about five minutes of Amarok 2 usage.
Hi bss,
Yes, we are aware that compilation support truly sucks donkey balls in Amarok 2. Unfortunately nobody has stepped up to fix it (it’s not an easy fix, like everyone would hope and think).
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