Comments on: Orbitting the Sun

By: markey's status on Wednesday, 29-Apr-09 11:26:39 UTC - Identi.ca

markey's status on Wednesday, 29-Apr-09 11:26:39 UTC - Identi.ca — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 11:33:43 +0000

[...] seb ruiz reposted his excellent essay on Amarok 2 (originally written for a commit-digest): http://www.sebruiz.net/364 [...]

By: Seb

Seb — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 21:54:06 +0000

Okay, apologies, perhaps I got out of hand . Let me cut straight to the point – the only reason we don’t support OpenSUSE build service is because we don’t have any volunteers writing packages for it. The corollary is: the only reason we support Neon is because Harald Sitter has been very active in creating the packages. (Neon is his brain child).

By: Markus

Markus — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 17:58:25 +0000

Seb, are personal attacks the only means you can defend your behavior?
1.) Harald Sitter himself posted a few days ago how Canonical sabotages Kubuntu: http://apachelog.blogspot.com/2009/04/facts-about-rosetta-and-kubuntu-l10n.html

2.) Build Service allows automatic building of packages for various versions of SUSE, Fedora, Mandriva, Debian, Red Hat / CentOS, and (K)Ubuntu.
Why didn’t you choose Build Service and instead opted for a closed-source single-vendor solution? (Launchpad is not Free Software.)

By: @Seb

@Seb — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 17:04:17 +0000

What exactly is moronic with Markus’ behaviour? I support his statement 100%. To me it as a complete miracle as well why you guys don’t use the openSUSE Build Service to create packages for more distros than just Kubuntu…

By: Bugsbane

Bugsbane — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 16:52:59 +0000

Personally I’m loving Amarok 2. I mainly use Amarok Nightly. It’s a bit like those games where you have to find the differences between two images… every time it updates you get to try and find the improvements!

The only thing I’m really missing is that Amarok doesn’t seem to see my Creative Zen Mosaic making me use the incredibly ugly but functional Gnomad2.

By: Seb

Seb — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 12:28:40 +0000

Removed (I was being an insensitive fool)

By: Markus

Markus — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 12:05:45 +0000

Providing NEON only for Kubuntu is the worst thing you’ve ever done. Everybody knows that Kubuntu is the worst KDE distro in existence.
I have no idea why you didn’t just use openSUSE Build Service — it can generate packages for many distros. Instead you advertise that Kubuntu crap.

By: Dave Taylor

Dave Taylor — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 11:19:12 +0000

2.1 does feel like a big improvement however there’s one dealbreaker for me and that is IPod write support. I have tried other players such as Songbird (getting pretty close to taking on Amarok) but I think 1.4 is still the best purely because of the dealbreaker.

The rest of the issues are more minor but I would like to see them again.

1. Less gray please, it looks like Miami.
2. I would like too see the return of the last.fm upcoming concerts widget please. It was in 2.0 but I haven’t had it since and that was my fave plugin.
3. I would like to be able to search through my playlists (different from the playlist).
4. I would like somewhere to store radio streams (I had created a folder in the playlists and then added them in to that – back on 1.4 since).
5. I know scrobbling is available but have never had it work from 1.4 onwards.
6. I would like to be able to download podcasts before I play them so that I know how long the podcast is, there are no buffering issues etc…

Great work though, with just the IPod support I should be able to happily join the 2.* fold and the rest are minor issues (the concert viewer is a biggy, I never even knew I would want that until I used it in 2.0 and infact I still have concerts to attend suggested from that!)

By: Keith Z-G

Keith Z-G — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 10:42:46 +0000

Personally, although I have other outstanding annoyances/issues, running Jaunty/KDE4.2 right now on my laptop I only have two main issues with Amarok 2 . . . but they’re dealbreakers, unfortunately.

(1) Podcast episode info: In 1.4, you could see the episode info when you clicked on an episode of a podcast; this greatly helps with things like say Hacker Public Radio where the podcast is by different people every time and often with titles that aren’t elaborate enough on their own. Without being able to see the info (which Amarok is downloading already anyways if it’s downloading the podcast’s feed), 2 becomes quite inferior to 1.4 as a podcast aggregator.

(2) Being able to drag and drop from playlists or podcast-lists/collection into a file browser like Dolphin or Konqueror. This is how I do it 99% of the time with KDE3/Amarok1.4….being a die-hard Linux user I’ve always had UMS music players that support ogg and FLAC (hey, they tend to be the best ones anyways) so I’ve never needed anything fancy like MTP/iPod support or transcoding, just let me drag and drop files and let me see the info of my podcast episodes and I’m a happy camper

I should be clear, I have nothing but respect for all the Amarok devs, and I’m trying as hard as I can to use Amarok 2 on my Jaunty laptop (at the moment I have no landline, so I’ve been using my laptop as my window into the internet and as an experiment in using KDE4 all the time)….just that so far I really can’t justify switching from 1.4 and I’ve yet to hear for sure that the two sticking issues will be addressed

(But Amarok rules!)

By: Birdy

Birdy — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 10:12:41 +0000

But Amarok lacks nearly all of my use cases.

One is described here: http://amarok.kde.org/blog/archives/559-Dynamic-Playlist-niftiness.html

Next is support for podcast with my iPod (automatic delete of fully listened ones).

And last is, that I want to fill my iPod with 5-star-rated songs, and some random 4-star-rated songs.

But I’m confident, that Amarok 2.2 will be usable for me again. Keep up your good work!