Amarok 1.40 - Fast Forward

[bigtomrodney]

Okay so I'm going all out and treating myself. With Suse 10.1 pleasing me so far I decided to try the amarok beta that was in Guru's repository. All I can say is it's great. Stable, smoother, a few extra features like iRiver iFP support and.....wma/MP4/AAC tagging and library support.

I have a big legacy collection of wma, and I don't want to convert them for fear of further loss on the sound, not to mention the enormous undertaking it would be. Don't judge harshly it was before WMP had MP3 support, and I had no internet. anyway I always supported the amarok developer's decision not to include support for wma, but now that I have it it's great. My library just doubled in size and amarok is as stable as ever. I've even successfully retagged some of my files. I'm just having a great win on the linux front this week.
All I can say is, when this goes 1.40 final any amarok users out there should jump on it.

[jugio]

Tried it. Not very impressed at all though. I liked the former version and I guess this one's good when they fix it, but right now I can't even rescan my collection - it just stops at 96% and no collection at all is what I get.

[bigtomrodney]

That's pretty bad alright. Have you submitted a bug report for it? I'm sure the Amarok guys would appreciate. I haven't had the same problem myself though, and my collection is approaching 40GB.

[jugio]

Well, I think I found the problem. The rescanning crashes at certain mp3 or ogg files that it can't handle well. The sad thing is that there's so many of those somehow bad files that I just can't go and remove them all from my collection.

What I don't get is that how on earth could the developers have messed this thing up as in the previous version of amarok the rescanning had no problem whatsoever.

[Vergil83]

although I am not a kde person, I do like amarok (I actually use rhythmbox, but that is a different post....) Besides k3b, I think it is the best program that kde has.

[GNOME_n00b]

Stable, smoother,

you must have a special version.

frankly, amorak is big, bloated, slow, buggy, predisposed towards crashing often, difficult to use, and a mess. similarly to kde and many other kde applications, the developers just keep on mindlessly adding features to it with no thought given to the design. even Linux Format, who usually give a very slight nod to kde applications, only gave it 7/10. they concluded "we think they[the developers] have gone too far". i agree with them too.
i think its about time the devlopers did an about-turn, take a step back, and started redesigning it from the bottom up. this time with a good design and a decent interface.

[bigtomrodney]

I think the majority of crashes reported were related to the tagger having trouble with corrupt or unreadable tags. Amarok has now seperated the tag system to avoid these crashes. To be honest I haven't had a crash in amarok since version 1.3.2, and my music collection is very large. Even early problems they had with slow rescans are gone. The first library import takes a minute or so with subsequent checks being only a few seconds (2-4) in the background. Amarok itself remains useable during this scan, no longer hanging as it did in early versions.

I'd say it's certainly worth another look for anyone looking to manage a music library. For people just wanting barebones music playback xms, totem, noatun etc would be better.