Amarok 2.0.2 lacked many a features of the earlier 1.4 edition, and was largely a disappointment.
For one the playlist was displayed differently, and it was not easy getting used to it. I used to have my playlist sorted in the order of rating or last played or play count, but that was missing here. Also the playlist was cramped to a side, hardly revealing anything.
More than a half of the sreen was covered up with applets or scripts. I found only two useful ones – Current Track and Lyrics. So this was basically a waste of space for me. The earlier Amarok made a much better use of space.
Then there was this nagging issue of scrobbling under proxy. Last.fm was being detected, I could see all my neighbours listed and all, but streaming would not work. Also the played tracks would not scrobble, even though I had manual proxy configured in the kioslaverc file.
All in all, I stayed away from Amarok. I installed Exile for the time being and used last.fm client to listen to radio. This was until I stumbled across Amarok 2.1 yesterday.
The Kubuntu has a download binary file, but to install for ubuntu you have to download the source file and compile it. And it wasn’t easy. There were quite a few dependencies that needed to be taken care of. Also it took me hours to get mysqld working. The funny thing is that I am not sure how I managed to do it. I remember having given up trying to install Amarok. Later on I thought of giving one last try and the installer detected mysqld ! Anyways, I got Amarok compiled and ready to go.
This edition is wonderful. I will soon fall in love with it. Though it looks just like the earlier one, it has quite a few newly added features. Firstly, here’s a screenshot of Amarok 2.1
Amarok 2.1
One of the first things I noticed was the ability to modify the display of the playlist. It can now be configured to show informations as chosen by the user. It is very easy to make these changes. Towards the right hand bottom corner there is a icon labelled Playlist Layout. Clicking on it pops up an easy-to-use editor. Just drag and drop the required information tabs in desired order. Simple ain’t it. Now I can display the rating of each song with its name.
Also the last.fm is scrobbling now. Yay ! I have the proxy manually configured in kioslaverc. All my songs are getting scrobbled. I think that amarok scrobbles the songs a bit late, because sometimes a song is displayed as now playing, and after it is finished, it shows up as played only after a few minutes. Doesn’t matter. I’m happy as long as it scrobbles.
The radio service didn’t work for me. Sadly. But its not much of an issue as I have last.fm client to cater to my radio needs.
The now playing display has changed in look. It looks better now, when compared to the 2.0.2 version. The lyrics are fetched without any problem. Also I noticed that this time around the songs get an initial rating of 50 compared to 75 that they used to in 1.4. I have 120 gb songs in the collection and no problems.The On Screen Display looks cool. The cover manager was easy and intuitive to use. Also the sound can be configured from within Amarok itself.
Although this edition has everything I need, there are a few additions I shall like to see. For one, in this edition you can only select files and not folders, to import into the playlist. If you want to recursively inport a folder, you have to drap-and-drop. Earlier Amarok 1.4 allowed importing folder.
Its not easy moving up and down in the widgets pane. You have to click individual tabs to see them. I am used to my mouse tracker ball for moving up and down.
Most importantly I want to see the amarok 2.1 in the repositories of Ubuntu Jaunty.
All in all, this version has all that I need of Amarok.
But the most impressive fact that I stumbled across about Amarok was that this version is just the beginning of a new journey. There are a lot of features planned to be built into Amarok quite soon. The one that I read about was having a amarok:// url to be able to play amarok using custom urls. Now this is an exciting and something I am quite looking forward to. Till then, chillax and enjoy the cool Amarok 2.1.
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