Amarok Insider - Twelfth issue released

The next issue of Amarok Insider has been released, along with lots of screenshots. It takes an in-depth look at Amarok's visual theme, Plasma-centric technologies, Web services, and MacOS X integration. It also discusses pending Amarok releases, talks about past and future events, and interviews some crazy Amarok fans. Enjoy!

Dot Categories: 

Comments

by Lukas (not verified)

Hey, I'm testing it currently, but my collection is not shown in the TreeView. The collection.db-file seems to be ok (from the size).
Someone an idea?

Lukas

by Mark Kretschmann (not verified)

Hm, try to delete the collection.db, and then rescan. If that doesn't help, talk to us on IRC or so, and we'll look into it.

by Jens Uhlenbrock (not verified)

Oh, btw will there be a way to reuse my old collection from Amarok 1.4 ?? Would be sad to lose all the stats and stuff. :(

by Mark Kretschmann (not verified)

Yes, in fact our man from down under, Seb Ruiz, is currently working on a converter script that does exactly that. Last I heard the script is almost finished, so you could be one of the first to try it :)

Seb's IRC nick is sebr, try talking to him.

by Lukas (not verified)

Mmh, done, it works now basically, but the problem was, that Amarok2 has some problems with some kind of files (I don't know) and then shows no Tracks in the Collection-Tree. Anyway, another problem is that it doesn't show all files of my collection only a few =(

Lukas

by Paulo Cesar (not verified)

Hi, I was theming my compiled Amarok (svn from ~2 weeks ago), and I was having some problems with colors..

The SVGs color’s on the application looked very different from the svg editor (inkscape).

I guess it’s because of that thing of colorizing the theme to match the desktop colors, and if that’s true, it’s possible to disable this? My svgs were very nice (at least for me ;) ) and I was frustrated that I couldn’t have amarok with the same colors I choose..

Besides that, congratulations for the great work! The idea of making the entire window themable with SVGs is wonderful!

by Mark Kretschmann (not verified)

Hey, if you've created a good SVG theme, you shouldn't hesitate to share it with us! We're desperately looking for new artists anyway.

by Dan (not verified)

We replace only certain colors.

If you don't use those colors, then they will not get replaced, see SvgTinter.cpp for the colors that are replaced.

However, any default theme would need to be tinted, for obvious reasons.

by Emil Sedgh (not verified)

Hi
First, i use Amarok, i love it, new UI looks perfect but:
i love KDE, because awesome intergration.i love to select one style, and whole my applications look same.Amarok, has now its own UI.SVG based user interface and widgets which are really beautiful.they even match colors.
but Amarok now looks different...so, i dont know it is possible or no, but i think if Amarok guys want such look for they app, create a QStyle so all applications could have same look and feel.

(im a user, i dont know if that is possible or no, but i dont like KDE to go the way that windows went: each application with its own theme support, different looks and colors for each application, etc)

sorry for bad English.

by cies breijs (not verified)

I share the concern.. i like the fact that there are a lot of new UI possibilities (svg, plasma, ) in KDE4, but i'm like emil also a little concerned that it will make the desktop apps look more alien to eachother.

i like juk for being so 'KDE' if you understand what i mean. (i need amarok for the features though)

p.s.: i think the 'Manage Files' is still the biggest feature of amarok giving user full control over their collections. a possibility to put tracks in more than one genre would be my biggest wish -- i hope to submit a patch at some point.

by TheBlackCat (not verified)

I am using Amarok 2 and I must say it is already working really well. It also looks great. I don't think it looks too busy at all, in fact I can't wait for more context views. I have to admit, though, I have an extremely high threshold for "busy" so I may not be representative. I do have one question and one suggestion.

First, the cloud view looks very cool, but it sounds like it currently only works with online services. Will it be made to work with user labels at some point?

Second, in the tree view you have album art for albums, but for artists you only have that generic person image. Is there any way you can take one of the album art images for each artist and apply it to the artist as well (if there is one)? It doesn't matter which one you use, it can be the first alphabetically, first in the folder structure, randomly selected (although it should stay consistent between sessions). I just want something you can use to select an artist visually. At least for me identifying an image is a lot quicker than reading text.

by Nikolaj Hald Nielsen (not verified)

For now, the cloud view is mostly a prototype and it still has some major issues ( Such as skipping all further items when it cannot fit any more in the view. ) That said, it is one of my little personal pet projects, and I have a tendency to not bing able to leave them in an unfinished state for too long... ;-)

I certainly think it would be cool if it worked with local tags, favorite last.fm artists or whatever as well... Most of this is likely post 2.0 though

by ac (not verified)

Any chance that we'll see updated Windows binaries?

The version I get with the KDE for Windows installer is from mid-February. =(

Thx.

by Mark Kretschmann (not verified)

Well we need more Windows devs to help us out. Our Windows team is a bit underpowered at the moment.

You can help by doing some advertising in the Windows community.

by AD (not verified)

+1

I'll try my best to recruit Windows programmers.

by AD (not verified)

+1

I second that. A great new Windows alpha would be great.

I'll let my Windows friends know about it.
I think the hardest part is that KDE on Windows / Amarok is not advertised AT ALL on windows groups and the windows side. Only Linux friendly people know about it.

We need to somehow advertise AMAROK on WINDOWS heavier. I think that would create some pull for the entire project. (kind of like the iPod created pull OS-X and the rest of the family of Apple products. Have Amarok be the "Halo-vehicle" for KDE on Windows. <-- It's a car industry term.)

Maybe get Cnet involved. A lot of Windows users use Cnet.

It's too early for tweaking, but I have a suggestion that might help with adoption:

Make Amarok on Windows have a smaller memory footprint than iTunes. iTunes is a Memory hog!!!!
I think a lot of people would switch based on that alone.

Hopefully it's possible. *crosses fingers*

by Torsten (not verified)

I really like to hear podcasts. unfortunately amarok makes it to complicated to manage podcasts. They UI is at the bottom of the playlists menu and sometimes podcasts won't get synced with my mp3 player.

I wish a central playe in the amarok GUI to manage my podcasts and chose which episode I want on my mp3 player.

by Md (not verified)

+1

I like podcasts as well. Hopefully this will be implemented eventually. Hopefully it'll be easier that podcasts under iTunes.

by Md (not verified)

Amarok 2.0 is the most exiting program with the most buzz EVAAAR!!!!

Tons of people are waiting for it. Especially for the Windows version. (Hopefully they'll eventually switch to Linux as well. :) )

Question:

Will it work on college campuses and share playlists, the way that iTunes does now? I love that feature that I can play the songs that other iTunes users have on their pc's over the campus network. Will this work with Amarok 2.0 users as well? (will that work no matter what OS Amarok 2.0 is installed on?)

.
___________
* I'm predicting that Amarok will replace Winamp of days past. (for the young'ins. Winamp was HUGE!!! in the '90's!!!) *crosses fingers*