Journal: The Return of Amarok

Astute users may have noticed that Amarok has suddenly reappeared in the menu and that rhythm-box has disappeared. This is because with the latest release Amarok again approaches usability. If you were expecting Amarok to be half as good as the 1.4 branch you are going to be disappointed, Amarok still has quite a lot of ground to catch up on. See entry "Amarok Replacement" for information on why Amarok was removed in the first place and what went wrong with the 2.x branch.

It is finally possible to remove the widget container that sits between the collection and the playlist, the option to do this is called "Hide Context View" and you will find it under Settings → Configure Amarok → General. Thanks to this it is now possible to use Amarok 2 without ripping ones hair out.

Unfortunately there are still several significant problems with Amarok 2, the chief of which is its propensity to lump almost everything under the heading of "Various Artists" (If you seem to be missing 75% or more of the collection look in there.) You can laboriously manually right click each album under "various artists" and choose "Don't put under Various Artists" but this could take billions of years.

Overall, the redesign of the user interface is simply inferior, but no worse than any other KDE 4 application, KDE designer's newfound obsession with purplish greys and oversize widgets continues to escape us.

The other constellation of problems stems from the fact that Amarok 2 is still not feature complete with Amarok 1.4, support for removable devices is markedly missing (consult support article on Mp3 Players for interim workaround). There are also numerous minor bugs (we noticed that album covers are not showing up.) Amarok 2 has stability comparable to Windows 98 which is acceptable if one doesn't intend to run it 24 hours a day.

<< No Upgrades for now | News Index | Foreign Equipment and the Vistua Network System, policy >>

News & Notes is the a journal of The Vistua Network Administration and the factuality of this content is guaranteed. From time-to-time, this content may contain normative statements or set policy.