tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-86926337910602989402011-07-08T10:48:37.144-07:00tremorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02344202340515705570noreply@blogger.comBlogger21100tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8692633791060298940.post-45772837921932079952010-02-25T04:18:00.000-08:002010-02-25T04:50:25.192-08:00I feel obligated to redeem Amarok 2 line. Its developers put a lot of hard work. And after second thought - those guys did what almost every programmer dreams about - rewritten their child to make it better. It wouldn't have mattered much, but the outcome is that Amarok is usable again. <br /><br />Sure, it still lacks some features (random playing mode), options (can't change lyrics source) and has some bugs (no album covers, prolly fixed in newer release already), but all the major features are here and the application is stable again. Also, new Amarok is noticably faster and lighter than its predecessor. Collection scanner works great, Media Sources view is likeable once one gets used to it, one can even add keyboard shortcut to play chosen track and I bet many new features are yet to be discovered.<br /><br />I still need to get used to this almost totally new app, still look back from time to time, but I'm not going back - Amarok 2 is good enough and have this excitement of novelty on its side . If I only knew how to customize look to get rid of that gray background.<div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/8692633791060298940-4577283792193207995?l=tre-mor.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>tremorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02344202340515705570noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8692633791060298940.post-29409193137442683882009-07-11T09:31:00.000-07:002009-07-11T10:08:27.565-07:00<span style="font-weight: bold;">After having some problems with Amarok 1.4 (sometimes it tries to send one bug report per 10 s while still playing) I've decided to give Amarok 2.1.1 a try. I lost 1.5 h of my life.</span><br /><br />After upgrade I found that my old collection is lost. OK, it doesn't have to be backward compatible with preferences. I tried to import old collection data (from PostgreSQL db) - no luck, pg driver not available whatever that means (ruby/qt libs?).<br />So let's create collection from scratch. It's easy, just point the right directories. I found out that Amarok created MyMusic dir in my home directory. Maybe I'm strange but I don't like when apps do it, they have their hidden directories and they can do whatever they like out there. I try to keep as few dirs and files at home as possible.<br />I pointed to one music directory first just for test. Amarok scanned it very fast. Suspiciously fast. But I was too excited with all the novelty to notice. I added some songs from collection to playlist. I started to play and was adding new ones meanwhile (after all kinds of problems with "all songs as one huge playlist" I tend to edit current playlist very often). And here comes another unpleasent surprise - new Amarok automatically starts to play just added album breaking flow of music.<br />Morever, some global shortcuts didn't work (volume up) and I couldn't bind them where they used to be (numpad). Then I found out that collection contains less than half of songs from collection directory. I tried to add just a couple of albums - only one of them and two other albums appeared in colection!<br />My last take was to create huge playlist from all songs and playing in random song mode. Amarok stopped after couple of songs. Hitting "Play" several times resultet in displaying "Too many errors" popup message.<br />I tried several times with similiar effect.<br /><br />I'm writing this listening to music from my old good Amarok 1.4. As long as it doens't try to report problems every 10 s I'm happy user.<div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/8692633791060298940-2940919313744268388?l=tre-mor.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>tremorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02344202340515705570noreply@blogger.com1