The Road to KDE 4: Amarok 2 Development is Underway
























Thank you for telling me what I really want! You are right, to be aggressive with the developers is the solution !
Listen to me Amarok devs : don't forget that everybody is paying you for this software!


two things: your response hardly went any ways towards addressing the OP's point about manners being something that should be included when hoping to sway people who are working for free.

Secondly, having had a quick (by no means comprehensive) look at the link you provided I'd hardly characterize the number of votes for the wish list items you listed as an overwhelming mandate of user opinion. I'm not saying that some of these items may or may not have merit, but the number of votes the various wishes have received certainly don't warrant the strident demands you seem to feel entitled to make on the devs

By borker at Tue, 2007/03/13 - 5:00am

I agree with you...
I think that the new GUI is step backwards.

By franta at Tue, 2007/03/13 - 5:00am

I never said the new GUI is a step backwards.

What I'm saying is that there are much more important things than the GUI...


I also think, it's a step backwards. Main advantage of amarok is playlist creation and in 2.0 is playlist area moved to the little right pane with almost none information about tracks.

And think about 1024x768 users, which don't want amarok to take all the screen area. And I'm not primary interested in artist info (which takes the most area).

But the mockup is not only bad. I like the top bar and little redesigned collection pane. The rest should not be changed...

By Petr at Tue, 2007/03/13 - 5:00am

Well I'm a user and I don't want any of those features you listed. However I do like the new GUI and look forward to using it. So don't make sweeping generalizations that are obviously wrong.

By Leo S at Tue, 2007/03/13 - 5:00am

Is that why all those features are the top wishes in the Amarok bugtracking and why there are tons of threads on the Amarok board about tabbed playlists and all that?


How do you figure those are at the top of the wish lists? I read the link you posted before and I certainly didn't get that. They may be the ones YOU posted there and there may be some other folks who asked for the same thing, but just because you SAY they're the top items doesn't make it so.


I for one have been waiting and hoping for exactly what this mockup is showing. If it is combined with an improved winamp/itunes style collection browser I'll be in heaven.

Different strokes......


- Tabbed Playlists.
I have yet to hear a convincing arguement for tabbed playlists. I thought one day about coding them, then I realized that I could not think of a use, so I didn't. They look ugly, they do not accomplish anything, and they have no buisness in Amarok.
- A full screen mode.
I've thought about this a little. amarokFS already exists, if the developer of that wants to email the list and further explain what they need in order to make amarokFS better, then thats probably the best way to go.
-Multiple Collections
Maybe :)
-Volume normalization without a need for scripts
show us the code. None of the developers have expressed much interest in doing this, I'm sure if you coded it it would be added.
-Recording/capturing streaming media to disk
Beyond the scope of Amarok
-A better use of covers
We'll see :)
-More data from integrated into Amarok
We have big plans for the context in 2.0.. wait till you see them.

Now I take big offense to "This is what users want." That is what you want. Most of that I could care less about. The fun thing about open source software is taht you are free to add whatever you want--so do it.

I am the person who has done most of the gruntwork behind the gui refactoring thus far (working off of mxcl's mockup). I did this soley because I liked the new look, as did other developers, as did other users. The interest has been there for a new look for quite a while.



But your USERS *want* and *love* them!

There's tons of threads about tabbed playlists on the Amarok board and people keep on asking about them on the IRC. Also, it's the #1 wish (almost) in the bugtracking system. You can, of course, ignore all that, but not adding tabs to Amarok 2.0 will disappoint a whole lot of users and they will prolly go elsewhere, that's for sure...

"amarokFS already exists"

Sure, but adding it by default would be better.

But we had this discussion before on the mailinglist...


There's a script already that does it, so why don't you take a look at this code?!

"Beyond the scope of Amarok"


"Now I take big offense to "This is what users want." That is what you want."


Read the Amarok SMF board and check the Amarok bugtracking system.

Those are the top wishes and it's exactly what LOTS of users would like to see in Amarok 2.0...

"Most of that I could care less about."

It seems you also could care less about all the Amarok users out there.

Ignoring all the requests is the easiest, eh? Yeah, why bother...


Okay, yes...and I NEVER criticized the new look. Actually, the opposite - I really like it.

However, just changing the look will disappoint lots and lots of users...

It's not what most of them are waiting for - the mentioned features is what lots of them would really love to see in Amarok 2.0 and not "just" a GUI fefactoring.

But yeah, keep on ignoring - you'll see where it leads to...


If it leads to make users like you switch to another audio player (banshee or whatever), then it might be a good thing.
I think you don't understand what is an open source project. The devs are working on amarok for free, and because it's fun. You can't FORCE them to make something that don't interest them.
Moreover, what's the problem of having a feature in a plugin ? Why should it be better to add it by default ? (except adding build dependencies...)
Does Firefox bundles adblock, flashgot, fireftp, [insert your prefered plugin] by default ? No. Does it affect firefox popularity ? No. You see ?

By the way, I hope there are plan to integrate kghns2 into amarok2 for managing plugins :)


my problem with plugins is that I'm too damn lazy to install them ;)
however, ghns does solve that in some cases...


"However, just changing the look will disappoint lots and lots of users..."

Just think about how long it will take until amarok 2.0 is release...

So there is quite a long time left to implement more features. But many of those features should be done _after_ the GUI refactoring.
Let's see what the amarok 2.0 will bring. I bet many of your mentioned features will be (more or less) be included.


I also would use tabbed playlists.

But you need to keep in mind, people ask for stuff that isn't always a good idea.

Even if a lot of people want it, doesn't mean they are onto something.


Yeah, you guys are sooo not going to make any money on this version. No one is going to pay for this upgrade.



By Bret Baptist at Tue, 2007/03/13 - 5:00am

> -Recording/capturing streaming media to disk
> Beyond the scope of Amarok

In Amarok 1.4 there is a menu-item "Burn to CD" which opens k3b when selected. I think that there should equally be a menu-item "Rip stream" which opens a stream ripping program.

By the way, Amarok is a great app and your new GUI is cool! I agree with a lot of other posters that the GUI should be customizable.

By Vlad at Tue, 2007/03/13 - 5:00am

By Peppelorum at Wed, 2007/03/14 - 5:00am

I like Amarok, and I've briefly reviewed it in my blog for the Linux Journal at For me, its most glaring lack is stable support for JACK. Gstreamer's JACK back-end is in need of maintenance (last time I checked), and I'm not sure what xine's current status is re: JACK. Give Amarok clean JACK audio support and it'll be the bee's kness for me. :)

By Dave Phillips at Tue, 2007/03/13 - 5:00am

If you want jack support you need to grab libxine from cvs (or is it svn) and compile it yourself.... (or wait until the next release)

Jack suddenly becomes an option in Amarok. Which is great because my good soundcard does not have alsa drivers.

By Danni Coy at Tue, 2007/03/13 - 5:00am

That makes no sense. I think you would be better served asking the audio backends to improve JACK support. Amarok has no contact with JACK what-so-ever and never will.

By Allan Sandfeld at Tue, 2007/03/13 - 5:00am

That would prob be because pretty much no one uses jack

By easytiger at Tue, 2007/03/13 - 5:00am

sorry but ardour/rosegarden/rezound/hydrogen users i.e. musicians doing music with Linux use Jack... Jack support would be very much appreciated.

By lucus at Thu, 2007/04/19 - 5:00am

The new gui doesn't look good. There (on the mockup) the tracks rows height is big, so you can't see many of them on one sreen.

Can you please leave the old style as an option?

By CHX at Tue, 2007/03/13 - 5:00am

First of all: you guys are doing a great job, keep up the good work.

One of the reasons I like the old GUI better is: I think it's a bad idea to use 3 columns. It's just too much. Think of it: every professional program/website has 2 columns...


By Meister Lampe at Tue, 2007/03/13 - 5:00am

Simply not true.
Since getting a widescreen monitor, three pane interfaces is a huge productivity boost. Among the programs that would be far less usable without it that I use are: kdevelop, eclipse, visual studio, outlook and thunderbird. And that's just an off the top of my head 20 second list.


I think that, on one hand, there are some great innovations with news GUI, but on the other hand, other innovations are just trying to change the user interface because of changing it : well, it's not the good way.

There should have been some example mockup releases before to begin the development. As some others, I think, for example, that the context menu, shouldn't be there, in the middle of the window. Because, yes, the context menu is good looking in himself, but I don't look at it so much when I'm workin'.
And I think that, the common use of Amarok is, listening music when you're working. You just want to see Amarok icon in the system tray. When the playlist is finished, you click on it, and drag&drop some other files in the playlist.

There is something I like yet, it's that the playlist informations are not in columns anymore. The informations are integrated in the file line (I hope you see what I mean...) : author, time, notation etc.. (see mockup).

I also think that, the collection should take more place, and should more use CD-covers. The collection is one of the things that made I decided to migrate to Linux & KDE : I didn't find this on Xmms.

And to finish this message, I'll say that : Yeah ! the menu, with navigation buttons (play, pause, next, previous etc...), is great. It's large, usable, with great graphics...but it should be on the bottom, not on top.

By Jean-Baptiste at Tue, 2007/03/13 - 5:00am

Please tell me there will be an option to make Amarok use the current main window layout? I don't think the new one looks as good (yet), and also it doesn't really leave enough space for people like me who want to see 7 or 8 columns of metadata for their playlist. More customisability of layout wouldn't be bad. Being stuck with a layout like the mockup would be bad for a lot of people who really like the current GUI.

IMHO, Amarok's current GUI is very good, certainly the best of any existing audio player (being easier to use than iTunes is pretty impressive, given that iTunes is supposed to be built for simplicity and Amarok is purposefully feature-rich). Phonon support, scriptable services and all that are cool additions but it would be a shame if the stuff which is already almost perfect were changed just because it's The 2.0 Release.

By Ben Morris at Tue, 2007/03/13 - 5:00am



According to the comments I've read so far, they've got enough work ahead to match users' needs instead of implementing what they thought was the best ;)

Keep it up team, we're not asking for Amarok3, just a really good Amarok2 will be enough ;-)


I am looking forward for it, I like the mockup and I don;t think that it looks too much like itunes. I really like that the middle pane with information is taking special attention since I listen to a bunch of podcasts and its a pint to go trough the play list and then having to click on the bottom button (show more information)and maximizing an minimizing the info just to see what the podcast includes. I am also glad that you have added basic video support( I hope you keep it basic) and I am looking forward to see what other features are implemented.

By tikal26 at Tue, 2007/03/13 - 5:00am

I would love to see a skin optimized for small touch screens. I have a car pc with 7" screen and so far you either get a gui that's easier to use with features like giant buttons, but doesn't navigate through music collections well or great navigation but buttons and title info just a bit too small.

By donniedarko at Tue, 2007/03/13 - 5:00am

GUI looks terrible. Just terrible. Kinda looks like the alignment has 100 different rules and nothing is following it. Images look really basic, like something from windows 3.1.

By anon at Tue, 2007/03/13 - 5:00am

Whoa, easy there!

Please remember that this version was ported to KDE4/Qt4 just one month ago, and the new layout was introduced even later than that. Considering that there are several months to go before Amarok 2.0 will be released, MUCH will change before that!

If you think it looks bad now, you should have seen it a few weeks ago! :-)

As others have said, have a little faith, this a PREVIEW article about the current state of development! This is how software in (very) active development, far from a release, trying out a completely new GUI looks!


It does look very messy, so thanks for reassuring us its not permanent :p

Amarok is great. One question: will we be able to choose horizontal panes instead of vertical ones (I still hate vertical panes with vertical text on them... :( )

By Darkelve at Tue, 2007/03/13 - 5:00am

I do allot of copying from the files tab to the playlist. With the new layout, one will have to drag over the context menu, and then into the appropriate place in the playlist. I think that is the main downside to the new proposed GUI. The other downside being that if I want all the current info that I like using (Artist, length, album, score, stars) and have the context menu open.... would require allot of width.

I would have to agree that if you do go with this GUI, the old Gui should be an option.

By UA=42 at Tue, 2007/03/13 - 5:00am

I like the new look. Can't wait to use it.

Two things I'd like to see in Amarok 2
- Fetching context information for internet streams (Context info doesn't work for for example, and since context is such a central focus of the app, it should always work)

- I know its not easy to do with the current toolbar approach to buttons, but it is very nice when the important buttons are bigger than the less important ones. Like Play is bigger than skip.. Windows media player does this and it works quite well.
Not that you should copy that layout, but I like the idea of making the play button more visually prominent than the others.


Not so sure about this. I know that for each play (to start playing an album) I usually press skip a number of times (to move to another track).

By RandomOne at Tue, 2007/03/13 - 5:00am

Well, how could you get any relevant information from radioparadise? It's not obvious to me.


I mean just loading the song info correctly. I don't know the right term for it, since it is probably different than ID3 tags, but radio streams like radioparadise do send the author - song name when the song switches.
This is what shows up in the metadata history.

However, in the current Amarok, when I click Lyrics it doesn't show them to me. Although right now it says:

Lyrics for track not found, here are some suggestions:

Squirrel Nut Zippers - Put a Lid on It
Squirrel Nut Zippers - Bad Businessman
Squirrel Nut Zippers - It Aint You

The track I'm playing is the first in that list, worded exactly like that, so I don't know why it didn't find it. If I click on the Wikipedia tab, it says:

Wikipedia Information
Squirrel Nut Zippers - Put A Lid On It
Jump to: navigation, search
Wikipedia does not have an article with this exact name.

I assume that the stream sends the author and name as one string, and then amarok uses that to search. So all I really want is for Amarok to take a stab at parsing the string it gets back. They are always formatted like "Author - Song name" (on radioparadise streams) so it shouldn't be too hard.

By Leo S at Wed, 2007/03/14 - 5:00am

I really can't wait to have amarok2.0 but I would like to suggest a pair of things to devs.
I think amarok is going the right way with new functions and gui but is important to remember features we're waiting amarok2.0 for.
Concerning gui I think an implementation for amarokfs cuold be great; to use it as screen-saver or anti-geek.
About collection imho a full implementation of what regards bug 119539 or 90095 could be great.
Another thing about collection is that it's not necessary to show it when playing something; a better way to show all we want to see in it is it to have collection screen-wide (and so not together with playlist and contest browser).
I also think that in the middle of the screen it has to be what a user uses mostly, not what is thougth to be important (eg. I prefer having infos, which I read quite often, on one side most likely than in the center).
Anyway amrok is great and for what I've seen about it will continue to be so.

By Dareus at Tue, 2007/03/13 - 5:00am

i think that middle pane is useless and it takes a lot of usable space in the window. i use amarok for playing and listening to the music, not for reading some information about artist, which i am not interested in. yes, it could be an optional feature, but i think it shouln't be there by default. try to replace it with something useful.

By nardew at Tue, 2007/03/13 - 5:00am

I would very much rather see KPlayer ported to KDE 4. I really like its multimedia library far better than all the Amarok clutter.

In KPlayer everything is very clean, only the really necessary stuff is shown by default. And the multimedia library is so easy to use, and never gets in your way.

I just set up a few playlists, and then closed the library window because I don't need it anymore. All the playlists I made are on the File menu, very easy to click and play.

I wish all KDE programs were that simple, flexible and powerful at the same time. Oh, and KPlayer will never ever pop up any stupid flashy window right in your face when you are in the middle of something else.

By Give me KPlayer at Tue, 2007/03/13 - 5:00am

Thanks for pointing out KPlayer. I cannot believe that I've completely missed it's existence for so long. I've just found my new default video player :)

I'll definitely be keeping Amarok for my music though.


Man, what are you people bashing the UI for? I like the new UI. It looks really cool! It's probably not done yet, so just wait and maybe they'll improve it to your liking. :)

And to the Amarok devs, perhaps an option as to whether to use the old UI or new UI is in order.

By The Digital Pioneer at Tue, 2007/03/13 - 5:00am

I don't like the new GUI because it marginalizes what I consider to be the most important function of Amarok.

I like Amarok so much because it does a very good job of keeping my music organized. It has tag editing, "Organize Files", a rating feature, "Suggested Songs" ... and (unlike JuK, the last time I tried it) an actual playlist.

Sure, sometimes I want to read lyrics, and the cover art is a nice touch. But those are *secondary features*. They are tangential to the primary job of organizing and playing music.

Most of the time, I have Amarok going in the background while I'm at work. That's my primary use case. I'm rarely (if ever) interested in staring at cover art or reading artists' Wikipedia entries while listening to music.

I'm either *listening to music* and completely focused on it, or I've got some music playing in the background and I'm doing *other things*. Neither of those two scenarios involve digging deeper into the artist/track that's playing, which is what the new interface seems to be focused on.

Now, don't get me wrong -- I think it's a perfectly good idea to have those features. But I don't think they should become the central focus of the player. If they were to become so, it would greatly reduce Amarok's usefulness to me because I'd be constantly trying to navigate around things about which I don't care.

It's not a question of "improving" the new UI. It's an issue of taking Amarok in a completely different direction, one that I'm not happy with. (It sounds like many others feel the same way.) I honestly can't think of a way to "improve" the new UI that doesn't involve moving back toward the old one.

We'll see. Amarok developers have done a kickass job so far, so I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt. But it seems to me they have a lot of work ahead of them.

By Des at Tue, 2007/03/13 - 5:00am

JuK does have playlists, you can drag your collection around, or drag and drop back to where your collections are listed and it creates a new playlist.

I think JuK and amaroK complement each other nicely. I use JuK for my purposes (mostly recorded radio and listening to complete albums), and can easily see a music playlist obsessed person preferring amaroK.

By Evan "JabberWok... at Wed, 2007/03/14 - 5:00am

I love the concept of the second screenshot. It's realy cool to be able to get information about the band that's currently playing, and to get it in a readable way.
I wasn't convinced about the playlist but thinking about it, it can actually be quite cool.

One thing it would be cool to have is to be able to get information about another band than the one currently playing. I don't how that should be handle. But when you're with friends and trying to remember the name of that guitarist in whatever band, it would be great to go the collection and be able to right click (for instance) and get information about the selected band displayed in the center panel.

By Francois at Tue, 2007/03/13 - 5:00am

If they manage to finish Amarok 2.0 before KDE 4.0 is released they could already release the Windows version. Some of my Windows friends really like Amarok when they see it on my PC but are just not yet ready to switch to Linux just for one app. If they could already enjoy Amarok before the final release of KDE 4.0, that would be awesome.

By WPosche at Tue, 2007/03/13 - 5:00am

...and I really trust in its developers. They have proven again and again that they know what they do. Keep going!

If I were to ask something for Amarok, be it 2.0 or 1.x, is that I'd like it to start quickier when double clicking files in Konqueror.
I still miss good old Winamp for that reason, currently Amarok takes too long to load a song, even when it's already running.


By Gabriel Gazzán at Tue, 2007/03/13 - 5:00am