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KDE Music Open Source Software Linux

Amarok 2.8 "Return To the Origin" Released 99

Posted by timothy from the heavily-stimulating dept.
jrepin writes "Music player Amarok 2.8 has been released and it brings a fancy audio analyzer visualization applet, smooth fade-out when pausing music, many UI improvements and visual tweaks including better support for alternate color themes, significantly enhanced MusicBrainz tagger, power management awareness with a pair of new configuration options, and performance optimizations and responsiveness tuning all over Amarok."
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Amarok 2.8 "Return To the Origin" Released More

Amarok 2.8 "Return To the Origin" Released

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  • Twice as good as 1.4 (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 16, 2013 @09:14PM (#44590461)

    Irony: every major version after 1.4 has been worse than it

    • Re:Twice as good as 1.4 (Score:5, Insightful)

      by vilanye ( 1906708 ) on Friday August 16, 2013 @09:17PM (#44590479)
      Agree I dealt with it until about a year ago when it started up and immediately grabbed about 600MB of RAM. Ditched it and been happy with Clementine ever since.

      It is a shame that they ruined what was once the best music player you could get.

      • Re: (Score:1, Insightful)

        by swaq ( 989895 )
        I ditched Amarok for Clementine a while back as well. It just works better. I don't see how adding a bunch of new features is a "Return to the Origin"...

        • I don't see how adding a bunch of new features is a "Return to the Origin"...

          It triggers a reset of The Matrix, which is just the next version of the same trap, none of it reflecting reality.

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by aliquis ( 678370 )

          I don't see how adding a bunch of new features is a "Return to the Origin"...

          Same old bloat.

          • If it's lack of bloat you want, then I have just the thing. I wrote up a little Tcl/Tk script (less than a screenful long) that simply displays all the songs it finds on my PC using locatedb and has a small search box that lets you narrow the search down. Takes less than a second to start, finds all my music without me having to add it to some special folder or import it, and uses almost no resources cause it plays the music with mpg123.

            Feel free to email me for it - my website hoster is having trouble with

        • That article gave me hope for a moment-- until I read TFA I thought they had reverted Amarok to its classic apprearance.

          • Re: (Score:3)

            by richlv ( 778496 )

            hah, exactly the same for me :)
            was a user of amarok 1.4, tried to use amarok 2 for several months... moved to clementine eventually.
            too bad clem isn't as good as amarok 1.4 was (for example, editing tags of a track does not update that in the collection db, and some other slight annoyances)

        • I did too, and never looked back.

          I believe Clementine is a fork of Amarok 1.4, which was the last version I really liked. My experiences with 2.x were not good.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by icebike ( 68054 )

        The most recent version prior to this one was fairly usable, but you are right its been a long road to stability. They keep adding stuff till its designed and releasing stuff till its debugged.

        And any suggestions are met with surly put-downs and childish insults.
        I almost hesitate to upgrade because I've been so often disappointed.

    • Re: (Score:1, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Just tried no play a CD with Amarok on Fedora - it just segfaulted. What a fancy audio visualization :(

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by aliquis ( 678370 )

      Maybe any of these work:
      https://github.com/Razor-qt/razor-qt/wiki/3rd-party-applications [github.com]

      Now to find a distribution which actually have them all packaged...

  • Bah (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward

    I ditched Amarok over a year ago. Once they lost the option to make it a small interface similar to xmms I got rid of it. Even on a quad core with 8gb of ram the thing froze, couldn't handle large play lists and just sucked.

  • people still care about visualization? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by kcmastrpc ( 2818817 ) on Friday August 16, 2013 @09:53PM (#44590707)
    it's must be the fact that i'm over 30 and no longer take LSD.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward
      I was wondering the same thing. I listen to music from on my smartphone quite often, but rarely on my PC. When I do play audio tracks on my PC, my player of choice these days is VLC. I really don't give a damn what it -looks- like. I'm -listening-.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by aliquis ( 678370 )

      lol :)

      i think a nice looking visualiser is a plus :)

      I imagine one can do pretty insane things with todays hardware :)

      As for "heavily-stimulating dept." it got me thinking of:

      "The isolated, the decisive, victory stimulated
      The non-simulated patterns of flight originated
      Now I'm a carnivore on a tour of duty
      My band of brothers in full metal jackets establish cruelty
      Black magic conjurer, attack through the monitor
      Destruction of assumption, one thing I can promise ya
      Impact, crash, with cold shards of glass
      Rituali

    • Hey, back in the 90s I loved Winamp's visualizations, especially Milkdrop's (which was later made an official part of the program). At that point, probably the only "drugs" I had taken were caffeine, cold/flu/pain medicine, and (if you consider them drugs) vaccinations. Years have gone by, and while I haven't been able to properly use Winamp since 2006 (since I switched full-time from Windows to Linux), the only additions you can really add to the list are good ol' marijuana and alcohol. But if I still u

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by marsu_k ( 701360 )
        Protip: XBMC + projectM (Milkdrop clone/port, not sure which). Should come built-in with latest versions, requires some GPU but even a lowly ION2 handles 1080p just fine. And yes, it reduces the need for acid ;)

  • Not for me (Score:4, Interesting)

    by xQuarkDS9x ( 646166 ) on Friday August 16, 2013 @09:59PM (#44590739)

    I've been quite happy using Audacious in Lubuntu compared to say in the past when i've tried Clementine and Amarok and I found they both felt bloated almost like iTunes for windows.

    • I like these articles about Amarok because they inevitably lead to people discussing the alternatives, and sometimes I'll give one of them a try.

      Personally I've been on Banshee for the last year or so. It's got a simple UI that reminds me of an early version of iTunes. Not too many frills, but I can pick the columns I want, and it can sync with music players. Playlist modification is simple enough as well. I personally don't need much more than that.

      I just hope they don't screw it up.

      • I like these articles about Amarok because they inevitably lead to people discussing the alternatives, and sometimes I'll give one of them a try.

        One of my favourite players is Herrie. Playlist management is simple enough to do in text mode.

        OTOH, I still maintain my textmode frontend to Audacious [github.com], because the Python code makes it easy to add custom functions. As a theatre sound guy, I don't want to futz around with a mouse in the midst of a play.

        Text-mode players such as these are also convenient over ssh - it's quite neat to manage the player with a phone/tablet from the dance floor...

  • Huh. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by _KiTA_ ( 241027 ) on Friday August 16, 2013 @10:06PM (#44590787) Homepage

    Am I the only one who stuck with Foobar2000 back in the day, once Winamp self destructed?

    I mean I have the rather... shoddy... Google Play Music on my Android Tablet, but on the PC, Foobar2000 does everything I thought I needed. Is there a compelling reason to try Clementine / Amarok?

    • If you're disappointed with GPM on android you should try an app called PowerAmp. PowerAmp is to the android music player what foobar is to WMP, as far as formats and configurability.

    • Re: (Score:1, Informative)

      by aliquis ( 678370 )

      Foobar2000 alternative for Linux would be deadbeef.

      http://deadbeef.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net]

  • Amarok - still my favourite player (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 16, 2013 @10:21PM (#44590889)

    With all the Amarok 2.x haters that show up to complain any time it's mentioned, you'd think Amarok 2 is the worst thing ever, on par with iTunes, but it's not. It's still a damn good client, and I prefer it over the 1.4 series (or Clementine) for varous reasons.

    Amarok's smart playlist functionality has improved a lot since 1.4, and is miles ahead of Clementine, for example, allowing you to set up complex rule chains for creating random playlists that continually trim old entries and add new as you listen. Clementine finally got Amarok 1.4's smart playlists back, but they're completely overshadowed by the Amarok 2 series version.

    UI flexibility is another thing I prefer; Amarok uses KDE's dockable panels model, so you can modify the interface to have as many or as few panels as you want, and even add and remove tabs to each frame. The default is a three-panel setup that works fine on widescreen, but I trim it down to a two panel layout with various tabs on the left panel. Meanwhile, Clementine offers very little flexibility in appearance, staying true to Amarok 1.4, so it's "my way or the highway". Great fit for the GNOME folks, I guess.

    It also has some interesting features for finding lyrics, artist info, etc., though I use them infrequently and can't say much about them, other than they seem to work and would be useful to someone that uses them more.

    People complain about the extra features and the flexibility, but that's sort of the point of Amarok. If you don't want that, stick with Foobar or mpd (which I also use, they have their places as does Amarok).

    • Yeah, I don't get the hate either. I love the 2.x series. And with MTP support, its brain dead easy to transfer music between my computer and phone. It just works.

  • This is why I use and contribute to Nightingale (Score:4, Informative)

    by ilikenwf ( 1139495 ) on Friday August 16, 2013 @11:19PM (#44591241)
    http://getnightingale.org/ [getnightingale.org] seems to be coming along nicely. I'm a bit biased but it really is a nice multiplatform player. We've even got feature/bug bounties setup now (we don't handle the money, it's through this site, which tracks our github issues:https://www.bountysource.com/trackers/230233-nightingale-media-player-nightingale-hacking).

    We almost have gstreamer 1.0 and xulrunner 9 working with it...from there it's upgrading some other stuff and getting it stable, and we'll be golden. All of you are free to join and help us develop!

  • Oldfield (Score:2, Offtopic)

    by rossdee ( 243626 )

    Am I the only one who saw the headline and thought wow has Mike released another 60 minute masterpiece, but sadly its just a new version of a music player :(

  • ui improvements and visualizations, what is this? 1996?

    here is what I want a music player to do, play music and get the fuck out of the way, there is like 5 controls and they are already on everyone's keyboard, why even HAVE a UI anymore?

    • I imagine that works great when you're trying to play your copy of Jonathon Coulter's greatest hits, some people have music collections that actually need some kind of management.

  • * A fancy audio analyzer visualization applet
    * Smooth fade-out when pausing music
    * Many UI improvements and visual tweaks including better support for alternate color themes

    With priorities like this, we can expect a decent application in about two decades I guess.

  • I read the release name and thought for a moment they'd realised the error of their ways since 1.4. Sadly no. I will continue to use Clementine.

  • Is it just me who thinks Amarok is a ridiculous piece of software which is bloated to the max, yet misses basic features or makes them hard to use ? For me, the previous version was an example of everything that can be wrong with audio players. Let's see what this one has to offer.

  • I prefer moc [daper.net]. It doesn't waste CPU time with silly and useless animations, and it works from the console.

  • I just want one that can handle fixing my collection, preferably on multi-platform since I'm on Win7. MP3Tag works fairly well but I'd rather have something that can handle anything thrown at it without a lot of manual intervention. When the length of songs are known, it should be able to auto match to the version of the album I've got, including extra tracks. - HEX
  • What would be so hard about analyzing the FFT every 1/10 sec for the power specturn in pitch frequency and attempting to assign a note name to the pitches? Make that the visualization, sheet music of a sort, and I don't mean just a piano roll kind of thing. There have been attempts to do this since at least 1970. One doesn't have to be perfectionistic and determine meter, two triplets is good enough for 6/8 time and so what if measures aren't drawn?

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