Amarok 2
While I have my eye on Clementine, an alpha-release Qt 4 port of Amarok 1.4, I’ve been using Amarok 2 since it became Amarok install of Kubuntu.
Amarok 2 seems to have been a more dividing release than KDE 4 was after the stability and expanse of KDE 3. While the KDE Software Compilation 4 has grown into a fairly stable system (with Plasma a strong part of the workspace, and tagging/search improving quickly), Amarok has staggered around a bit.
With a recent release of Amarok, perhaps Amarok 2.2, I noticed two things missing. First was that I could no longer modify the design of the playlist. The icon for it was no longer below the play list. Second, I could no longer set whether to play tracks randomly, or otherwise.
After playing around for a long time, I finally found that a weird icon at the bottom of the playlist, with the tooltip “Track Progression”, had nothing to do with the progression of a single track, but actually was the missing method of setting the playlist to play random tracks or albums, and to repeat a track, album, or playlist. Apparently a good amount of discussion and consulting with usability experts determined that modifying how the playlist progresses from one song to the next should be in the play list area. This makes sense. But why remove it from the menu? I haven’t yet figured out how to access this icon using they keyboard, nor do I see anything for it in the shortcuts setting.
Looking over the Amarok Userbase article (which is overly fanboyish at the time of this writing), I found where the icon for editing the playlist’s appearance went. It’s a menu now. I can only determine that a usability expert pointed out that because this relates to the playlist, it should be removed from the playlist, and placed under a menu item. I’m not complaining, though. I have easy keyboard access to it now.
I’m still looking for options such as “Overwrite a saved playlist file with the current playlist,” and perhaps, “Remember that I loaded this set of tracks from a saved playlist, so when I add and remove tracks, and save the playlist, you can either overwrite the one I loaded it from, or ask me whether I want to save or save as.” Might just require a feature request if they’re not there already.
I’m going to keep an eye on Clementine, and hopefully Clementine and Amarok can even share some common libraries, but maybe Amarok 2 isn’t so bad anymore. Almost. Now if only I knew why setting it to “random tracks” stops playing after every track on the playlist has played once…
