

Amarok 2.4 "Slipstream" Released - Garbage
http://amarok.kde.org/en/releases/2.4.0

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rorymarinich
While I really dislike a lot of things about Amarok, particularly its UI
design, I love it in that it's a media player that seems to constantly strive
to add new, innovative features that let its users do new things with the
music that they love.

I'm wondering why its code name is "Slipstream", though. Is that a name that
refers specifically to a new feature? Or are all Amarok releases so colorfully
titled?

(As an aside: If you haven't listened to the Mike Oldfield composition Amarok
that the program gets its name from, remedy that immediately. It's an
absolutely stupendous hour of music, perhaps my favorite album ever. Excerpts
on Youtube: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fs3NgTIXqfc>)

~~~
wladimir
I dont agree its GUI design is bad, it's clunky but basically the same as all
music players these days, an iTunes ripoff :)

Sometimes I long back to the time when music players had a simple streamlined
minimal interface like xmms, and the old winamp...

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rorymarinich
I wish it was an iTunes ripoff. iTunes has got a lot of bulk but I find its
interface vastly more intuitive.

Look at the screenshot included in this post:

<http://amarok.kde.org/files/amarok2.4.0.png>

It uses a three-panel layout, for information that is not essentially equal.
The left panel determines source, the right panel browses through music, and
the center panel shows related artists. There's a lot of unused space in the
title (now playing) bar and in the lower left corner.

So if I'm picking music to play, I have to first choose an option on the left.
Then I skip OVER the center panel and look at the newly-updated right panel,
which doesn't seem to be showing me very much music at once. The middle panel
only matters if I'm actively looking at similar artists.

iTunes, on the other hand, has a clearly delineated (smaller, different-
looking) left panel that lets you decide what sources you're using to play
your music (playlists, the online store, podcasts, etc). The bulk of its
interface is dedicated to letting you browse as much music as possible. It has
an artist recommendation that shows up as a similarly delineated bar on the
right, and which is disabled by default.

Also, look at how many untitled icons there are on the Amarok interface. And
how many repetitive images there are. That one band's album image repeats five
times — is it adding extra relevant information? And in the center pane there
seem to be two separate Settings icons. Do they do the same thing, or do they
serve different purposes?

iTunes has bloat, but on a WAY different magnitude. Here's a screenshot of
what mine looks like right now:

<http://cl.ly/191a0U1o411X0O433Q0g>

There are only three groupings of unnamed icons. The one at the top right
pretty clearly depicts the viewing style; the one at bottom left is all the
playing controls (though the Add Playlist and Hide Artwork buttons are a bit
ambiguous); the ones on the bottom right (AirPlay, Genius, and Show Sidebar)
are the only ones that I think are a little confusing to new users. Everything
else is very clearly labeled and pretty much explains itself.

I'm not a big fan of iTunes but it's operating on a different level of UI
design than Amarok, currently. That's not to say it's prettier (although I
think Amarok is a little clunky), but it's a program that a team of expert
interface designers have thoroughly tweaked. I wish KDE had more interface
designers working for them; it's one of those fields that _sounds_ like a lot
of unnecessary bullshit but goes a long way towards making experiences more
enjoyable.

~~~
fjh
I suspect that your perception of iTunes being more intuitive comes simply
from being more used to it. I used to use Amarok a lot and when I had to use
iTunes it didn't really make any sense to me. For example, I once ended up
deleting some songs from a friend's collection when I tried to remove them
from the current playlist. Now, maybe I'm just not smart enough to use a
computer correctly, but may friends definitely had less trouble using amarok
on my computer than I had with itunes on theirs.

~~~
rorymarinich
No, no, you're right. iTunes does have some usability issues still. The
"removing a song from playlist" is actually the first one I'd think of also;
the fact that you hit the same button to delete a song and to remove it is
problematic. By default iTunes pops up a warning either way asking you if
you're sure you want to delete/remove, so that that way you know what you're
doing, but if you tell it to stop popping up warnings there's a risk of
messing things up.

The thing is that anything can _become_ intuitive. Use Amarok long enough and
I'm sure it becomes effortless. The term interface design uses to describe
this is "mental model"; good designs let users form a model of how something
works before they even touch it. (So on iTunes, the metaphor of seeing album
covers immediately makes me think that to play an album I click on its cover,
which is exactly right.) It's very difficult to create a program that forms a
good mental model of every single function at once, especially if you're
making a complex program like iTunes. But I'd argue that it's still vastly
easier to intuit from the interface than it would be for Amarok, where,
looking at that screenshot, I can't tell how I would look at other artists'
music or how to form a playlist or a number of other relatively trivial tasks.

~~~
fjh
> The thing is that anything can become intuitive. Use Amarok long enough and
> I'm sure it becomes effortless.

Agreed, but the same applies to itunes. Which is why I think that it is quite
hard to accurately judge whether or not one's own music player is intuitive or
not.

> But I'd argue that it's still vastly easier to intuit from the interface
> than it would be for Amarok

And that's where I disagree and why I mentioned that my friends seemed to have
less trouble with amarok than I had with itunes. (btw. why are people
downvoting my opinion? ok, anecdotal evidence and all that, but really?)

~~~
rorymarinich
I disagree with your disagreement, but I figure at this point it's nitpicking
on both our sides. We both stated our cases pretty thoroughly, I think.

> (btw. why are people downvoting my opinion? ok, anecdotal evidence and all
> that, but really?)

It's because we all like kneejerk downvoting opinions that disagree with ours!
Kneejerk is fun! Sometimes we also curse each other out too. It's an awful
joy.

(I wish Hacker News would stop with the downvotes. We derive enough data, I
think, from masses of upvotes to sort threads by popularity. The only people
who deserve downvotes are spammers, and we have the "flag" option for that.)

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auxbuss
A player I've been using for a couple of months, and really liking, is
Clementine <http://www.clementine-player.org/> They claim it to be inspired by
Amarok 1.4.

~~~
km3k
I really like the look of Clementine, but I'm still holding onto Amarok 1.4
because it works with Katapult. Does Clementine work with any launchers yet?

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MrUnderhill
Looks very nice - Amarok has been my favorite music player for years now.
Lately I've been using more and more of the online streaming services, however
(Spotify, Grooveshark, Wimp etc.). I hope future music players will have the
ability to integrate these services as well. While most of the services have
nice interfaces on their own, it would be great to have one application for
all my musical needs. I do believe there was an independently developed
Spotify client for Linux at some point.

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al_james
I thought that said 'Android 2.4' and got very excited!

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spiffworks
If you're on Linux, try cmus. Its the greatest there is. Vi shortcuts,
simplicity embodied, and as fast as you can type.

~~~
urlwolf
I do love cmus, but I can't find a way to understand how it deals with some
tags. Some songs are not displaying using the titleformat string I have. No
idea why. Maybe they are missing a field? Conflickting ID3.2 tags v.3 and v.4?
No idea. No time to dig deeper...

Still my main player.

