natedawg
December 16th, 2008, 01:50 AM
I have been looking forward to Amarok 2 for a while and now that its out I can't help but be disappointed. I know the Amarok team wants to change the way we play music and make it more intuitive but I think they have really turned a simple task of playing music into a multiple step process that is much more confusing and useless.
I would say 99.9 percent of music players have a excel like table layout for displaying music in your music library. Amarok 2 on the other hand threw out this familiar and simple implementation in favor of something I can't even describe. The new amarok layout dosn't allow you to easily view track play counts, last played dates, or even bitrates or file sizes without clicking on each individual track.
The other major flaw I see is that in order to play anything I have to add it to the playlist on the right. There is no one click (double click) play. To play something I have to navigate through the music collection tree something that take multiple clicks because I have open up the local collection node, artist node, then the album node and finally find the track I want. You even have to do this when searching for songs because the search results are returned with a collapsed tree :( So say I finally select the song I want to play I now have to drag it or right click it and click the menu option to load. Even after its loaded it will not play until the current song playing has ended or you press next.
Overall I'm just disappointed that Amarok 2 takes so much effort to do simple things, and doesn't show as much information as even the most basic music players do. I don't mind dropping the table based interface but replacing it with the interface it has now seems like a big step backward instead of forward.
Please tell me if I'm missing something here... Is there an easier way to search and play music than what I described above? If not then what can be done to make the new interface faster and easier. I think the Amarok team is set dropping the table based layout forever.
I would say 99.9 percent of music players have a excel like table layout for displaying music in your music library. Amarok 2 on the other hand threw out this familiar and simple implementation in favor of something I can't even describe. The new amarok layout dosn't allow you to easily view track play counts, last played dates, or even bitrates or file sizes without clicking on each individual track.
The other major flaw I see is that in order to play anything I have to add it to the playlist on the right. There is no one click (double click) play. To play something I have to navigate through the music collection tree something that take multiple clicks because I have open up the local collection node, artist node, then the album node and finally find the track I want. You even have to do this when searching for songs because the search results are returned with a collapsed tree :( So say I finally select the song I want to play I now have to drag it or right click it and click the menu option to load. Even after its loaded it will not play until the current song playing has ended or you press next.
Overall I'm just disappointed that Amarok 2 takes so much effort to do simple things, and doesn't show as much information as even the most basic music players do. I don't mind dropping the table based interface but replacing it with the interface it has now seems like a big step backward instead of forward.
Please tell me if I'm missing something here... Is there an easier way to search and play music than what I described above? If not then what can be done to make the new interface faster and easier. I think the Amarok team is set dropping the table based layout forever.