Feature changed by: Peter Gumbrell (gumb) Feature #312784, revision 23 Title: Replace Amarok with Clementine openSUSE Distribution: Unconfirmed Priority Requester: Desirable Requested by: Roger Luedecke (shadowolf7) Partner organization: openSUSE.org Description: Clementine is a Qt-only music player based of the old Amarok 1.4. Clementine boasts a more traditional interface. It also includes a robust visualizer implementation for those of us who enjoy them. Business case (Partner benefit): openSUSE.org: Amarok is difficult for new users coming from Windows of Gnome. Also, no other player has robust visualization like Clementine. Discussion: #1: Markus K (kamikazow) (2011-09-06 20:53:33) Clementine is no KDE application and there has -- so far -- never been Amarok 3.x. #2: Kim Leyendecker (openlhag) (2011-09-07 19:46:07) (reply to #1) With Amarok 3.x was the old Amarok under KDE 3.x meant. #3: Roger Luedecke (shadowolf7) (2011-09-07 20:17:30) (reply to #2) Yes, thank you Kim. #4: peter nikolic (petenjr) (2011-09-07 21:35:50) Yes please the sooner we can get shut of Amarok the better #5: Don Vosburg (dvosburg) (2011-09-07 21:38:50) (reply to #4) I agree. Amarok has become unwieldy and unstable since 2.0. #6: Steven Sroka (lin-unix) (2011-09-07 21:53:40) Clementine is soo much more user friendly. +1 for Clementine as default music player. #7: Christoph Obexer (cobexer) (2011-09-07 23:02:44) Integration with the plasmoids that show the current track and album cover would be nice for clementine! #8: Graham Anderson (andtecheu) (2011-09-08 09:58:15) No thanks, Amarok2 is awesome, has worked very well for a long time and has *really* nice integration with Wikipedia, something that Clementine lacks. Additionally, "Clemetine is easier, Amarok is hard" is purely anecdotal and/or subjective. In my opinion, all music players are easy to configure, Amarok included. If users find any music player hard to configure, perhaps they should be looking to purchase "computers for dummies" or something in that line of books. #9: Sascha Peilicke (saschpe) (2011-09-08 10:10:38) (reply to #8) Uh? clementine displays artist info from wikipedia, last.fm and quite a bunch of other services. But I think it shouldn't be about configurability but about what makes the most sense as a default. Amarok is more known although it is a really controversial piece of software. Most people don't want to have MySQL running for a music player, the other thing is the still not ended UI experiment (involving plasma and screen waste). Clementine on the other hand is a Qt4-rewrite of Amarok-1.4, which everyone seemed to be in love with back in the days :-) It needs way less RAM and doesn't depend on plasma (and a whole bunch of kdelibs), so it could be called more lightweight. While both share mostly the same feature set, In my opinion, the latter is better suited as a default media player. #10: Markus K (kamikazow) (2011-09-15 15:57:02) (reply to #9) Let's see… the proposal to replace Amarok with Clementine so far has an approval rating of -18. That means your allegations what “most people” want, is simply wrong. #11: Sascha Peilicke (saschpe) (2011-09-16 09:26:59) (reply to #10) It seems so, yes ;-) #12: Joseph Mitzen (duncreg) (2011-09-17 07:46:03) (reply to #11) I don't know. Sabayon already went and made Clementine the default media player. :-) #13: Joseph Mitzen (duncreg) (2011-09-17 08:08:22) (reply to #8) I'm not sure how you can claim that Amarok is easy to use or that any music player, regardless of UI, is easy to use. Anyone sitting down in front of Clementine can use it right away because it follows standard user interface guidelines. Amarok... well, let's just say it deviates sharply. Try syncing a music player with Amarok some time. In some players you select your music files, right click, and there would be a menu option about sending the music to a device. In other players, like Banshee, you just drag and drop. I tried both of these techniques in Amarok and neither worked. I believe I managed to do it once by accident (after which it crashed). If even transferring files is a complex process that involves submenus, it can't be considered an intuitive interface. In one of the many, many critiques of Amarok's interface on the Net, http://briancarper.net/blog/463/songbird-vs-amarok-how-not-to-design-a-gui Brian Carper details many of Amarok's design decisions using the phrase "in every other music program in existence...". Again, it's not really debatable that if your program works differently than users expect music programs to work, it's not going to be simple for them to use. If Banshee is good enough for Gnome (and supported by Novell/SuSE) why not just make it the default on KDE as well? #14: Ruediger Meier (rudi_m) (2011-09-17 16:42:53) IMO as seen so often the subject "Replace Amarok with Clementine" is wrong. Why the people always want to _replace_ something _per_default_? Why not just asking for "Inlcude clementine into standard distro"? This would make my admin life easier because all my KDE4 users want clementine to be installed. But then they are able to type clementine instead of amarok ... BTW I'm still happy with amarok-1.4 and don't care about the topic at all. + #15: Peter Gumbrell (gumb) (2011-09-18 13:10:00) + I'll just weigh in with a few thoughts since this topic inspired me to + try out Clementine a couple of weeks ago. So here's a 'real-world + scenario' user case: I've long been promising my father to get him set + up transferring his enormous CD collection, and for over three years + now since the advent of KDE4 and Amarok 2 I've been waiting for the + moment to get him started. Sadly, whilst KDE became usable around the + 4.2 mark, Amarok (and in some cases Phonon or Linux audio in general) + has presented one problem after another. I had great hopes when Amarok + merged CD ripping functionality in, potentially making the whole + process easier and manageable from one program, but it's been so buggy + I've never got it to reliably recognize discs on three completely + different systems. I found existing bug reports that I contributed to + but these either got forgotten or closed as fixed when they weren't, + and in the latest 2.4.3 version there seem to be further regressions. + When I first heard about Clementine I imagined it to be another example + of a project catering to people who can't or are unwilling to move on + (like some of the KDE4 naysayers). But with Amarok randomly crashing + and forcing me to bash my head against the wall wondering if it will + ever be usable in my father's lifetime, I had to look elsewhere. + Consequently, I've set up Audex as a simple standalone program for the + ripping part, and have been pleasantly surprised with Clementine, which + is certainly more than just a reproduction of Amarok 1.4. I've now just + left my dad happily ripping away and he has taken to Clementine very + well. Despite all this, I don't vote either way on this topic because + for the moment at least there are evidently people who are satisfied + with Amarok, and I don't deny there are people working hard on its + development. It would just be nice if their efforts could be focused + more on cleaning the program and its buggy reputation up, like happened + with KDEnlive not so long ago. So I suggest keep Amarok as default but + keep an eye on Clementine and other alternatives and make it easily + available in the repos, and for those who haven't tried it, don't write + it off. Even Mandriva just made it the default player. + (Sorry for the long post, but I hope it adds some balance). -- openSUSE Feature: https://features.opensuse.org/312784