Rewrote this after the comment from Leo and some work getting my Amarok install done properly.
Amarok 1.4 has been my favorite media player for years. It rocks. In the early days it was unstable but we can forgive in development software for that.
I gave 2.0 a try in the svn head days when nothing at all worked. I tried 2.0 at release and never got audio output working. Finally 2.1 seemed to load a collection correctly but the interface was still jumpy and broken.
Here we are at 2.2. It is declared stable on amd64 in Gentoo Portage. There must be some way to make this thing work by now.
That’s what it looks like if you emerge amarok without any other KDE components. Kind of broken. CPU usage is high and it looks ugly and confusing. On the up side, first run of the player went more smoothly and required less in-app configuration than 1.4. Audio painlessly worked.
To fix the styling problems for the most part on Gentoo for those without all of KDE4 installed you need kde-base/kstyles. That gets you the Oxygen theme. You may also want kde-base/systemsettings as this will let you configure and change KDE themes.
Much nicer.
Removing the Wikipedia and Lyrics widgets seems to help the lag. The Wikipedia one was spawning off new loading spinners and stacking them up.
Next problem is global shortcuts won’t work if you don’t install the KDE Global Shortcut daemon. emerge kde-base/kglobalaccel then run kglobalaccel.
There’s still some problems. The Album Cover Manager hangs the whole player for about a minute with my collection. Once open the count doesn’t match up with the icons displayed and closing it hangs for another ten seconds. CPU usage is in general higher than Amarok 1.4.
With some more configuration you can get something like this (or however else you like) to get a more 1.4 feel.
2 Comments
amarok looks like crap in that screenshot because your kde style and window decorations look like crap.
it’s not clear what elements are clickable or not because your style doesn’t make it evident what makes them clickable or not.
try it again with oxygen, or qtcurve, or any other decent kde4 style and windeco
I was lacking kdebase-runtime which contains Oxygen. Qt4’s look without that package is terrible. I don’t run any other KDE applications, so general KDE problems (my config or otherwise) tend to look like Amarok problems.
Any hints on getting keyboard shortcuts to work while Amarok isn’t the focused application?
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