Amarok WTF

Warning: the following rant could be caused by my idiocy, more than by Amarok’s fault. See comments.

I have been using [[Amarok (software)|Amarok]] as music player even since I had first contact with it. I was really delighted with its capabilities, and everything was intuitive and useful in its [[User Interface|UI]]. That was until version 1.4.x.

Version 2.0 was an almost complete rewrite of the code, and as such many things changed. The UI suffered a large redesign, in my opinion for worse… but that’s just an opinion. There are, however, other issues that are facts, not opinion. Amarok 2.0 lacked many of the features of Amarok 1.x, as the developers themselves admitted (not much room to deny). Fine, I have no problem with that. It is understandable: until version 2.x things will not settle down. The only problem is that Linux distros (at least Ubuntu) adopted Amarok 2.0 almost immediately, leaving us users with a broken toy. Not nice.

My latest gripe with Amarok? I run Ubuntu 9.10 at work (Amarok 2.2.0), and latest Arch at home. In the latter, I just updated Amarok 2.2.1 to 2.2.2 in the weekend (Arch is much more up to date than Ubuntu, since it’s based in almost bleeding-edge rolling releases). Well, unlike Amarok 2.2.1 before (or Amarok 2.2.0 at work), the new Amarok 2.2.2 does not have an option for random play. Yes, you read correctly. There is no way I know of to avoid playing all the songs in the playlist in the exact order (in principle, alphabetical) they are laid on. In older versions, you could play songs or albums randomly. With 2.2.2, they lost this capability. Amazing feature regression, if you ask me.

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