KDE Amarok 2.7 Coming Very Soon With New Features

[GreatEmerald]

Then don't use GStreamer. ;-)
Amarok, just as almost any other KDE media player, simply talks to Phonon. Simply switch the Phonon back-end (in my case VLC).

Yeah, no. VLC doesn't support MIDI at all. As a matter of fact, with VLC you can't even add MIDI files to the playlist. So that's not an option.

[bug77]

"Note, these tests are on a 64 bit machine, so they would be about double compared to a 32 bit machine."

No, they wouldn't.
Also, unless you tested with no playlist, Clementine uses way more memory than what those tests show. I'm getting 186MB RAM usage with ~4,000 items. Amarok uses 132MB and roughly half the vitual memory.

[Pawlerson]

I'm using KDE since version 3. I do not like players covering a big annoying window. I always used Audacious (yes, gtk). It does what it have to do, play music. Small interface, filters, plugins, equalizer, playlist, and skinnable.

You could give qmmp a try. It's WinAMP lile Linux media player written in Qt.

[BO$$]

Offtopic: I find that when the system is under heavy HDD load I get stutters when listening to music. Yet when the system is under heavy load in windows it never stutters. As if windows gets better buffering. Does anyone else get this behavior? Is there anything I can do to increase the buffers? I use rhythmbox as of now.

[talvik]

Offtopic: I find that when the system is under heavy HDD load I get stutters when listening to music. Yet when the system is under heavy load in windows it never stutters. As if windows gets better buffering. Does anyone else get this behavior? Is there anything I can do to increase the buffers? I use rhythmbox as of now.

Not just music stuttering but the UI becomes quite unresponsive as well. I've experienced this behavior for years in several different machines.

edit: The pertinent kernel bug https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=12309 since 2008 >600 posts.

[vsteel]

I am glad to see I am not the only one who fell out of love with Amarok after 2.0 I personally don't care about how much memory it uses, for me I don't like the cluttered interface. I don't connect it to internet radio, I don't care about album cover art, I don't need to have the lyircs, ratings and statistics. For me it is all about the music, I just need a simple interface, that is why I now use the deadbeef player and I have never looked back. I can also set it up easily for bit perfect playback to my digital output. My 96Khz 24bit flac recordings have never sounded so good.

[bug77]

Offtopic: I find that when the system is under heavy HDD load I get stutters when listening to music. Yet when the system is under heavy load in windows it never stutters. As if windows gets better buffering. Does anyone else get this behavior? Is there anything I can do to increase the buffers? I use rhythmbox as of now.

How much heavy load? I had compile run in a VM for 10-15min, doing some find on the entire drive in the host system and music was playing fine all along. I do have indexing turned off, but so do many windows users. Using a fairly old HDD too, though it's a 7200RPM one.

Quite the opposite, I was able to edit an ID3 tag in Linux without the music pausing when saving the file I was listening to. Winamp always pauses when I do that.

[Reloaded211]

Works fine for me. Currently it uses 55 MB and does just what is needed - plays music. Also, one more vote for Amarok's search capabilities, I use them to create dynamic playlists filled with music of certain rating, score, play count, genre etc.

[Awesomeness]

Yeah, no. VLC doesn't support MIDI at all. As a matter of fact, with VLC you can't even add MIDI files to the playlist. So that's not an option.

VLC supports MIDI files according to http://wiki.videolan.org/Midi but one needs SoundFont files first.
Beside that the VLC back-end never had any problems with randomly stopping playpack of MP3 files.

[GreatEmerald]

VLC supports MIDI files according to http://wiki.videolan.org/Midi but one needs SoundFont files first.
Beside that the VLC back-end never had any problems with randomly stopping playpack of MP3 files.

The VLC player does support MIDI, and quite well. However, the VLC backend does not support it. And well, bugs happen, and they get solved, so I just have to wait until everyone switches to GStreamer 1.0.