Hi everyone,
long time user, first time releaser here.
I am happy to announce the immediate availability of Amarok 3.0 beta (2.9.82)!
This is the next step towards a proper KF5 based release. Although there have been some functionalities lost during porting or due to changes in external network services, it should work quite well in general.
Depending on reactions and amount of bugs reported, another beta or the final 3.0 will be released probably about 3 weeks from now.
3.0 is/will be KF5-based. After possibly some 3.0.x bugfix releases, an effort
will be made to port to Qt6/KF6, and hopefully have such version available in
this year still.
Very nice to see that the project is being developed further. I’ve been using Strawberry for the last few years, so I guess it will soon be obsolete … Thanks for that!
Years has passed since the last time I’ve tried amarok, tried when I saw the project was back alive a couple of years ago? but I couldn’t even compile by that time. And I think it was quite outdated for the times.
But it was the best player out there on their times… so I’ve compiled it successfully this time.
As for now, what I could see is:
Wikipedia page draws pretty ugly
It does not found any lyric
I miss new features useful nowadays, like streaming from Amazon music, Youtube and Youtube Music, Spotify, Plex… those services werent popular or didn’t even exist for the times amarok was on the scene.
Breeze dark theme doesn’t feel nice, as there are some black letters
Nice to hear your experiences and very fine and valid comments!
Indeed, lyric fetching in the context applet doesn’t probably work at the moment. It’s something that I haven’t used myself, so I haven’t yet paid much (any) attention to it yet.
Wikipedia applet is also maybe not quite optimal. Looking at git log, Malte Veerman and Pedro Gomes did very nice job getting it to run on KF5 some years ago, but it hasn’t received attention thereafter yet. I have some ideas for improving it, but I’ve figured that’s probably post-3.0 work.
Web services are an interesting topic. There are many, they might be dynamic and might need adapting to once in a while. On the other hand, they are quite contained, so if one should have a favourite online service, the threshold for developing (or updating an existing) Amarok Internet service for it might not be too high. There some examples available in the sources (e.g. Jamendo is functional code-wise, but their old API doesn’t work any more, so it’s disabled by default)
Last.fm pretty much works, however they’ve discontinued their Radio service so I guess I should remove those non-functional radio streams from UI. Also it seems that some new login code might be necessary (although existing sessions from Amarok 2 still remain functional). Additionally, some of the Flickr photos in Photos applet fail to load, apparently due to QML HTTP request headers, that’s something I’d maybe like to fix before 3.0.
Breeze dark and black letters: Thank you for the notice! Those kind of things are something I’d definitely like to fix before 3.0, so putting it on top of my TODO list. However, I somewhy can’t reproduce that even when applying Breeze Dark colour scheme:
Seems like my dark and light colours are kind of inverted when compared to yours. Even when setting the whole look-and-feel to Breeze Dark, I’m somewhy not getting the result in your screenshot. If you have any ideas what is the difference and how to reproduce, I’m very interested to hear them.
On the subject of online lyrics fetching, this is something I’d very much like to have in Elisa too; maybe we could collaborate on it and put it in a framework or other library that both apps could use? JuK also has this functionality which keeps breaking and could be ported to use it as well. With more users and eyeballs, this might make it more likely that issues with providers would be found and fixed quickly.
Lately I’m testing Tauon Music Box, which I found pretty nice, and it can streams your own music from Plex, Jellyfin and Airsonic, which is pretty awesome. Besides from Spotify Premium. It can also stream to Chromecast, so it has several modern features expected in a music player nowadays.
If you see at its code, you can see the guy is working in several lyrics engines.
Tauon needs to manually download the lyrics one by one, which is a pain in the ass, but at least just the first time, then it stores it somewhere. One thing the old amarok did is autofetch the lyrics automatically, I don’t know if it fetched the lyrics every time or it did store them somewhere, but it was pretty cool.
A nice feature would be nice to embedd the lyrics as metadata, just like the cover.
That would probably be a good idea.
I checked the code, the current version tries to use lyrics.fandom.com (=lyrics.wikia.com) for fetching the lyrics, which seems to have been shut down some time after being introduced in Amarok code.
The 2.x versions had the concept of scriptable lyric services written in QtScript, I believe, which made it pretty modular and flexible to update if there were changes required. The scripting system update is still WIP, so I’m not completely sure how much effort would it take to enable similar ‘lyric script’ functionality at the moment. But if there was some common lyric backend to target for, shouldn’t be a problem to convert the current code for such.
Thank you for the screenshots! Very good to know that the applet toolbar seems to be the only place affected. I think I had some similar colour issues elsewhere earlier, and based on those two pictures, I have some ideas where a fix perhaps would be needed. (Hopefully I’ll manage to reproduce that so I won’t have to do the fixing blind, though)
(I didn’t manage to replicate the problem myself yet, but the it reminds me of something I encountered some time ago when working on one of the applets; it might be that it is fixable with similar changes.)
Okay, thank you for testing! That’s very useful to know. This should give me more idea on how I might be able to reproduce myself and fix, knowing now that it indeed is related to the things I changed in that branch.
(Wikipedia not showing at all: ah yes, just some lines I overlooked when making those initial changes, apologies)
Thank you, a good question. I am myself not familiar with flatpak processes, so probably not right away at least by me, but if some flatpak veteran would like to set everything up, that would of course be awesome.
I still haven’t managed to reproduce this myself (or, not really reproduce: setting color: palette.window in QML file for those labels does yield a similar result, no idea why), and I couldn’t even reproduce the similar issue I had earlier with one applet any more. However, looking at code and various resources, I guess it might be some corner case behaviour difference in SystemPalette between QtControls1 and 2. Not quite sure how and why, but maybe adding an explicit binding to the correct Kirigami colour helps.
Many of the context applets would be straightforward to port from Controls 1 to 2, but apparently there might be surprises, so I guess that’s something to do later during Qt6/KF6 port, then.
