amaroK, complex?
I’ve spent maybe 30% of my coding time for the last 20 months trying to make amaroK usable, simple, clear and logical (I’ll break down the other 70% some other time). And I spend maybe half of my amaroK thinking time contemplating how amaroK could be made more intuitive. This is why I’m always pained to hear people describe it as the opposite. Especially with the launch of 1.2.3 I find it ever harder to understand what it is that people find difficult, unclear or complex about it. Not that everyone finds it sucky; nowadays it does seem that there are more people saying “amaroK is a joy to use!” than “amaroK sucks!” Which is very rewarding.
Hearing JRiddell say that #gnome-hackers think our startup wizard is scary is interesting. I assume they don’t object to the wizard itself; being a music-library application it would be pretty non-intuitive to expect the user to use his own initiative to set up the library. What’s scary about it? Is there too much text? Because we were trying to be thorough and helpful. It’s funny how you have to be perfectly concise or people criticise you either way.
There’s always some issue that gets the most talk at any stage of amaroK’s life. Pre 1.2.0 it was bugginess, pre 1.1.0 it was non-intuitiveness, pre 1.0.0 it was getting the damn thing installed, pre that I can’t remember. Recently I’ve heard a surprising amount of “how do I put music in it!”. I find this difficult to understand as it seems pretty obvious to me:
It’s the first menu item in the first menu, or use the filebrowser, or drag and drop
to the playlist (it’s even labelled “the playlist” in big letters on first-ever-run), or use the usual shortcut for open, CTRL-O. We even added a help text for 1.2.0 that shows in the playlist the first time you run it, it explains how to add music to the playlist. Probably it needs improvement. I really want XP style bubble help tips and have half written a cool class to do this. Then I’d add these to all the browsers, and widgets that have cool hidden features, and to stuff that could do with some further explanation.
When questioning these people I have found many of them are used to using JuK and expect amaroK to be similar. Whatever, I’m going to spend some time figuring out how to make this step easier. It’s funny, but once you’ve cracked these issues you only find out 2 months later when the complaints stop coming in. When we fixed the installation issues at pre-1.0.0 nobody came to the channel saying, “wow that was easy to install!” 
I just noticed one day that I was spending a lot less time helping people fix their amaroK. But when you think about it, that’s human nature really.
I’d like to hear detailed arguments for what is complex about amaroK, if you have the time. Thanks!
Man, I’m telling you : Amarok IS the greatest App available in KDE, just beside K3B. You rock !
Fred April 5th, 2006 at 19:56Amarock is brilliant, I have used a lot of music players and this one is stable, easy to use and beats the lot. I really like the scripts and the way it is so intuitive. I like the way my album covers appear and the way I can configure the playlists.
I only have a problem with the amount of system resources the visualisation plugins use because my children’s PC is an old 800Mhz AMD duron with 256MB ram and the visualisations are not optimal, have to be run 600×800 or less.
Also it opens in the system tray and not as on the desktop by default so my 5year old does not realise it is there. I have to open it for her… Once it is open she can use it no problem.
The more features that a program has can give it great quality but it obviously becomes more complex. With everything amarock is capable off it is really very simple to use and one of the reasons I no longer use commercial operating systems. Thanx.
Stephen April 5th, 2006 at 20:04> detailed arguments for what is complex about amaroK
Spelling words with KaPitAls in strange plAcEs is toO harD!
Anon April 5th, 2006 at 20:34I can’t say that i know of any part in amaroK that I find complex. Except for the scripting-part which is a little buggy from time to time, but that has been greatly improved over time.
Perhaps a first time tour of the program could be a good idea? The first/last question in the startup wizard could something like “Have you eer used amaroK before?” and if the user replies “No” on this question, a series of informative bubbles could pop up on the screen pointing at things in the program and explaining them, pointing the way to the nest bubble. A little like the tutorial in Battle for Wesnoth; “To get to point B, you must first get to point A and complete requirement X.”.
Just a friendly thought (I felt bored and thought I’d read some blogs). I bet you have already thought of this, but perhaps it could be something to implement?
Thanks for a great, easy to install (using apt and SVN that is
), killer-application!
Jeff April 5th, 2006 at 20:36“I assume they don’t object to the wizard itself; being a music-library application it would be pretty non-intuitive to expect the user to use his own initiative to set up the library. What’s scary about it? Is there too much text?”
The wizard is not really as good as it is now.
To start with, take a look at the first screen of the wizard. “HI, THIS IS THE STARTUP WIZARD; PLEASE PRESS NEXT”. Well, why just don’t remove this step? This is a unuseful screen, it doesn’t really says anything useful
Second screen: choose between JUK and XMMS style of interface. Can’t this just be turned on in the preferences? OK, so mayby this is more meaningful, but users just want to…use the program, I don’t see why removing this step would harm too much
The third screen is the one really meaningful, but more on that later.
The fourth screen asks user to choose between….different database backends?? Really, is this a question that is neccesary to ask to the user in a startup wizard?? 99% of the people just want SQlite, mysql users can configure it in the preferences
The third screen is the one meaningful: Ask the user where on the computer the music is. In my very humble opinion, you just can remove the whole wizard and leave that step.
And if you’re going to rework that, you could do it better. For example, you may want to import music from a CD. Or a OPML list of podcasts.
Diego April 5th, 2006 at 20:39Hi, on my last party I used amarok to play music. All of the people never saw amarok. There were two, who played with it, and in general we had the following issue. I had prepared a playlist. Now, the others wanted to add songs. So what do we do? We go to “All Collection”, and search for the song. Then we drag&drop it to the other playlist, go to the original playlist, and move the song to where it belongs.
Now, if you want to add another song, you first have to save the playlist, and then do the whole procedure again, which is very unintuitive and combersomely. If you forget to save the playlist before switching to “All Collection” (what was usually the case), the current playlist is lost.
…or do I miss a very cool feature somehow?
Dominik April 5th, 2006 at 20:51It is great to hear, that people put so much thought into usability. Understanding what makes a UI difficult or easy to use is the biggest obstacle when making your program more user-friendly. We had lots of disucssions when designing the debian-installer. I share somt thoughts with you, which you migth find useful or discard them:
1) Don’t ask questions, if you have a sane default.
Regarding your first start wizard:
- No one reads the introduction. Sad but true.
- Just use one of the two display modes as default
- The question about the collection is necessary of course
- Drop the question about the DB backend. Only experienced users will want a non-sqlite backend, and those will find the settings.
2) More features impede usability.
One thing that springs to my mind when applying this to amarok is the playing queue (I hope that this is what it’s called in english). Even I as feature-greedy software nerd needed some time to understand what this feature is about and how I can make good use of it. Mst people will never use it and the many references to may be irritating.
The latter point is hard to tackle. I do not believe there is a golden way to it. Maybe it is an option to have different levels of user-interfaces, where the simplest only shows you the most relevant stuff (that 70% want to use) and the more advanced add more features to the UI. I do not know if that is feasable and how to find out the parts to leave out…
Well, good luck in making amaroK even cooler. I really can’t understand why anyone wants a different player than this one
Sebastian Ley April 5th, 2006 at 20:54I love it. Aside from the EQ not working right, I find nothing wrong with it at all.
I would like to offer some ideas though…
Maybe a Media browser for Videos and embed kmplayer in there so people can watch internet shows; sort of like what WinAMP has.
Also, maybe a default media website so people can click on music and listen to it from the internet (Like what Windows Media Player has.)
I know the last 2 Items I mentioned were ideas that Windows users have, but my 3 Girls like WinAMP and Windows Media Player because of those two items. If they were in Amarok (Or something smiler to those ideas but yielded the same effect) they would switch in a sec…
Just my 2 cents…
Thanks for working on Amarok… I love it!!!
Joe
LinuxRocks April 5th, 2006 at 20:56BTW, as for adding songs: I find natural that people can’t add music easily. It’s the first entry in the first menu, sure, but the menu is called, uh, “Actions”. Everything in the interface, from menus to buttons are “actions”, this could surely get a better name, ej “music -> Add music”, or something. And being able to stop/pause/etc is really something that has to be in a menu, and in the first menu, when most users just do it from the interface? (my two cents)
Diego April 5th, 2006 at 21:09I’d like to first say that my mates and I think amaroK is the best in it’s class on any platform. Thanks for the massive amount of work that clearly went into it.
Naturally, any piece of software will have critics and naysayers. I hope you won’t take their criticisms too deeply to heart. You should remember that amoroK is quite popular and highly regarded, generally. I would take with a grain of salt anything coming from the gnome interface nazis. In their effort to make things simple they’ve created something that is barely functional. I find it laughable that they even have the arrogance to criticize amaroK when their own default music player is so weak.
Any app with some power is going to take a little time to get used to. When opening a new software for the first time, the eye doesn’t know where to look and there can be some confusion. Most people realize that this is simply due to being unaccustomed to the new interface, and after a day or two, the logic of the layout starts to become more clear and intuitive.
In my opinion, gnome and apple have been consistently guilty of confusing ease of learning with ease of use. We should not design interfaces with the idea that a first time user will automatically know what to do (because there’re only two buttons to press?). Clearly the user will feel limited by the program in very short time and go looking for something more powerful.
As you hint at in this post - when you spend a lot of time on forums or irc, you tend to get a distorted view of what the general population thinks of your software. You don’t get much positive feedback and only hear about the problems, whining, chronic complainers, and know-it-alls. It might be refreshing for you to look around the web and see that the great majority of people love amaroK. Here is one example: [url]http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/showthread.php?t=409046[/url]
That’s a huge landslide victory for amaroK considering it got 42% of the vote in a poll with ELEVEN choices.
You have a vision for amaroK which I think has been realized quite well up to this point. It’s important to stay true to your vision, or you’ll end up with some bland, watered-down piece of rubbish that YOU hate. And how can you continue to feel inspired to work on it when you don’t even like your own creation anymore?
I see that this topic is a year old, but for whatever reason it just came through on KDE’s rss feed, and I felt inspired to leave a comment.
Segovia April 5th, 2006 at 22:13Sorry, I can’t help you, I just find Amarok perfect and better than anything else I ever tried
OK, if you force me to say something bad about amarok, I would talk about the 4 tabs in the “Context” sidebar, but the propositions made on http://dot.kde.org/1139952529/1140021101/ solve this problem. Not sure if you noticed them.
jmfayard April 5th, 2006 at 22:14Bah, don’t worry. Just keep up the good work!
amaroK was one of “The Big KDE 3″ that convinced me to use KDE-GNU/Linux as my primary OS, the others being Konqueror & Kontact.
Not a day goes by that don’t use amaroK! I can’t imagine amaroK being “too confusing”, I can’t think of another app that goes to such lengths to make things easy.
There’s a reason why a lot of Gnome users will still use amaroK even if they don’t use other Qt/KDE apps. It’s the same reason Banshee and Listen have caught a serious case of the clone
RS3York April 5th, 2006 at 22:25In support of amarok developers everywhere I can only say nice things about the project. Ever since adding the selection screen for musicbrainz (insted of just choosing) I have been a 100% happy customer. Thanks much!
Christian April 5th, 2006 at 22:45amaroK IS a joy to use.
Gareth Sargeant April 5th, 2006 at 23:38Hi,
first of all, thumbs up. I really like amarok. What I think is a bit complicated is the following: It sometimes happens that I select an album but want to play only a few song out of it. Right now that means: Right click, add to playlist for each of the song I want to hear and after the last sog, a “stop after here”.
michael April 6th, 2006 at 0:27More easy would be:
I use a multiple selection (STRG+mouse click) and the selected song are played in the order I selected them.
This would also have the additional benefit, that the song order is not changed. You could still visualize the playing order with a small icon number as you currently already do.
michael April 6th, 2006 at 0:29well, you asked for it
My humble reasons for calling Amarok “scary” and kicking it out of the 3.5.x screenshots set we are about to release:
1. Obnoxiously large amount of various tabs and buttons, going both horizontally and vertically. There are so many of these things, we need scroll buttons to look at them all.
2. Redundancy of the tabs:
- “Collections” may easily be one more list in “Lists” or, vise verse.
- “iPod” tab should be there only when user needs it (i.e. when user HAS an mp3 player. Just make it hidden by defult and show it if iPod is detected, or user enables config option)
- Why is there a need at all for a “file browser” tab? What happened to dropping files directly from actual file browser? not good enough, or something?
- strange positioning of horizontal buttons / tabs. They should be intuitively subordinate to the side tabs. When they are on top, the order of subordination breaks. Suggest moving buttons and tabs from top, to bottom, so they actually visually compliment “play button” and friends.
This music player is SOO good in features, it is really shame it has to suffer from so much UI deformity.
This thing should have been properly discussed in kde-usability. Too bad it turned into a one more place where authors just blindly defend their “babies”
Daniel "Suslik" Dotsenko April 6th, 2006 at 1:59Don’t listen to them. Amarok is the best music player around, on any platform I ever worked on.
Louis-Philippe Huberdeau April 6th, 2006 at 2:29Hm, ok, you asked for it.
First off, kudos on an overall solid program. I’m of the mind that the KDE-based audio managers (amaroK and JuK) are better than any of the Windows or Mac counterparts.
That said, the biggest annoyance for me when using amaroK is is managing the collection. I rely heavily on MusicBrainz for that, and like to go through and view/edit my tags frequently.
This is one area where I find JuK far easier to use than amaroK. Reasons:
1) Inline pane vs. popup window. JuK’s inline tag editor is far nicer for me than amaroK’s popup. I can see the “long and editable” version of a bunch of songs in a row with only a single click, rather than two clicks per song in different parts of the screen. It’s also easier to simply edit and move than to edit, Save, select next, move to popup, repeat.
2) JuK lets me rename the file in the same editing window. amaroK doesn’t, as far as I know. If I have a song misfiled (not uncommon), then I can’t easily change both the tag and the file name in the same edit dialog. I therefore forget to change the file name, so I later find I have songs whose file name say one artist and ID3 tags say another.
3) Multiple MusicBrainz returns. Often, MusicBrainz has multiple possible returns for a given song. The first is not always correct. In JuK, I get a list to choose from or to not select any. In amaroK, the first suggestion returned is automatically used, even if it’s extremely wrong. The only way to not have the wrong data overwrite the old stuff is to cancel the popup dialog. Of course, if I’d been using the “Next” button to page through several files and update them, those changes aren’t saved until I click Save and Close. So if I cancel to avoid wrecking one file, I then lose the changes to any other files. And if I Save each one separately, then I’m back to a separate popup window for each file, which is 3 times as much mouse movement.
Even though I use amaroK for most of my playback these days, I still use JuK any time I need to do any serious filing or categorizing or tag cleanup. amaroK is just too much work to do what JuK lets me do very easily.
So there you have it; a rather informal usability bug report.
Use it in good stead, and even still great work on the program!
Larry Garfield April 6th, 2006 at 3:52Espero que alguien que entienda español lea esto, y comprenda cuan difícil se me ha hecho a mi también entenderme con amaroK.
Rodolfo "Fito" Acosta April 6th, 2006 at 5:28Soy nuevo usuario de Linux, e intento desligarme de todo el entorno XP, y voy bastante bien, pero multimedia ha sido hasta ahora una de mis mayores frustraciones…apenas he podido reproducir algunos sonidos e imágenes a través de un Real Player que bajé de la red y ni hablar de reproducir ni siquiera uno de los mp3 que tengo almacenados se admite cualquier consejo que pueda ser útil…en español en lo posible…GRACIAS !!!!!
Hi.
Amarok rocks!. Thanxs for the time you spend hacking on it, it’s a pleasure to use.
javier April 6th, 2006 at 5:44I’m not commenting to tell you how overly complex amarok is (because i don’t think this is the case) but to tell my experience with amarok.
. It transformed the computer from a cold music reproducing box to a nice and friendly jukebox.
infopipe April 6th, 2006 at 6:43First time i installed amarok it was about version 0.6, 0.7. I were (again!!) on the search for an alternative for xmms (which was and is a PITA to use). Amarok’s interface was unusual, even a bit scary on the first impression and it was crashing regularly, so i had no time to get familiar with it.
I got back on amarok after the 1.0 release, it was not crashing anymore (at least very rarely) and i used it as my regular music player.
Well it really changed the way i listen to music. With xmms i had loaded the whole bunch of music into the playlist and let it play the tracks randomly. Every other function was either not available or to painful to use (just think about the “open file” dialog, argh! In amarok i don’t need one!).
Amarok made me able to listen to whole albums again, what i wasn’t doing since i changed from the CD-Player to the computer as main music player. Today i’m able to get lyrics of tracks and more information about the artist. It introduces similiar artist! It shows me my CD-covers! It would even manage my mp3-player if i had one
Amarok even changed the way i’m using the computer, i’m drag’n'dropping nearly everything. When i started to do that, i was surprised how often it just works the way i wanted it! (Today i’m annoyed if it works not)
So all in all: i really want to thank you and your fellow developers for what you gave me.
Amarok gave me back my music!
Hallo, I’m an amarok user for a longer time.
I had always problems to choose the right sound engine.
What I would really like is an “autodect” option that would choose
the best available engine (including it setting such as output-model)
out of the installed ones.
Also the configuration dialog for sound engines could contain “Test sound”
button, so that if I manually change the engine, I should not need to leave
the config dialog, then start to play a song and to find out that the amarok
and sound engine crash.
The play,prev,next,stop buttons are very small. I’d prefer to make them
Michal April 6th, 2006 at 7:04bigger and rather diminish the equalizer.
really sorry, i can’t tell you what i think is complex about amarok. since i switched from juk (hehe) tot amarok 1.0 (which indeed took me a few minutes to get adjusted), i didn’t have any complaints. every release, you guys made it both more powerfull and easier to use - a huge accomplishment, imho. so - respect!!!
superstoned April 6th, 2006 at 7:04Hi,
When I used amarok for the first time I also didn’t understand it. I added my music directory with the startup wizard but the songs didn’t appear in the playlist. So I moved to the collection tab and was suprised there was no button to add all songs to the playlist. So I selected all the songs and dragged them to the playlist. But when I added a new song to my music directory it didn’t appear in the playlist, so I had to go to collection again and drag everything again to the playlist and click the button to remove duplicates. This may sound stupid but I have done it that way for a long time (several months).
Then I discorvered that in the playlist tab there is a button “All Collection” which moves the entire collection to the playlist. Which is very useful! Maybe it’s good to make it more clear that that button is there for instance by putting the “All Colleciton” button not in a submenu from the tree but on the toplevel? Or maybe make this the default, or also a selection box to always add all colleciton to the playlist. Because if I add a new nummer I have to press the “All collection” button again.
Maybe I listen to my music in a not-Amarok way
because I like to have my full collection in the playlist and use the “Search” filter very much.
Btw, I don’t know if this is in the new Amarok but what I really mis is a button in the playlist tab to show in the playlist all the songs that are for instance added in the last couple of days. Or on the newest track button the option to show more then 10 new songs.
Thanks for making amarok!
Cheers,
David April 6th, 2006 at 7:27David
>Recently I’ve heard a surprising amount of “how do I put music in it!”. I find >this difficult to understand as it seems pretty obvious to me:
I also find it unintuitive, and always have to click around, until I figure out what I need to do.
IMO, there are too many side bars and the difference among them is not obvious: Files,Playlists,Collection.
I just have a directory with all mp3 files on my disc and some favorite mp3 streams/podcasts. These are the only ones I want to see in my collection. Why do I need 3 sidebars for that instead of one?
What also confuses me are the built-in streams and (smart) playlists. Why are the “mixed” in my collection? For me it is the same, as having some office clipart images and my family photos in one directory.
Michal April 6th, 2006 at 7:32Not sure, it the previous post got in:
Also, the player should tell me if I try to play a mp3 song and I do not
Michal April 6th, 2006 at 7:38have mp3 support installed. Some hint should appear telling me
what to install, instead of failing silently.
Sometimes, when you overengineer things, they become unintuivtive.
I must be a robot because I think in files and directories. When using “smart” music players like amarok, I often have to give up finding the music I want to hear because I’m flooded with suggestions on what to hear.
I do really enjoy amarok at parties, though, when you don’t feel like thinking about what music is playing. And it’s probably also true that “normal people” don’t think in files, so perhaps it’s more intuitive for them. In any case, keep up the good work
mark April 6th, 2006 at 8:15I for one find Amarok fairly confusing and complex because I simply don’t understand the “intended use”. Bear in mind that I have never ever used (or seen running) iTunes, or other “music organizers”, or an iPod for that matter.
Amarok (and other players/organizers, like banshee and rhythmbox) seem to imply a “way” of interacting that is obvious (to you), but obscure to anyone that does not already know it.
From time to time I try to use Amarok, banshee, rhythmbox, and others… and always revert to bmp (which is the same to say xmms).
Could you describe the “standard workflow” of an AmaroK user? Sounds like obvious, but it is not.
As a side note, the interface of AmaroK is pretty crowded on a 1024×768 screen, but this is also a matter of taste (I find the vertical tabs of kde apps ugly and confusing, for example)… but I’m a gnome user, don’t mind me
Renato
Renato April 6th, 2006 at 8:20I don’t find AmaroK scary or too complex. It was a but confusing at first and it took me a little while to get used to the way it works, but that was most likely because I hadn’t used any similar applications before. I’d only used simple players like winamp and foobar (windows apps) and xmms.
The only real problem I have had is stability, but I think that is related to sound system (gstreamer and so forth), however that is not really obvious to me as a user and the result is the same
Joergen Ramskov April 6th, 2006 at 10:27I guess I’m a year late
but here’s my view of why the current GUI of amaroK needs to be improved.
http://yavin4.anshul.info/2006/04/06/amarok-gripes/
Anshul April 6th, 2006 at 11:17I too think that amarok is better then juk or other music players.
However, I was confused by the lack of a context menu to add music to a playlist. I don’t know why but it feels more intutive for a context menu to allow music to be added to the current playlist/default list.
That being said, great job on a great app!
Ben April 6th, 2006 at 15:45Ben
Ah, I think I’ll throw my chip in too. I personally think amaroK is quite fine as is. Maybe the sane defaults idea is a good idea, I don’t know, whatever. The important thing is that the player seems quite successful as is because it appeals to a variety of people. It seems to have the features that people want and need, who could ask for more than that? The GUI is there, and it works. It’s perfectly usable from its typical perspective, as far as I have seen. The other day I showed a friend Linux, and his comments afterwords “the music player was cool.” I found that fascinating, that that was the thing remembered most. I think the GUI is mature, not complex, and keep in mind that it is usually only the people who are displeased for some reason or another that will actually say something to try to change it. If the GUI works and people are happy, then why not go on a bug hunt or work on some killer feature rather than worry about a GUI that doesn’t have anything wrong with it?
Dustin April 8th, 2006 at 5:28Amarok is a very nice program, and I don’t think it is too complex. I really love the features, such as being able to display artist information and the song lyrics.
I do wish there was a XP version, because sometimes I need to run XP in order to use programs that don’t have a Linux equavalent.
Keep up the good work!
B
enigma April 15th, 2006 at 13:02Amorok offers some new concepts of usability and data management, which at first sight, seem to be complex. But after using it for a while, I say it’s worth to learn these new concepts and enjoy a form of music management that just did’nt exist so far. Great work!
shs April 24th, 2006 at 8:03It seems that the Gnome people have invaded this blog to destroy the killer app of KDE (I know amarok run w/o KDE
). PLEASE, do not remove features for the sake of so called simplicity. That Gnome philosophy is for lazy programmers and it is taking them nowhere. It is a pity that successful projects like Gaim are infested with these people (who actually do very very little programming let alone contribute). PLEASE DO NOT LISTEN TO THESE PEOPLE.
TiCL February 18th, 2007 at 15:04I can honestly say, using amaroK has been nothing but a pleasure.
I installed it while I still used GNOME as my (default) desktop, and found it quite nice: Incredibly feature rich, and better than the alternatives. Just incredibly well designed and, well, complete. Hell, it even worked with my 1st gen iPod shuffle with no fiddling - I plugged it in, and everything just worked.
UNIX desktops and applications never, ever, ever work this easily.
Long story short, I got tired of the rest of my desktop being worthless, and went back 100% to KDE. I can’t live without KDE or my beloved amaroK!
Shawn September 4th, 2007 at 6:13