[rorymarinich]

While I really dislike a lot of things about Amarok, particularly its UI design, I love it in that it's a media player that seems to constantly strive to add new, innovative features that let its users do new things with the music that they love.

I'm wondering why its code name is "Slipstream", though. Is that a name that refers specifically to a new feature? Or are all Amarok releases so colorfully titled?

(As an aside: If you haven't listened to the Mike Oldfield composition Amarok that the program gets its name from, remedy that immediately. It's an absolutely stupendous hour of music, perhaps my favorite album ever. Excerpts on Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fs3NgTIXqfc)

[wladimir]

I dont agree its GUI design is bad, it's clunky but basically the same as all music players these days, an iTunes ripoff :)

Sometimes I long back to the time when music players had a simple streamlined minimal interface like xmms, and the old winamp...

[rorymarinich]

I wish it was an iTunes ripoff. iTunes has got a lot of bulk but I find its interface vastly more intuitive.

Look at the screenshot included in this post:

http://amarok.kde.org/files/amarok2.4.0.png

It uses a three-panel layout, for information that is not essentially equal. The left panel determines source, the right panel browses through music, and the center panel shows related artists. There's a lot of unused space in the title (now playing) bar and in the lower left corner.

So if I'm picking music to play, I have to first choose an option on the left. Then I skip OVER the center panel and look at the newly-updated right panel, which doesn't seem to be showing me very much music at once. The middle panel only matters if I'm actively looking at similar artists.

iTunes, on the other hand, has a clearly delineated (smaller, different-looking) left panel that lets you decide what sources you're using to play your music (playlists, the online store, podcasts, etc). The bulk of its interface is dedicated to letting you browse as much music as possible. It has an artist recommendation that shows up as a similarly delineated bar on the right, and which is disabled by default.

Also, look at how many untitled icons there are on the Amarok interface. And how many repetitive images there are. That one band's album image repeats five times — is it adding extra relevant information? And in the center pane there seem to be two separate Settings icons. Do they do the same thing, or do they serve different purposes?

iTunes has bloat, but on a WAY different magnitude. Here's a screenshot of what mine looks like right now:

http://cl.ly/191a0U1o411X0O433Q0g

There are only three groupings of unnamed icons. The one at the top right pretty clearly depicts the viewing style; the one at bottom left is all the playing controls (though the Add Playlist and Hide Artwork buttons are a bit ambiguous); the ones on the bottom right (AirPlay, Genius, and Show Sidebar) are the only ones that I think are a little confusing to new users. Everything else is very clearly labeled and pretty much explains itself.

I'm not a big fan of iTunes but it's operating on a different level of UI design than Amarok, currently. That's not to say it's prettier (although I think Amarok is a little clunky), but it's a program that a team of expert interface designers have thoroughly tweaked. I wish KDE had more interface designers working for them; it's one of those fields that sounds like a lot of unnecessary bullshit but goes a long way towards making experiences more enjoyable.

[fjh]

I suspect that your perception of iTunes being more intuitive comes simply from being more used to it. I used to use Amarok a lot and when I had to use iTunes it didn't really make any sense to me. For example, I once ended up deleting some songs from a friend's collection when I tried to remove them from the current playlist. Now, maybe I'm just not smart enough to use a computer correctly, but may friends definitely had less trouble using amarok on my computer than I had with itunes on theirs.

[rorymarinich]

No, no, you're right. iTunes does have some usability issues still. The "removing a song from playlist" is actually the first one I'd think of also; the fact that you hit the same button to delete a song and to remove it is problematic. By default iTunes pops up a warning either way asking you if you're sure you want to delete/remove, so that that way you know what you're doing, but if you tell it to stop popping up warnings there's a risk of messing things up.

The thing is that anything can become intuitive. Use Amarok long enough and I'm sure it becomes effortless. The term interface design uses to describe this is "mental model"; good designs let users form a model of how something works before they even touch it. (So on iTunes, the metaphor of seeing album covers immediately makes me think that to play an album I click on its cover, which is exactly right.) It's very difficult to create a program that forms a good mental model of every single function at once, especially if you're making a complex program like iTunes. But I'd argue that it's still vastly easier to intuit from the interface than it would be for Amarok, where, looking at that screenshot, I can't tell how I would look at other artists' music or how to form a playlist or a number of other relatively trivial tasks.

[fjh]

> The thing is that anything can become intuitive. Use Amarok long enough and I'm sure it becomes effortless.

Agreed, but the same applies to itunes. Which is why I think that it is quite hard to accurately judge whether or not one's own music player is intuitive or not.

> But I'd argue that it's still vastly easier to intuit from the interface than it would be for Amarok

And that's where I disagree and why I mentioned that my friends seemed to have less trouble with amarok than I had with itunes. (btw. why are people downvoting my opinion? ok, anecdotal evidence and all that, but really?)

[rorymarinich]

I disagree with your disagreement, but I figure at this point it's nitpicking on both our sides. We both stated our cases pretty thoroughly, I think.

> (btw. why are people downvoting my opinion? ok, anecdotal evidence and all that, but really?)

It's because we all like kneejerk downvoting opinions that disagree with ours! Kneejerk is fun! Sometimes we also curse each other out too. It's an awful joy.

(I wish Hacker News would stop with the downvotes. We derive enough data, I think, from masses of upvotes to sort threads by popularity. The only people who deserve downvotes are spammers, and we have the "flag" option for that.)

[ugh]

It is impossible to move songs in a playlist to the trash. That can’t be what happened. (“Deleting” songs in a playlist always merely removes them from the playlist.)

The only place where you can directly move songs to the trash is the music library. You must have been browsing the music library and confused it with a playlist.

[blasdel]

Holding down option while pressing delete in a playlist prompts you with the "Move to Trash" / "Keep in Library" deletion dialog.

[ugh]

I don’t really understand what a simple player would be good for. All those simple players were kind of ok when you had a few dozen mp3 files on your PC but they just don’t work comfortably for a few thousand files. Using the file system to browse music is no fun at all, you are just throwing away so much metadata you could leverage.

It’s trivial to let iTunes display all albums I bought in 2010. I know of no easy way to do that with a file manager.

[wladimir]

A simple lightweight player is good because my use case for a music player generally is to listen music, and not to do extensive database queries on the metadata. In that case, a simple minimal interface gets in the way less. I usually had the window in the corner of my screen so I could see what song is playing and skip/rewind tracks.

I have no problems with advanced features, but I simply don't like the big clunky windows that pop up by default.

[sjs]

I use my music player to play music. I don't sort through my filesystem painstakingly building a list, I just say "play songs in these genres" or "play songs in these genres that I've rated at least 3 stars". Technically these are DB queries but it's not like I'm typing SQL.

When I want a small player window I have that too. To each his own, but your arguments against music libraries are pretty bizarre and make no sense to me.

[ugh]

I don’t do extensive database queries. I browse my music.

[sid0]

foobar still exists.

[emilsedgh]

"Slipstream" is a Mike Oldfield song, as im being told by Amarok devs.

[rorymarinich]

You're right! I am ashamed; I have no right to call myself a Mike Oldfield fan now.