Amarok mediaplayer, why is it being removed from LInux os?

[conclave]

I've used Fedora, Ubuntu, Debian, AV, and Mint. I have noticed in the latest versions of Linux that Amarok is disappearing from available package downloads and use. I realize that technology is pushing so many forms of playing music to cloud service applications. As an older person I spent a lot of time streaming music from LPs, cassette tapes, and CDs to MP3 and Wav files and then set up folder directories as a music library along with time consuming tagging. Amarok had one of the best and accurate ways of sorting music from your folder into a library to choose your playlist from. Clementine is still around and fairly good yet never sorts recording artists on compilation various artist CDs, cassettes, or LPs properly leaving them under various artists the category used when streaming and sorting into appropriate folders. Clementine also has a lot of flaws that are annoying especially when attempting to correct or upgrade, for some peculiar reason it stays with the first thing it picks up in a small amount of recordings and never recognizes changes to library after adjusting or updating a folder directory of music.

My request is PLEASE bring back Amarok to Linux. It is still available and works fine with Windows 10 yet no more with latest versions of Mint, Debian, AV, or Fedora. If Linux is to continue representing freedom for the user of an operating system why start changing to a bunch of package applications that leave the user with only one option, cloud based media players? I realize that many people consider my way of doing things obsolete yet freedom means more choice instead of being forced into one way of doing things like the definition of the word control. Leave both choices open for users of Linux: online cloud based media players, or offline use media players. I do not have any expertise in programming to get involved in any writing of these programs, I am simply a user yet would gladly volunteer as a beta tester to help in any upgrading project to bring Amarok back in a 64 bit format.

[Head_on_a_Stick]

I think Amarok was removed because it used the Qt4 toolkit but Debian was transitioning to Qt5: https://wiki.debian.org/Qt4Removal

My request is PLEASE bring back Amarok to Linux.

No point requesting anything here, we're all just lowly users like you. The clue is in the name of the boards.

FWIW Amarok is still available from the AUR: https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/amarok/

EDIT: the PKGBUILD looks fine to me (apart from the curly bracket fetish).

[conclave]

Thanks for your time and response here. Quickly looked this over yet totally over my head.
I know how to use G-Debbie Package Installer, apt repositories, and Synaptic yet this is confusing.
Oh well, still works good with Windows 10, hopefully in the future the program will be upgraded and useable again through debian and mint packages.
I'll take a closer detailed look maybe I can figure it out, yet Fedora rpms are different. AV and Mint are very closely related to Debian and both are similar for package installation.

I'm probably wasting a lot of time yet I like to set up different Linux operating systems and see how they work and are different.
In fact, since getting into all this and not working exclusively with Windows I seem to be drifting away from my earlier years of using computers for graphic arts production and digital paintings. More of my time is consumed discovering the benefits and/or disadvantages of using all these different Linux operating systems and the programs available. Setting up media players to work with large collections of music is one area of discovery. Seems the same player will work differently in different operating systems. Amarok was extremely difficult to use in Fedora, always freezing when attempting to use features, yet Debian did work very well until they removed the package as you educated me about changing from QT4, did not realize this was the reason, thanks.

[sunrat]

KDE's new audio player is Elisa. It's different from Amarok but since Amarok is basically dead, worth a look. Elisa is still heavily under development but has improved exponentially since I first tried it.
I tend to use DeadBeef mostly for playing music and just Dolphin file manager for managing my collection.

[MicroScreen]

KDE's new audio player is Elisa. It's different from Amarok but since Amarok is basically dead, worth a look. Elisa is still heavily under development but has improved exponentially since I first tried it. I tend to use DeadBeef mostly for playing music and just Dolphin file manager for managing my collection.

But that doesn't quite correspond to the facts how we clearly can see here. Amarok will finally be further developed again after almost 3 years of break and the old Qt4 scripts will now be rewritten to Qt5. Version 2.9.71 Alpha is out now, since you should already keep an eye on the application with confidence.

[sunrat]

KDE's new audio player is Elisa. It's different from Amarok but since Amarok is basically dead, worth a look. Elisa is still heavily under development but has improved exponentially since I first tried it. I tend to use DeadBeef mostly for playing music and just Dolphin file manager for managing my collection.

But that doesn't quite correspond to the facts how we clearly can see here. Amarok will finally be further developed again after almost 3 years of break and the old Qt4 scripts will now be rewritten to Qt5. Version 2.9.71 Alpha is out now, since you should already keep an eye on the application with confidence.

That's good news indeed, I always liked Amarok. Will try it in about a year when hopefully it's out of alpha.

[MicroScreen]

That's good news indeed, I always liked Amarok. Will try it in about a year when hopefully it's out of alpha.

Don't be so pessimistic, it could be faster. They want to bring Amarok back, so that it's present again at least in the most important distros. Let's hope that most of the members of the old team will have time to do this again and work together.

[sunrat]

I just downloaded the source tarball and tried to build it. Gave up after half an hour finding and installing dependencies flagged by cmake errors. Will wait for a binary on this one.

[dilberts_left_nut]

... or just use gmusicbrowser

[sunrat]

... or just use gmusicbrowser

I actually use DeadBeef mainly.
Trying to compile Amarok was a challenge similar to a game. This time the game won.

[MicroScreen]

Trying to compile Amarok was a challenge similar to a game. This time the game won.

But of course you knew that before. Just wait for the beta version.

[sunrat]

Trying to compile Amarok was a challenge similar to a game. This time the game won.

But of course you knew that before. Just wait for the beta version.

Nope didn't know that. I win the game usually when compiling stuff. Qtractor was a challenge but I won. Compiled a kernel once but decided other people compiled kernels with similar configs so didn't do it again. Amarok was starting to look like it was going to need virtually every kf5*-dev and every qt5*-dev package so was too much.

[Head_on_a_Stick]

Trying to compile Amarok was a challenge similar to a game. This time the game won.

If you check the Debian stretch package page there is a link in the .dsc file to the Debian salsa repositories that have the current version.

I managed to create the .deb packages in my bullseye system like this:

Code: Select all

mkdir ~/builds && cd $_
wget https://download.kde.org/unstable/amarok/2.9.71/amarok-2.9.71.tar.xz
mv amarok-2.9.71.tar.xz amarok_2.9.71.orig.tar.xz
git clone https://salsa.debian.org/qt-kde-team/extras/amarok && cd ${_##*/}
sudo mk-build-deps --install --remove # needs the devscripts package
rm amarok-build-deps_2.9.71-0r1_amd64.*
debuild -us -uc
sudo apt install ../amarok{,-utils}_2.9.71-0r1_amd64.deb ../amarok-common_2.9.71-0r1_all.deb
sudo apt purge --autoremove amarok-build-deps