I think I would have been justified in a bit of angry flaming if there wasn’t any import-from-1.4 functionality. Since there is, though, the tone of my post isn’t at all justified. I apologise.

I’m still not completely sold on the UI changes, but that’s an entirely different issue (and one that I’ll air over at your place, if I come up with anything constructive).

As for the roadmap for future versions, there is not really one place to go for that, but the changelog (http://amarok.kde.org/en/releases/2.1/beta/1) for 2.1.0 Beta 1 gives a nice overview, and you can find a lot of discussion about what features are being planned/worked on in our blogs (http://amarok.kde.org/en/PlanetAmarok)

Robin: you did. It was the PPA version that didn’t deal properly with my usb drive, but KDE4 has been so flakey that I’m not even sure that that’s Amarok’s fault. Note my new conciliatory tone, because…

Nikolaj: now I feel like a right jerk. There is an import function. It didn’t even occur to me there might be… what a jerk. Thanks for your response, I’ve edited some bits into the post. I still don’t see how to alter the collection sort order, but that’s a seriously minor point besides having all my long-hoarded data back. In my chastened state I’m now off to check out the roadmap for 2.x.x development, which of course I should have done first.

As for having this upgrade happen when installing Jaunty, the Amarok team would have preferred that Jaunty had kept Amarok 1.4.10 as the default and offered Amarok 2.0.2 as an optional update as we realize that it does not have feature parity with the 1.4.x version (yet). However this is not our call to make but that of the Ubuntu packagers. What is even more frustrating for us is that we almost have Amarok 2.1.0 ready for release, which is all around a much better Amarok than 2.0.2, fixing many bugs and bringing back many features, but we were unable to get it ready in time for inclusion in Jaunty. There is a beta available now with an experimental PPA for installing it on Jaunty.

All in all we are very aware of the shortcomings of the 2.0.2 version of Amarok, and are working hard on fixing them. 2.1.0 is going to be a major step forward, bringing back a lot of the missing features as well as adding some unique new ones that are possible because of the new framework. There are still a few things missing, such as better device support, but we are already working on these, and have a Goggle Summer of Code project for fixing this.

I’ll try to answer a few of your specific points:

User controlled sort order in the collection should still be there even if the interface for it changed a bit.

5) We have one default implementation built in, but it is actually possible to write your own using scripts, there is already an alternative version available on kde-apps.org ( you can install it using the script manager within Amarok . In general the scripting interface in AMarok 2 is very powerful compared to the previous version and allows for some amazing stuff.

6) Yes!! We want those back to. Unfortunately it has proven a bit harder to do with the new codebase than we had expected.

7) We really do try to listen to our users and respond to blogs like yours that while critical are definitely not trolling or just throwing flames and we agree on many of the issues and are working to fix them.

The lack of information displayed in the playlist makes organising and checking on tag information nearly impossible.

I also can’t ‘stage’ things using the Files option and clean up tags etc. before moving them to my collection. It appears you can’t do anything with ‘Files’ except add them to the collection – despite being able to drag and drop them anywhere – nothing happens.

I’ve already given up using it as I can’t do all the things I relied upon in the old version to manage my music. I could learn to put up with it if the features where still there in a different spot, but most are gone!

I too hope they’ll get all these features back in.