Ubuntu 9.04 was just released, so I upgraded over the weekend and it went fairly smoothly except for two old friends: the sound drivers had to be rebuilt from the ones from Realtek’s site like I had to do before, and Amarok.
Oh, Amarok… This Ubuntu release includes the 2.0 version for the first time, but as far as I can tell, it’s actually a huge step back. There’s an all-new, pretter interface, but a lot of functionality seems to be missing, or is so well-hidden that I couldn’t figure out how to use it. In particular, all of my carefully-crafted smart playlists were gone, with no apparent way to recreate them. It also didn’t help that it kept crashing on me, especially while trying to import my old collection.
I was disappointed enough in it that I tried out some other programs as well, like RhythmBox, but they didn’t even recognize my iPod, since support apparently hasn’t been added for 4th gen Nanos in the library it uses yet.
In the end I removed Amarok 2 entirely and actually went back and completely rebuilt Amarok 1.4.10 from source. It’s literally been years now since I compiled a major program like this manually (just minor utilities), and it took a while just to figure out what it required and get the packages needed to satisfy all of the dependencies, but I finally seem to have Amarok working again.
Now you see why I said I hated Amarok. :-)
I prefer Rhythmbox. Simple, and it doesn’t seem to be flawed.