Amarok weathers its own storm of reactions

... Which was a big fiasco in itself, because MySQL Embedded simply wasn't
ready, and obviously not intended at that stage anyway, for the use to
which they were putting it. The thing was simply broken on AMD64, and
because Amarok devs decided to use it anyway, it all sorts of distribution
folks scrambling trying to fix the broken package.

That was actually the final straw, here. I had used the kde3 version, but
both kde4 and amarok took a whole series of bad turns with kde4, and while
I think it'll work out OK in the end, it sure caused a lot of needless
user pain in the process. Meanwhile, I decided if the Amarok devs are
that unconcerned about their AMD64 users, I don't need to be using their
package.

Of course, that was /after/ they'd already dropped the bits of amarok I
actually used it for on KDE3 (the winamp skin compatible minicli and the
visualizations), while only expanding the number of features, such as
lyrics and wikipedia lookups that normally turn up blank for the music I
use, that were useless bloat, from my perspective, requiring all sorts of
dependencies and taking screen real estate for nothing I found useful.

So they (1) dropped the features I liked, (2) added junk I found useless,
requiring a bunch of extra dependencies, including (3) one that was being
used for something it wasn't intended for and was flat broken for many
users.

So I switched. In my case, mpd along with separate clients for CLI,
curses, qt3/kde3, and qt4/kde4, met my needs FAR better, yet even with
non-X playback and control (amarok requires KDE, which requires X) and a
whole host of clients to play with, dependencies were FAR fewer and
smaller. Yes, I lost some functionality, namely the visualization and
minicli, that I used amarok 1.4, the KDE3 version. But those were broken
in amarok 2.x, the KDE4 version, anyway, and it had far heavier
dependencies, even when they /weren't/ broken!

No /wonder/ I switched!