Amarok
Amarok is a music player for UNIX written using the KDE libraries. Through the use of various audio back-ends, Amarok supports the playback of a wide variety of formats. While they’re a part of the KDE project, Amarok has an independent release cycle which makes for more frequent updates.
The Amarok developers have some fairly radical ideas about functionality and usability, making Amarok unlike any other Linux media player. It’s generated a lot of media buzz, and is becoming very popular among users of desktops other than KDE.
Getting Started:
The first time you run Amarok, you’ll be greeted with the first run wizard. If you’d prefer not to use a wizard, you can click ‘Skip’ and then configure Amarok later using its configuration dialogue. The first set of options in the wizard allow you to configure the Amarok player interface.
Amarok provides two separate interface configurations. One combines the player & playlist windows rather like rhythmbox or iTunes. The other configuration separates the interface into a small player window with a separate playlist that can be hidden - rather like xmms or Winamp. If you change your mind about which configuration you’d prefer, you can toggle between them by showing the playlist if it is hidden, and selecting ‘Show/Hide Player Window’ from the Settings menu.
The next set of options in the wizard allow you to select folders to be scanned to add media to your library. The selection is recursive - ticking a folder causes all of its subfolders and all of their subfolders et al to be scanned for media. You probably want this, but if you’re really sure you don’t you can untick the box ’scan folders recursively’ below the folder list to disable this feature.
By default Amarok also watches folders for media files being added or removed and updates the library accordingly. If the software you use to rip CDs creates a playlist file, Amarok can automatically import these as well. Scanning and building your music library can take a few minutes if it’s quite large. Once Amarok has finished, you’ll be presented with the player window in the configuration you chose.
Users of other desktops in particular will appreciate the fact that Amarok can be configured to use multiple audio back-ends. While some KDE users may wish to use aRts, being able to output to xine or gstreamer makes a lot more sense for users of other desktops. This can be configured in Settings -> Configure Amarok -> Engine.
The Interface:
The playlist window is the focus of Amarok’s feature set. on the left are the sidebar browsers, and on the right is the playlist. Populating the playlist is as simple as dragging and dropping tracks or folders of tracks from a file manager window, or from your collection in the sidebar.
The context browser displays a wide array of information about the current playing track. The Music tab displays metadata about the current track, and if you have last.fm support enabled, suggested tracks from similar artists. The Lyrics tab automatically downloads lyrics for the currently playing track. The Artist tab fetches information about the artist from Wikipedia. Both the lyrics download and wikipedia lookup works for radio streams as well as files played locally.
Managing your Collection.
After you’ve run the first run wizard, any time you want to prompt Amarok to scan your collection and add new media files you can select ‘Rescan Collection’ from the tools menu. You can also add or remove directories to be scanned in Settings -> Configure Amarok, in the ‘Collection’ section.
The cover manager (Tools -> Cover Manager) is a great way to quickly populate your album collection with cover art. Set your Amazon locale to allow for differences between albums released in different countries, and then click “Fetch Missing Covers”. It doesn’t always get them right - more obscure recordings, and especially those not released in the US may not have a cover image available on Amazon, or may be assigned an incorrect image. If you have somewhere your own image file you’d like to use as cover art, right click on the album in the cover manager and select “Set Custom Image”. Navigate to where you’ve stored the image file, and click open to have it loaded as the cover image for that album.
Amarok provides a fairly featureful tag editor for editing the metadata in audio files. To edit tags for once or more files, right click on selected tracks in the playlist window or the collection browser and select “Edit information for tracks”. You can edit an entire album or artist at once by doing the above on the album or artist name in the collection browser. When multiple tracks are selected, only the information they hold in common can be edited. If you select a group of tracks from the same album, you would for example be able to edit the Artist, Album, Genre, Year and Comment fields for all of these tracks at once.
MusicBrainz (http://musicbrainz.org) is a large community driven database of music data. Amarok uses musicbrainz integration to automatically fill in metadata for music files. When editing tags for a single track, as well as being able to edit the other fields manually, you can click “Fill-in Tags Using MusicBrainz” to have the metadata automatically filled in. Amarok will display a list of the matching tracks - select the most appropriate one to have the tags filled out. If at any point you wish to discard your changes, click cancel to leave the file unchanged.
Last.fm
Last.fm is a service that tracks what music you listen to and uses this information to match you to people with simimlar musical tastes. It uses this information to suggest similar artists you might enjoy, and creates a personalised radio station with these suggestions. To create an account, visit last.fm.
Your music profile is populated automatically from information uploaded by a compatible media player. Amarok ships with last.fm support, but it’s disabled by default. To enable it in the configuration dialogue (Settings -> Configure Amarok) navigate to the last.fm section. To enable full last.fm integration, enter your last.fm username and password and tick “Improve my profile by submitting the tracks I play”. If you would rather not submit this information, you can opt to leave that box unchecked and merely allow Amarok to “Retrieve similar artists”.
With last.fm support enabled, Amarok will now display a listing of similar artists in the context browser, and will suggest tracks in your collection that suit the current playlist. This is my favourite Amarok feature - with somewhere around 60GB of media files, often Amarok suggests artists I didn’t even know I had. Clicking on a suggest track will append it to the end of the playlist.
Another feature of last.fm Amarok supports is customised radio streams. Last.fm creates you an individualised ‘neighbour radio’ stream based on the artists in your profile. To listen to a last.fm stream within Amarok, select the stream you want to listen to from the “Engage -> Play last.fm Stream” menu. As well as your personalised neighbour radio, you can select a genre from ‘Global Tag Radio’. These seem sometimes to have slightly fuzzy matching - unless I am the only person who is startled to hear ‘Mandy Moore - Candy’ in the Indie Rock stream.
Look & Feel
Amarok allows a little bit of tweaking of it’s appearance to customise your experience. Most of the relevant settings are in the Appearance section of the configuration dialogue. Here you can change the fonts Amarok uses as well as the colour scheme. Amarok in recent versions ships with a custom icon theme - if you use KDE and would prefer Amarok to blend in a little more, you can turn off the custom icons here to set Amarok to use your KDE icon theme.
The context browser’s look is controlled by customisable CSS stylesheets. A couple of fairly plain ones ship with Amarok, and more can be downloaded from within the Appearance dialogue. To see what styles are available, click ‘Download Styles’. The Get Hot New Stuff Browser will automatically download and install the themes you select. If the rather violent pink context browser in these screenshots isn’t your cup of tea don’t worry - it’s not the default, and there are plenty of other styles to choose from.
Another attractive visual tweak is to customise the On-Screen-Display. Under OSD in the configuration dialogue, enabling it causes a nifty little popup label to appear on screen with information about the currently playing track as the track starts playing. With control over the font, font sizes, colour, placement and length of time displayed on screen it can be made to be as flamboyant or as unobtrusive as you like.
Playlists
As well as allowing you to manually create and save playlists, Amarok has support for radio streams, podcasts, and dynamic and smart playlists.
Smart playlists allow you to quickly populate a playlist with tracks that match certain criteria. Most of the smart playlists choose the top 15 tracks in a category, be it the newest, most played, least played, or various others. One loads the entire collection, another loads 50 tracks at random. The playlist names are pretty self explanatory - try them and see!
Dynamic playlists are a little different in that they automatically update. Great for a party, or a long day sitting behind a desk.
There are many other features of Amarok that haven’t been covered here. It would take three articles of this length to truly cover them all in detail. For more information, visit http://amarok.kde.org, check out the Amarok handbook or visit #amarok on irc.freenode.net.