amaroK - App of the Month
See also the interview with the developers of amaroK.
Description by Mark Volkert
amaroK is the music player for KDE and a real star in the circle of KDE applications. You can get the software from amarok.kde.org. There you will find binary packages for most distributions. Through the well thought out concept from amaroK and the easy possibilty to expand it trough scripts or themes, its popularity increases each month. On kde-apps.org there is it's own category for scripts and kde-look.org features a category for themes. amaroK gives you all the functions you could imagine from a music player and a lot more which you couldn't find in other programs. The current release is version 1.2.3.
Introduction
On the first start, amaroK welcomes you with an assistant, which asks you some questions to get all the necessary informatione for look & feel, storage places of your music files and database settings. After this step, amaroK welcomes you and starts to collect your collection.
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The Program
If you launched the player, you'll see a nice structured window with a lot of information inside. Most of all it is customisable: the systembar, the menubar with all control buttons, the wideness from most of the elements and which column should be shown.
The information from the most liked pieces and the album list of the interpret can be shown or hidden. On the left side you will find a little tab bar which lets you change between informations about the actual Song, the administration of the collection, playlists, filebrowser and removable medias. There also exists functions for repeat and shuffle.
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Look & Feel
The developers of amaroK are aware that a multimedia application has to look attractive. You will find a nice 10-band equaliser and visualisations. The program offers you nice fade in effects. After every change of a song, you can hear a little fade in. There is also a player window mode similar to programs like XMMS or Winamp.
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Cover Management
To fit in with every song, amaroK can show the right album cover. The cover administration shows an overview of all albums found and a picture of the cover.
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If you lack of a cover image you can search for it on amazon (or another provider) with a right click by your mouse.
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Playlists with ratings
amaroK remembers how many times a song was played and gives points for each time. With this amaroK can generate a chart of your most wanted songs. You can use it for your whole collection or for songs within albums. The rankings are saved like in a database. Normally, this is an SQLite-database, but using a MySQL server is also possible. amaroK has no problems with big music collections (self tested with 20,000 songs). amaroK reads the information to every song out of the ID3-tags from the file and also remembers when the song was last played.
All settings can be changed in the well structured Setting Dialogue.
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Support of Audioscrobbler
The audioscrobbler internet service generates a musicprofile for all registerated members. This is based upon the automatically transferred song statistics. The goal is that this means the members give recommendations to other people with similar music likings. Since version 1.2 amaroK is the first player which doesn't need a plugin to use audioscrobbler. The native support of audioscrobbler can be activated in the configuration dialogue. Users of amaroK can receive music recommendations and, based upon this, they can build a dynamic playlist.
Scripts
Using scripts you can extend amaroK with a lot of cool and helpful things. The are scripts to automatically shut down the pc at the end of the playlist, stream the sound in your local network (or start as a global web DJ), copy the playlist to an MP3-Player, remote control or convert the audioformat from played songs. Take a look at kde-apps.org and you will be amazed what some users create. Most of the scripts are written in Python meaning you don't need to compile them, they can be installed easily with amaroK. Here a script is running which shows the actual album cover on the desktop.
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More highlights
- amaroK directly supports the musicbrainz-database, to collect missing tags.
- amaroK can be controlled or expanded however you like with the help of scripts using DCOP.
- amaroK supports the libvisual XMMS audio visualisations library plugins. E.g. projectM
- automatic search for song lyrics of currently played song
Conclusion
amaroK inspires everybody from the first moment of trying it. You won't miss anything from your current music player, but you will find out new possibilities time and time again. The future of amaroK looks impressive too. The hard-working developer team welcomes all ideas and offers of help and in spite of fast release cycles amaroK is very stable.
Links
See also the interview with the developers of amaroK.
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