JuK - App of the Month
See also the interview with the developer of JuK, Scott Wheeler.
Description of JuK by Andreas C. Diekmann.
Translation by Fabrice Mous.
Original article can be found at www.kde.de
JuK is an audio jukebox for KDE. JuK supports renaming and playing collections of MP3, Ogg Vorbis and FLAC files. The author of JuK is Scott Wheeler. (Check the interview).
When you start JuK for the first time you won't see much more than an empty dialog, which is split in two parts. On the left side it shows the collections list and later on it shows playlists. In the larger right part it will also show some meta information of several music files.
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To listen and manage your music files with JuK you need to tell it where your music is located. In the menu File you can find 2 options:
- Open...: to add individual files to your collection
- Open Directory...: to add directories including subdirectories to your collection. JuK will search for new files every time when started. Depending on the quantity of files in the directories this can take a while before JuK has them all collected.
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Once you have fed the necessary music into JuK you simply double click on the desired track name. You can also control playing by the use of icons in the top taskbar. With the slider next to the speaker symbol you can adjust the volume. The longer slider in the top middle will show the position of the current track.
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By closing the Juk dialog the program will not terminate, it will remain active in the system tray. By right clicking on the system tray icon you will see buttons for playing. You can toggle the option Popup Track Announcement so that every time a new track starts you will see for several seconds a small dialog with information about that track
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The above way of feeding music into JuK results in one big list. To display your music collection in a more organized way you can simply create some play lists, for example for separate albums. When the files of which you want to make a playlist are all in the same directory you can rightclick the dialog on your left side. Then choose the option New->Playlist From Directory....
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In Juk you can call the Tag Editor through [View->Show Tag Editor] With it you can edit information of the current track like album name, artist or genre. By selecting multiple tracks at the same time you can also edit them at the same time. You can save your work with the shortcut Ctrl+T or via the menu (Tagger->Save).
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Maybe you didn't enter any tag information for several files. JuK can try to "guess" this information, on the basis of the file name (which will need to adhere to a certain standard) or it can retrieve the information online through a database. When you choose for the first possibility then JuK will need to know how the file names are formed: you can configure this via Settings->Tag Guesser.... The wild cards are:
%a -> artist %A -> album %t -> track %T -> track number %c -> comment
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To search through your collection for certain information you just enter the desired search terms in the search field. It doesn't really matter what kind of information you want to fill in for your search, you can make any combination of title and artist name. Searching begins instantly when text is entered into the search field and right side will change accordingly: only if the titles are matching the entered terms.
Also very convenient is the tree viewmode on your left: click with right mouse button on a playlist and choose View Modes->Tree. This way your tracks will be sorted by album, genre or artist.
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When you are looking for certain information from specific information field then you can press the icon with the magic staff (or press the key S) to do an extensive search. You can limit your search to certain playlists, determine in which fields you want to search for certain terms or determine if your search will have to be case sensitive.
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Read also the interview with the developer of JuK, Scott Wheeler.
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