mgroves

'Rok on

Development of Amarok 2.0 is well underway now. At long last, all you poor bastards using winamp or iTunes will find out what it's like to use a -good- media player.

Winamp was good back in the day, when mp3 collections were small and single playlists were king, but it's long since fallen apart with its clunky collection manager and miscellaneous oddities. iTunes is,... well it's iTunes, and it's bad enough to make mac users want winamp clones.

Enter Amarok, something Linux/KDE users like myself have enjoyed for a few years now.

It's got the only media manager I actually like. You tell it where to find your music, whether it be on a hard drive or a removable device, whatever. It lets you browse and search however you like by tags, or just browse the filesystem. No music gets added to your library if you don't tell it to, which is something winamp and itunes used to do that bugged the hell out of me. Then it has its context window displaying information about the song, lyrics, wikipedia pages on the band / album / title. It's fully extensible with scripts, useful for transcoding songs and albums. It works well with most any portable mp3 device imaginable (and can use the aforementioned transcoding scripts to convert as it transfers). And it ties in with last.fm to suggest songs for you to listen to, and even use that information to build playlists for you with its nifty 'dynamic playlist' feature, which constantly appends relevant tracks as you listen.

It's a wonderful music app, and with 2.0 on the way, it'll soon be available on windows and OSX as well. Huzzah!

Published on Saturday, April 28, 2007 at 12:11am and tagged and . Share your thoughts by commenting on this article.

7 Responses to 'Rok on Article comments Feed

1

Jonny

There's nothing more appropriate to name a music player after than a 1990 Mike Oldfield album.

Posted at April 28, 2007 on 1:02am

2

xDaveManx of http://http//www.wobbleshaft.com

I had a round with Amarok on Suse Linux 9 once. I never got it to work. I'm sure that had nothing to do with Amarok and everything to do with my inexperience with Linux.

I was intrigued with Linux, but the basic things were so counterintuitive for a Windows zombie that I just gave up on it. I finally got it to play (some) MP3s , CDs, and embedded videos from the internet, but not reliably. The death knell was not being able to find an equivalent for Quicken.

Plus, I was dual booting, so the temptation to just say F-it and switch over to windows was too great. I think the next time I build a machine, I will dedicate this one to Linux.

Posted at April 29, 2007 on 11:44am

3

correlr

Next time you take the dive, you may want to look into projects like KMyMoney, or perhaps GNUCash. Also, as you may have already noticed (I think SuSE dropped it after 7.3), some distributions don't carry mp3 / dvd / win32 codec support by default. Most do have alternative packages repositories you can get them from. I use openSuSE myself - setting up the packman and guru rpm repos are a must. You'll be looking to replace mplayer, the xine libraries (used by many multimedia apps including amarok), the k3b package (the alternate repos include libmad with it, so you can actually burn mp3s, joy), and of course libdvdcss & friends. While you're at it, you may also want to dump amarok in favor of the guru build, if you want to use mysql as a collection database backend (I need it for the size of my music bin for the speed and stability, a rescan takes close to an hour now). VLC is also a handy dandy thing to have. It is a bit of a pain, and your mileage may vary. After having typed all that, I'm starting to wonder about jumping distros again. It's been a good long while since I last had slackware on here...

Posted at April 29, 2007 on 1:23pm

4

xDaveManx of http://www.wobbleshaft.com

I actually found out about GNUCash when I had the distro on there, but I went with the KDE desktop instead of the Gnome one, and it could only be used on Gnome. Switching desktop environments was beyond my abilities at the time (and still is, sadly).

I had a nice, simple little spreadsheet up and running to keep track of my checkbook, but it just wasn't the same as Quicken's bells and whistles.

I did rather enjoy tinkering with Linux, and all this talk is making me have thoughts of dual-booting my newer machine again... nah. Never could get Linux to recognize my 2 external USB 2.0 hard drives, either, and that is where I do most of my image work from. Maybe next time?

Posted at April 29, 2007 on 4:37pm

5

mgroves of http://www.mgroves.com

I haven't had it running for a while, but I highly, highly recommend Ubuntu as a Linux distro. It was the least pain involved in installation and setup that I've ever had, and the ubuntu community is *great*--friendly, knowledgeable, and *not* indignant or elitist.

I was able to get it to recognize all the hardware, though dual monitors was a little tricky. I could play all the same media files, use the same browser (Opera--love it), and you also get the Debian apt-get, which is lovely.

Posted at April 29, 2007 on 8:07pm

6

correlr

It's no problem to run gnucash in kde so long as you install the basic gnome libraries. The opposite applies as well. Your package manager will handle any dependencies when you try to install either app.

Posted at April 30, 2007 on 2:06am

7

correlr

Btw, I have both my 200GB hard drives in usb enclosures now, and they both work fine. Unless it's a weird drive, it should just work with the basic usb mass storage driver...

Posted at April 30, 2007 on 2:07am

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