Amarok

Amarok (formerly known as amaroK) is a free and open source software music player for Linux and other varieties of Unix. It makes use of core components from the KDE desktop environment, but is released independently of the central KDE release cycle, and is developed with a desktop-agnostic policy.

Despite the fact that Amarok uses wolf-based artwork, and that the name "amarok" or "amaroq" literally refers to the Inuktitut word for "wolf", it was originally named after the album Amarok by Mike Oldfield. The 1.2 release originally had a wolf icon, but this was later withdrawn due to similarity with the logo of WaRP Graphics Inc. Amarok's wolf logo has now been modified sufficiently so as not to infringe on WaRP's trademark logo, and re-instated.

Originally it was named amaroK, with an upper-case "K" related to KDE application naming conventions. It was, however, renamed to Amarok in June 2006 after intensive discussions on usability at a KDE-based conference, K3M, in May the same year.

History

The project was originally started by Mark Kretschmann as a means of bettering XMMS due to several usability problems, which interfered with the addition of new files to the playlist due to several user inferface elements existing for one task. The original amaroK was created based upon the idea of a two-pane interface seen in midnight commander, and the first version of the software released solely by Kretschmann, was based upon the ideal of allowing users to drag-and-drop music into an interface in which the playlist was displayed on the right and information on the left.

After the initial release of amaroK, several developers joined the project to form the "Three M's" the first of whom was Max Howell, who acted as an interface designer and programmer for the project, alongside Muesli, who also provided user interface insight and programming for the early versions.

Development goals

Amarok's tagline is "Rediscover Your Music", and its development is based around this ideology. Amarok's core features such as the unique "context browser", integrated Wikipedia lookup and lyrics download help users to find new music, and to learn more about the music they have. Amarok also features integration with last.fm, giving users suggestions about what to listen to next and which artists may fit their mood, as well as with Magnatune integration, allowing no-cost full listening of all the music in their catalog, and DRM-free purchasing.

Features

Basic Uses and Functions

Amarok serves many functions rather than just playing music files. For example, Amarok can be used to organize a library of music into folders according to genre, artist, and album, can edit tags attached to most music formats, associate album art, attach lyrics, and automatically "score" music as you play it. Thus, the first run of Amarok can be daunting for some users. Users that find the interface difficult to navigate due to the many features may hide some features (such as by closing tabs) but may simply prefer a simpler audio player. The abundance of features has also attracted some criticism that Amarok is resource-intensive or "bloated."

Although a more technical list of features is listed below, here are the primary functions or uses for Amarok:

• Playing media files in various formats including but not limited to (depending on the setup) FLAC, Ogg, MP3, AAC, WAV, WMA, and Musepack. Note that Amarok will not play digital music files protected by DRM, such as those purchased from the iTunes Music Store.
• Tagging digital music files (currently Ogg, WMA, AAC, MP3, and RealMedia).
• Associating cover art with a particular album, and retrieving the cover art from Amazon.com
• Creating and editing playlists, including smart and dynamic playlists. The dynamic playlists can use such information as the "score" given to a song by an Amarok script, and the playcount which is stored with the song.
• Syncing, retrieving, playing, or uploading music to your digital music player, such as an iPod or Creative Zen.
• Displaying artist information from Wikipedia and retrieving song lyrics.
• Last.fm support, including submitting played tracks (including those played on some digital music players) to Last.fm, retrieving similar artists, and playing Last.fm streams.
• Podcasting

The current version of Amarok, 1.4.4 introduced the integration of the non-DRM digital music store, Magnatune so users can purchase music in Ogg, FLAC, WAV and MP3 VBR formats.

Note that some of these features depend on other programs or libraries that must be on your computer to operate. Furthermore, some of the features, such as support for newer iPods and AAC tag editing may only be accessible if Amarok is compiled from source, depending on how a particular distribution packages the software.

Additionally, although Amarok can be used with most Linux desktop environments, Amarok uses KDElibs and QT, so Linux users running environments such as GNOME rather than KDE will notice some quirks that are mostly cosmetic. Other projects, such as Exaile have been initiated to attempt to bring Amarok's functionality to a gtk-based program. But even under an environment like GNOME Amarok retains all of its functionality.

File:Amarok2.png

Amarok 1.4.5 and Moodbar functionality

More Technical Features

• Two main windows - playlist browser and player window (latter is optional).
• Systray (panel notification area) icon support.
• Moodbar functionality provides a graphical overview of a song.
• Song collection, which includes specific folders on the filesystem.
  • Can be stored in an internal SQLite database, or external MySQL or PostgreSQL database.
  • Songs can be rated both dynamically (based on how much the song is played) and by hand (giving rating of 1-5 stars to the song).
  • Amarok File Tracking (since 1.4.3): Stores file checksum in the collection. This allows the file be moved around in the filesystem without Amarok losing track of the song statistics. (In betas, this feature was called Advanced Tag Features, and instead stored unique identifier in the song tags.)
  • Collection filter (newest songs, highest rated, most played, etc.).
• Playback options:
  • 10-band graphic equalizer.
  • Crossfading (for GStreamer, Xine and aRts).
  • Gapless playback (MP3 and other codecs).
• Support for syncing, reading, and writing to the following digital music players: iPod, iRiver iFP, Creative NOMAD, Creative Zen, MTP, Rio Karma and USB devices with VFAT (generic MP3 players) support.
• Support for several audio engines. The audio engine also dictates which media types Amarok can play.
  • aRts (unmaintained since 1.3, and unlikely to return)
  • GStreamer (disabled in 1.4 due to a lack of maintainer)
  • Helix
  • Media Application Server (MAS)
  • Network-Integrated Multimedia Middleware (NMM)
  • xine-lib
• Uses TagLib for tags.
• MusicBrainz support.
• Amarok can be controlled via DCOP.
• Ruby can be used for scripting, for example, when writing lyrics fetching plugins.
• Support for Digital Audio Access Protocol and ZeroConf.
• Integration with K3b for burning audio CDs.
• Support for kioslaves-based audio CD access. This allows CDs to be ripped to MP3 or Ogg Vorbis using Amarok's file browser or Konqueror.

File:Amarok.png

Amarok 1.4.3 and Wikipedia article functionality

Easter Egg

Playing a song with the tag "title" as "Amarok" and "artist" as "Mike Oldfield" produces the following OSD popup:

"One of Mike Oldfield's best pieces of work, Amarok, inspired the name behind the audio-player you are currently using. Thanks for choosing Amarok! Mark Kretschmann Max Howell Chris Muehlhaeuser The many other people who have helped make Amarok what it is"

See also

• Comparison of media players
• meta:KDE and Wikipedia

External links

• Amarok homepage
• Template:Musicbrainz wiki
• Amarok Live! - Amarok-centric LiveCD
• Guide to compiling Amarok from source without KDE
• How-to: Streaming to the Airport Express under Linux - Description on how to stream audio to Apple's AirPort Express with Amarok under Linux