Filed under: Audio, Features, Open Source
Flipping the Linux switch: Amarok
Maybe you've got older hardware. Maybe you've had enough of restrictive EULAs. Maybe you've just received a teeny tiny Eee for Christmas (thanks Mom!). Or maybe you've been thinking about making the switch to Linux, but you wonder how you'll live without certain applications.A major obstacle in making the transition from Windows to Linux for many is music. Does Linux even play media files? While Linux can't play DRM-laden files, it handles unencrypted mp3s, and, with the proper codecs, Windows media files.
"So what?" you say, looking at your ripped mp3s, organized into perfect play lists on your iPod, "There's no iTunes in Linux!"
Enter Amarok. Sure, there are countless other music players in Linux. They do the job, and most do it quite well. Why single out Amarok?
First impressions mean a lot. Amarok is a pretty application. It integrates nicely with KDE, its native desktop environment. That's not to say it can't run on GNOME, Xfce, or other window managers. You'll just have to consult Amarok's site for system requirements, or check the documentation for your distribution.
It is completely customizable, allowing you to change colors, fonts, icon themes and on screen display settings. Plugins and add ons abound. Want it to match your magenta wallpaper? Want to use that new font? Need the on-screen display to be translucent? No problem, and no coding skills needed.
Alas, looks only get you so far (believe us). Amarok's true beauty is in its functionality. Organized with a large play list pane and a tabbed side panel, Amarok's many features are readily apparent and accessible. Most of these tabs are self-explanatory (Files, Collection), but some deserve a bit more explanation.
The Magnatune tab is the portal to Amarok's music store. You most likely won't recognize many (or any) of the musicians here. Face it, they're not major bands. Or minor bands. Some might not even be bands at all. It's worth a look, though, if you're into indie music.
The Context tab displays album art for the current song on the play list, as well as vital statistics about your playing habits. Lyrics are pulled off the 'net for the song, and artist information is loaded from Wikipedia. Of course, these sources can be customized. See a mistake in the lyrics? Fix it right there!
Amarok's other features include dynamic play lists, Shoutcast streams and Last.fm integration.
Amarok supports many personal media players. The most notable absence is the Zune. While this may not surprise you, it's interesting to note that the libmtp library which supports modern devices like the Zune allows for tracks to be viewed in Amarok. You can see your music. You just can't listen to it, due to an authentication issue between the Zune and libmtp.
Apple, iRiver, Creative and many other devices are supported for data transfer. That's great, right? Sometimes it's not quite that straightforward. Amarok can communicate with these players, but libraries peculiar to each device might need to be installed. For instance, installing a Creative Zen Touch involved installing several underlying libraries.
Fear not, the most commonly used libraries are often supplied through your distribution's repositories. Amarok, if not installed by default in your Linux of choice, is available in various binary formats. It's also available (of course!) as a source tarball and from Subversion, for those that like to be on the cutting edge.
Making the switch from Windows to Linux can be traumatic. Soothe that trauma with your tunes, courtesy of Amarok.
It is completely customizable, allowing you to change colors, fonts, icon themes and on screen display settings. Plugins and add ons abound. Want it to match your magenta wallpaper? Want to use that new font? Need the on-screen display to be translucent? No problem, and no coding skills needed.
Alas, looks only get you so far (believe us). Amarok's true beauty is in its functionality. Organized with a large play list pane and a tabbed side panel, Amarok's many features are readily apparent and accessible. Most of these tabs are self-explanatory (Files, Collection), but some deserve a bit more explanation.
The Context tab displays album art for the current song on the play list, as well as vital statistics about your playing habits. Lyrics are pulled off the 'net for the song, and artist information is loaded from Wikipedia. Of course, these sources can be customized. See a mistake in the lyrics? Fix it right there!
Amarok's other features include dynamic play lists, Shoutcast streams and Last.fm integration.
Amarok supports many personal media players. The most notable absence is the Zune. While this may not surprise you, it's interesting to note that the libmtp library which supports modern devices like the Zune allows for tracks to be viewed in Amarok. You can see your music. You just can't listen to it, due to an authentication issue between the Zune and libmtp.
Apple, iRiver, Creative and many other devices are supported for data transfer. That's great, right? Sometimes it's not quite that straightforward. Amarok can communicate with these players, but libraries peculiar to each device might need to be installed. For instance, installing a Creative Zen Touch involved installing several underlying libraries.
Fear not, the most commonly used libraries are often supplied through your distribution's repositories. Amarok, if not installed by default in your Linux of choice, is available in various binary formats. It's also available (of course!) as a source tarball and from Subversion, for those that like to be on the cutting edge.
Making the switch from Windows to Linux can be traumatic. Soothe that trauma with your tunes, courtesy of Amarok.
With Halloween fast approaching, it's a great time to get in some practice defending your territory against zombies. In Graveyard Shift, you take aim at zombies and other creepy-crawlies, blasting them into splatters of cartoony green guts. It's a casual first-person shooter, and it's very easy to get the hang of - use the mouse to aim, click to fire. Graveyard Shift has at least 15 levels, and it might even have some secret stages I haven't unlocked yet.
They key to getting good at Graveyard Shift is learning to use ...
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Tush said 2:09PM on 12-13-2007
If you're running Gnome and don't want to run a KDE app with all the KDE utilities running in the background, you can get a gnome clone of Amarok called Exaile.
Reply
Rumble said 4:34PM on 12-13-2007
+1 to Exaile. If you're in GNOME, it makes more sense to run a program with the GTK+ toolkit. Both Amarok and Exaile are excellent.
Michael C. Neel said 2:38PM on 12-13-2007
What's up with the "click to read more" posts on the RSS? Bad site, bad.
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Brad Linder said 3:39PM on 12-13-2007
When our articles are more than a few paragraphs long, we tend to just post the beginning of the article on the front page and put the rest after a continued link. It's not just for the RSS feed, you'll see the same thing if you visit Download Squad's front page. The goal is to cut down on the clutter and show as many posts as possible on the front page without forcing you glue your finger to your mouse scrollwheel to get past our more in depth content.
If you're an RSS subscriber, you should notice that the vast majority of our RSS feed is full text. The only posts that are partial text are the same ones that don't show up in full on our front page either.
James said 11:23AM on 12-14-2007
Mike, I beg to differ. I hate it when I'm using e.g. Google Reader and some idiot leaves an RSS entry that's 5 pages long without "snipping" it. If I'm not interested, I have to scroll for like 10 seconds (if I'm not using my keyboard) just to get past it. Maybe the best solution is to transmit the entire article, but have some sort of aggregator/reader feature that limits the size of the displayed article until you open it. But until that becomes commonplace, most people (I think correctly) snip very long articles out of a sense of courtesy.
About Amarok: it looks awesome, but I only run Linux on my home server, which is not easily accessible for day-to-day use. I just got my wife an MP3 player for Christmas, so I'd like a "media library manager" like this, but it would have to run on Windows. Is there a Windows port? (If not, why not?) If not, is there a similar recommendation that doesn't try to take over your whole computer like WMP or iTunes?
ChickebSangwich said 1:09PM on 12-14-2007
James, try out Media Monkey. It's Windows compatible and may be what you're looking for.
Kristin Shoemaker said 1:12PM on 12-14-2007
James,
There is a Windows port of Amarok in progress (more info here: http://amarok.kde.org/wiki/Development/Win32). I will say this: It looks a bit complicated to get running, to say the least.
I would recommend Songbird for Windows. (http://www.songbirdnest.com/) It's open source, and a nice interface.
rhythmbox said 2:40PM on 12-13-2007
I tried out amarok a few years ago, and it was ok. Very feature rich and customizable. But it also had a lot of problems too; crashed often, gui was not all that intuitive, and loading my library took forever.
I tried it again about 6 months ago. Many features had been added and overall, it was pretty stable. But it still had the feel of being a bunch of things smashed together. The underlying structure was lacking. Sure you could change the schemes, rate and listen to your music in a 1000 different ways, but if you just wanted to listen to some songs, it was overkill. And it still had the problem of dealing with large libraries. (My library was around 15,000 songs).
Rhythmbox was my savior. iTunes like interface, simple and easy to use. And it handled my large library with ease. Yeah, it doesn't have all the features of amarok, but I never used them anyway. It has last.fm support and that's all I really care about.
So I would definitely recommend rhythmbox for those that want a simple, but not too simple, music player.
Reply
Cams said 4:44AM on 12-14-2007
I'm a Linux n00b and just installed Ubuntu 7.10 on an old desktop to see if it will work out for a spare computer for our live-in nanny to use. I was snooping around to see what was on the system after the install and found Amarok. I was rather pleased with its ease of use and look. I think this Ubuntu box might just work out as well as I'd hoped it would and it's kind of exciting in a geeky sort of way. w00t!
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Onkel said 3:45AM on 12-14-2007
"While Linux can't play DRM-laden files"
Yes it can, check out Songbird...
Reply
Kristin Shoemaker said 7:48AM on 12-14-2007
Songbird, as far as I can tell, can only play Windows DRM files on
PCs running Windows (from their FAQ):
"Songbird can play any popular music file format that is not DRM'ed. We will also be able play Windows Media DRM on PCs soon (but not on Macs or Linux). We are looking into legal ways to play music from the iTunes Music Store that has FairPlay DRM."
(http://www.songbirdnest.com/support/#2)
Though there's been some talk about adding DRM support in Linux,
nothing seems to have come about yet.
Reply
Matt Petty said 9:22AM on 12-14-2007
I'm currently starting to use Amarok with an old iPod one a new Ubuntu 7.10 installation. It seems OK, but is a bit non-intuitive when it comes to actually playing stuff. I can't seem to get it to organise and rename my mp3's in folders automatically by their ID3 tags. And I haven't managed to get it to sync up with the iPod yet - it will let me copy music across, but it's a manual process. I'm sticking with it for now.
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