Why amaroK ‘Roks’
Music Utilities, Review December 23rd, 2007
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Tags: Amarok, Digital Media, Linux, Music, UNIX
Why amaroK ‘Roks’
Yes, I’m talking about amaroK, the free, open source music player, currently only for Linux and Unix, but soon to be available for Windows and Mac OS X. As the saying goes, there are two kinds of people in the world: those who use amaroK, and those who don’t. amaroK is the ultimate music management software, and for a casual music buff like me, it’s the best you can get out there. What separates amaroK from the other popular players in the market are its features which are targeted to make music management and playback easy, and a pleasing experience. Here, I’ve highlighted some of the key features of amaroK.
Super fast music searching
amaroK has an individual search box for your collection and your playlists, so that you can search for music in each of them separately. There is no lag in display of results, and results are shortlisted automatically, in real-time, each time you type in a character in the search box. This means that you don’t have to type in a long name for a particular track if you see it after typing the first 2-3 characters. In short, efficient management.
Lyrics, Last.fm and Wikipedia integration
With the amarok script manager at your hands, you can install virtually an infinite number of small useful scripts, but the most obvious and important is a lyrics script, which automatically fetches lyrics for the track you are currently playing. A lyrics tab is included by default in amaroK, so by just installing a lyrics script (there are several of them available, I prefer to use Wiki-Lyrics) you can get amaroK to display lyrics of your music, from a variety of online lyrics directories, such as LyricWiki, AZLyrics, and many more.
Second is Last.fm. Last.fm is an online music community, it tracks what you listen to, learns what you like, and gives you better music. You can always use the Last.fm official client, but if it comes integrated in your favorite music player, then it just can’t get better! amaroK sends information about what you’re listening to Last.fm and automatically retrieves a list of similar artists/tracks which match your taste (based on general results).
amaroK also includes a Wikipedia tab, which displays the Wikipedia page related to the track you’re currently listening to (artist, single, album, etc.)
Autogenerated playlists and Radio Stream Collection
amaroK tracks what you listen to, analyses it and generates playlists, which are very useful if you are building a custom ‘favorite’ playlist. These playlists can be sorted by genre, most played, last played, and how many times you played a track. These collection statistics can also be viewed through “Tools >> Statistics”.
amaroK also includes a large collection of Shoutcasts, in various languages and genres. These Shoutcasts are handpicked, and include some of the best ones out there.
Cover Manager
amaroK has a cover manager that manages covers of albums. These covers are displayed when a track is played, in the OSD (On Screen Display). Having a cover for an album helps you easily identify albums in a large collection. amaroK can fetch covers for you from amazon.com, or you can set your own custom cover for an album.
Magnatune and Device Support
amaroK integrates Magnatune, an online music store, which sells complete albums and individual tracks through the Amazon.com Music Store. So you can listen to music in amaroK, streaming, directly from Magnatune, and purchase it, download it, all this, without having to leave the amaroK window. You do not have to open a browser, everything takes place inside amaroK.
amaroK also includes support for a majority of media players out there, automatically detecting them, and adding music from them to your collection. You can change settings if you don’t want music to be added from your player to your collection. You can transfer music from/to your player from the amaroK window.
The Future
Though amaroK has all these features, it has a major handicap - it is currently only for Linux and Unix. But the development team promises to port amaroK 2 on Windows and Mac OS X. amaroK 2also includes a revamped design, increased speed, and tons of new features! So it’s just wait and watch!
Apoorv blogs at RutSum.
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About
It’s been Amarok not amaroK since like 2002…
otherwise nice article!
great news¡¡
im a dual boot user and i have been using winamp
in windows for ages! i just cant find a good replacement.
finally a good open source competidor
Yes, I know that the name has been changed to Amarok, but somehow I prefer to use amaroK, which signifies it’s binding to KDE. When it will become a standalone and will not require kdelibs, I will change my naming convention :P.
Nice article… I’ve used Amarok for some time, but nothing’s perfect and all programs have annoyances. One of Amarok’s worst is to pop up a note over everything else on the screen showing the current song, etc. every few minutes. I’ve yet to find a way to turn this off. Now I’m looking at Songbird just to ditch this annoyance.
@Mig
Use Audacious for a replacement for Winamp on Linux for getting the feel of it.Otherwise AmaroK rocks.
Amarok is simply fantastic. There is no better player available, not even on Windows. Apps like this and K3b are the reason I use Windows less and less every day.
I’m content with winamp, but I’ll be sure to give this a try.
no offense, but i personally cant stand amarok/exaile, because its too messy and not very organizable. I love banshee! it has a nice interface and keeps it simple. Amarok for me is slow and has too many features!
And what of this WMP can’t do?
Linkin Park FTW :P
Does it automatically scan your hard drive for new music and import it into your library?
for Windows: Use foobar2000, way more customizable and it got more features as amorak ;)
but there’s no support for MacOS or Linux :/
@ Gary Greene
Settings->Configure Amarok…->OSD
Then uncheck Use On-Screen-Display
lp, have you
1) read the article?
2) ever used amarok?
@nprlisner
Yes it does add your music, and it watches your directories for any changes. Usually within 1-2 secs of adding/copying new music, amaroK detects it and adds it to my collection (if I’ve specified that that particular directory should be scanned, of course).
“Though amaroK has all these features, it has a major handicap - it is currently only for Linux and Unix.”
It’s not a bug, it’s a feature!!!
Amarok is a shitty player. It’s got some interesting features, but most of them are hidden behind a useless UI filled with clutter and really bad design decisions. The same goes for Exaile, the Gnome-clone of Amarok. It’s got some interesting features, but it’s far too unwieldy and has a horrible interface.
I will never understand why it’s so difficult for Linux-developers to make a decent musicplayer. So far I haven’t seen a single one that comes close to the elegance and sophistication of either Winamp or iTunes.
And yes, I use Linux every day as my primary OS, so this is not another “open source sucks” troll - I’m just completely flabbergasted by the sheer amount of projects and how none of them manage to make anything decent.
I’m tired of these “omg Amarok is like so totally awesome, I’m gonna blow my load over it”-articles. Anyone saying that Amarok is the best player regardless of platform has obviously not used anything else, or is completely oblivious to the fact that every music player under Linux blows ass. Admittedly some blows more ass and some blows less ass, but not one is usable.
Amarok is faster than it used to be, but it’s still not especially quick on old hardware. foobar2000 under Wine is much faster than Amarok when starting up, sorting on a column, and mass tagging, features I use all the time and don’t want to sit and wait for. I also like foobar2000’s integration of playing and tagging much better than Amarok’s. Amarok may match foobar2000’s flexibility and speed someday, but it still has a long way to go yet, IMO.
nice article friend.
heh! my this comment got -5 diggs on Digg.
But Ill say the same thing here-
AmaroxX! :P
I don’t like AmaroK that much. I kinda agree with Rebenga, although I don’t call AmaroK shitty. It has a confusing and intrusive interface, although it’s a powerfull application.
In the media player field, I prefer Rhythmbox: simple, easy to use.
MediaMonkey includes all these features and more.
It’s available for Windows free.
Winamp 2.91 and the original xmms are my preffered music players.
If you want to search for a song in either one just press ‘j’. Then type. There is literally no lag, the search is instant and I have over 20,000 songs.
In my opinion Amarok is bloated and filled with feature creep useless features; however, many people like it for those reasons. So, thanks for the well written article.
My 2 cents.
I’ve always been able to get Winamp to work under WINE, so it’s not as if you had to reboot to Windows to use Winamp, unless you don’t have WINE and just don’t want to instal it.