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  amaroK: Next Generation Audio Player Hits 1.1
Multimedia Posted by Mark Kretschmann on Tuesday 28/Sep/2004, @09:54
from the special-agent-cartman dept.
Before amaroK was born, most KDE users were stuck with XMMS; others would even run console-based audio players. Now those days are over. amaroK, written for the KDE desktop environment with its slick GUI and plugable, engine-independent audio capabilities is coming to a computer near you!

amaroK is the first KDE application to use the GStreamer Multimedia Framework without any dependency on external bindings. amaroK can also integrate with xine so you have the freedom of choosing your own flavor. With version 1.1 there are many exciting changes that make using amaroK even more fun. Here are some of the features that you will simply love :

  • Fully Integrated with KDE: Play from your Samba share with smb:/, or use the fish KIO slave to play from a remote host.
  • Simple and Elegant: Collection-based system where you can choose songs from a variety of criteria, including artist, most played, never played, etc.
  • Stream Support: Listening to online radio has never been easier. Just load the playlist file and it starts playing.
  • Engine Independence: Ability to use GStreamer or xine. (There is also aRts engine but it is not ported to the new engine architecture yet).
  • Improved Crossfade: Crossfading with customizable fade-in/fade-out durations now works for GStreamer engine too
  • Inline tag editing: Tag your music while you play it.
  • MusicBrainz support for tag editing: No voodoo needed for tagging your music, just click the MusicBrainz button and it will get the song information from the online database.
  • Album cover support: If you have album covers in your music directory amaroK will automatically load them - better yet, amaroK can automatically download album covers from the Internet!
  • Multimedia Keyboard Friendly: If you happen to have extra multimedia buttons on your keyboard, using amaroK is even more fun. Just use KHotkeys to map those special buttons to amaroK's dcop functions (like play/pause/volume up/volume down and many more)!
  • On-screen Display: amaroK can optionally announce the currently playing song using its smart and stylish on-screen display.

So give amaroK a spin today! You won't be disappointed and that is guaranteed. Fire up amaroK, start playing your favorite songs, and visit the amaroK development squad @ irc.kde.org #amarok. Tell us why you just love amaroK, or your killer new idea for it. We are waiting for you!



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Over 40 comments listed. Printing out index only.
Nice features, bad UI
by MK on Tuesday 28/Sep/2004, @11:08
Yesterday I used amarok for the first time. It has some nice features like the crossfade or the album manager. On the other hand the UI is the worst I have ever seen in an KDE application (I'm sorry I have to say this).

For instance the menu items change depending on which of the sidebar menu (context, collection,...) one chooses. The stuff below the main entry looks chaotic to me, with a "menu" button at the lower right corner?! What really is brilliant is the "current track" context menu with the informations about the currently played track and related information - great!

Tag handling is much more complicated than in JuK which is the greatest application for adding meta data to mp3 IMHO. It would be great if amarok and Juk developers would work together on some parts: crossfade, album manager and musicbrainz integration could be part of a library shared by both applications.

I am not sure if I like the amaroK announcement, it sounds too much like marketing bla bla, but perhaps this is just me?!

"Before amaroK was born, most KDE users were stuck with XMMS [..] Now those days are over."

A bit modesty and at least a short link to JuK / noatun would have been more in place. Anyway, thanks for amaroK :-)
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Very good app, UI so-so
by Martin on Tuesday 28/Sep/2004, @11:57
I disagree that this marketing "bla-bla" is bad.
I think we (the Open Source world) has way too less
of it. Just compare Firefox and previous Mozilla Suite
and how marketing is important to really make impact.
Sometimes I'm under the impression that many geeks don't
really want a larger user base. Fortunately this isn't
the goal for KDE. On Windows you have big-scale annoucements
and bad apps. We should have great apps and shy annoucements
with no self-esteem? No way - we can have great apps and
great annoucement. Not a contradiction.

What I'm still missing in Amarok is the ability to somehow dock
the main window and the playlist into one single window with
a common look.

JuK is cool for organizing music. Amarok for playing. They are both
good partners and I think sharing some code (for Album, etc.) is
certainly a good-idea. Besides (slightly off-topic):
What's totally confusing me is that the current JuK that came
with KDE 3.3 (SuSE 9.1) has no sign _whatsoever_ that there
ever was an option to fetch meta data from the internet (TRM/MusicBrainz).
But I could swear there used to be an option some time ago...
Weird!
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Just what I was looking for
by Eric Weidner on Tuesday 28/Sep/2004, @12:06
Finally a player that doesn't make it all complicated to play my music. With xmms I really like that I can just play a directory of music without having to build a database of my music and sort on the artist, etc (assuming all the tags were correct). Amarok is great in that I can just browse my collection right on the drive and drag the folder to the current playlist. Nice and simple.

Thanks!
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Nice engine
by Bausi on Tuesday 28/Sep/2004, @12:30
The amarok engine with its support for gstreamer and xine is really fantastic. (And it works beautifully, amarok's the first music player which can do correct crossfading between tracks). On the other hand the UI is not - well - liked by everybody (especially not by me) because it feels so non-KDE-ish.

What I'd like to see: put the amarok engine in kdemultimedia and let juk and the other applications also use it. Juk is such a great application but its output support covers only gstreamer-0.6 (not really good working) and arts (obsolete).
However the amarok engine supports (or will support) all major media frameworks.
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Correction: aRts engine is available
by Mark Kretschmann on Tuesday 28/Sep/2004, @13:16
The article states that the aRts-engine is not yet ported to the new engine architecture. This information is not up to date, as I forgot to update the text.

In fact aRts is fully usable in 1.1 (although we don't recommend using it).
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Why I use amarok
by MANOWAR^ on Tuesday 28/Sep/2004, @14:08
The reason amarok has been the only player/orginzer/jukebox that I have stuck with is that it combines all the goods in one place. Mind you I am not saying that those feutures have been implemented/represented(GUI wise) in the best possible way, but it still has them while others don't. I would love to use Juk but it cannot handle my mp3 collection (40,000+ mp3s) without getting stuck for sometimes up to a minute before it starts responding again. I use Juk to do my mp3 tags but now that almost everything in my collection has tags amarok is great. The album art manager needs work though:
a) it should be configurable what the name of the file should be (aka Folder.jpg, Artist.jpg, whatever)
b) it should be able to place the jpeg in the album directory instead of its own ~./kde/share/apps/amarok/albumscovers....
c) it should scan for files already located in the folders.
I have images for almost half of my collection. The context tab displays the art beutifuly but the mng doesn't even get phased...
Overall though amarok is my choice of player so far. I have tried madman, yammi, and juk.
Btw if you ever wanted to be able to access your music from home check out http://www.gnump3d.org I was using that before I get my hands on amarok. I still use it from my office but no longer while I am at home. There is only one thing I am missing in amarok: ratings. I love to rate my songs, got hooked on it with my ipod. Talking about ipod can we get an ipod mngr for amarok too... that would great.
Keep on coding.
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App name
by AC on Tuesday 28/Sep/2004, @14:24
Why is it named "amaroK"? Is there some significance there?
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Unstable
by Elad on Tuesday 28/Sep/2004, @14:27
I for one, enjoy amaroK's UI, especially the cool album cover feature. I do have stability issues, though.
I've compiled amaroK from source, under Debian with KDE 3.2.3, and GStreamer-0.8.4. Every once in a while, playback stops, without any other observable problem (i.e., amarok doesn't hang.) Clicking the play button in these cases does not resume playback, and I have to restart the application.

Any suggestions on how to solve/debug this issue? I suspect it has something to do with the underlying engine, so I'm not sure simply running amaroK through a debugger would help.
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Nice UI
by jmfayard on Tuesday 28/Sep/2004, @14:52
I have to disagree with other people here, I really like the original UI of amaroK. Perhaps they should try it a bit more. The context tab is awesome, the collection tab is simple and powerful, the browser tab and the "Add media" button allows you to not mess the database when you don't want (which is a weak point of iTunes or Rhythmbox in my view), and as the website says, amaroK "doesn't get on your way"

One tiny thing though : on the sidebar, you can quickly access each browsing mode by clicking on a tab. But for some reason, the "Playlist" tab and the "Smart playlist" are in the same tab.
http://amarok.kde.org/images/zoom/XLZENU/transparent.png
This splitted window is not very usable with a small screen (like me) when you a non-trivial number of playlists. Fortunately, you can make the "Playlist" or the "Smart Playlist" take the full screen of the tab. But this means that you have now two logics and two ways to change from a tab to another.

Why not just make two separate tabs ? Simple is beautiful.
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Good job
by Alex on Tuesday 28/Sep/2004, @20:27
I like Amarok's UI and it's feature set is dead on for what I need.

I know the UI is not like most other programs, but I think the differentiation is for the best and it is also quite common for such an application. Now if this was a word processor or web browser I would insist on a uniform interface, but these programs are not so complex to use anyway and people do not want the screen real estate to be limited by a menu bar and like the cool and different look IMO.

Great job!
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non-kde-ish
by Mike Diehl on Tuesday 28/Sep/2004, @20:59
I don't understand the comments about amaroK not looking like a KDE app. This is what caught my attention the first time I got a look at it. I also think that features added like the player window follows KDE color scheme makes it look more KDE-like then ever.

I don't understand the need for a menubar, could someone answer this for me. All of the functions (very few) that are needed to actually play music are right there in the toolbar. All of the more advanced features (read stuff not often used i.e. configuration) are in a single location, the menu button. Had the devs put a menu bar and every other "KDE-like" feature, the playlist would grow bloated with no playlist to look at.


This all really bothers me, of all the time I've spent in #amarok I have yet to hear anyone say it was non KDE-like, or that amaroK was hard to use. I can however speak of the many users who have traded in XMMS for amaroK.

But everyone is entitled to there opinion, I guess this explains the all of the recent "usability experts".
:)

Cheers,
Mike
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Simple Review
by Nathan on Tuesday 28/Sep/2004, @21:25
I wrote this review:
http://grebowiec.net/archives/2004/09/amarok_11_revie.html
of Amarok 1.1 just to day :) I am rather enjoying it. It is what I have been waiting for in the music/media manager area.
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AmaroK rocks!
by perraw on Tuesday 28/Sep/2004, @23:52
Best media player I have ever used. I find the ui great too, despite the many people saying the ui is bad. Then the ultrafast tagging is great, when I ran some hot mediaplayer in windows it crashed when scanning my collection. taglib sweeped it very fast!

The hardest part with amaroK is remebering the name ;=)

Awesome guys!

P.
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My only problem with Amarok...
by Chakie on Tuesday 28/Sep/2004, @23:56
... is that it's not packaged for Debian so I can't try it. Currently I can't play my music at all under KDE.

I just ripped a new CD with the audio-CD ioslave, and it only gave me the options to rip as WAV or OGG, so naturally I picked OGG (KAudioCreator just sat and spun the CD, had to be killed [this is no copy protected CD, cdparanoia could rip it just fine at home]). Ripping went fine, but Juk can't seem to play OGG. It loads the files, starts playing, knows the file length and everything seems ok, but there is just no audio output! Playing a few old MP3:s I happen here at work works just fine.

So as Juk can't handle OGG I'd like to try Amarok, but I don't want to destroy my machine with randomly installed software, I prefer it packaged as deb:s (yes, call me lazy, but compiling and installing KDE apps with a different --prefix never seems to work properly).
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Maybe just not for me
by Boudewijn Rempt on Wednesday 29/Sep/2004, @00:28
I've tried Amarok, just as I've tried Juk and Noatun, and in the end, I always
have to go back to either xmms or ogg123. I simply cannot figure out how to play music with Amarok. I fumble around as if it's my first day with a computer. Which is rather annoying, since I've been messing around with all kinds of computers for more than twenty years.

Maybe I should make a nice mpeg video of what I'm trying to do. I found Bart's video of him using Krita very useful in assessing Krita's UI. Maybe showing in what way I am simply incapable of getting Amarok to function would help the developers.

(The reason both Juk and Noatun fail to make the grade is that they skip when I'm compiling code, which is pretty much permanent with me).
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Juk
by The Juker on Wednesday 29/Sep/2004, @00:50
Juk appears with cleaner interface & is such a pleasure to use. my 2 cents.
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Please don't change the UI!
by Ingemar Eriksson on Wednesday 29/Sep/2004, @02:40
Don't listen to all the ppl here that says they prefer JuK, noatun, xmms or whatever. Let them use the things they prefer and keep amaroK the way it is for those of us that like it!
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Doesn't work - It just closes
by Jure Repinc on Wednesday 29/Sep/2004, @03:12
I just installed this new version but I just can't get it to work. When I start it it says that I need to select output plugin gstreamer. And when I select it later and click Apply amarok just closes (no crash or something like that). I also tried to select arts and it also just silently closes. I'm runing this on AMD Athlon 64 in 64-bits if it has anything to do with this.
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Wish...
by mononoke on Wednesday 29/Sep/2004, @03:41
hi, i wish, "amarok" will get features like "Helium" has got ( http://www.helium2.com ).
amarok seems to become very nice, altough i have got a lot of crashes when using version 1.1 especially when i try opening streams while using arts-engine, but also xine-engine doesn't work with streams (for me).

thanx, and keep on the nice work..
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I don't get it
by til on Wednesday 29/Sep/2004, @04:15
I just don't get it - why is the big list on the right empty after clicking on 'Current playlist' in the 'Playlists' tab? Is that a bug or am I too confused?

I thought it would work like that: browse through collection, drag a few files from here and there into the playlist, doubleclick on one to play it immediately, and the playlist would persist during at least the current session. It should be possible to shuffle stuff around in the playlist by dragging it up and down, remove it by hitting the delete button when selected and so on. All that works fine as expected, but the 'Current Playlist' does not. I thought when doubleclicking on other playlists in the 'Playlists' tab like 'Cool Streams' I would switch to that other playlist but I can switch back to what I previously assembled by clicking on 'Current Playlist', but that doesn't work - the other playlist is displayed in the big window on the right, but when going back the current playlist is always empty.

Anyone care to explain?

(amarok 1.1 from Kalyxo Debian package)
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amarok is good
by yemu on Wednesday 29/Sep/2004, @05:18
i really don't know how people can compare juk and amarok and say that juk's better. for me it's not. i tried it once and it was terrible. amarok interface is really clean and simple to use. maybe control buttons could be moved to the top, as most peaple are used to itunes, rythmbox and other. but collection viewer, file browser, search and last but not least context viewer are just awesome!
best regards
yemu
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AmaroK is great
by Morten Fangel on Wednesday 29/Sep/2004, @06:18
AmaroK just saved me 50$... my Asus K8V SE Deluxe card isn't very well supported by aRtsd, so I where going to by me a new SB Live 5.1 just to listen to my music...
But then I discovered that Xine played DVD's just fine, so I just recompled AmaroK with xine-support, and now it works like a charm...

Morten
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KHotKeys
by Qerub on Wednesday 29/Sep/2004, @10:12
"Multimedia Keyboard Friendly: If you happen to have extra multimedia buttons on your keyboard, using amaroK is even more fun. Just use KHotkeys to map those special buttons to amaroK's dcop functions (like play/pause/volume up/volume down and many more)!"

Why not use amaroK's global shortcuts?
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amaroK review with screenshots at Linux Reviews
by xiando on Wednesday 29/Sep/2004, @11:25
http://linuxreviews.org/software/media-sound/amarok/

:-)
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too much of a good thing
by Tim Middleton on Wednesday 29/Sep/2004, @12:21
Like the majority here, I've been using amarok for a while. I always hated xmms... gtk... file dialogs... painful skin... ugh. Noatun is okay really; but why on earth does it load so slowly. kplayer and kaffiene are quite good too at playing; but their interfaces are more geared towards video. JuK was a giant leap forward, and is still uniquely good in a few ways, but I always found it very heavy. The scanning of my audio many large folders always would kill my system in the past.

Amarok suddenly appeared. Nice new ideas. Interface took a little bit to get used to (especially the weirdness of not being able to save/organize playlists). But generally it was just a pleasure of simplicity, with loads of wow factor (like when i discovered it was keeping stats on what files i played, and ranking them).

Now my complaints! I still find amarok pretty heavy in many ways. I actually use it's own colour scheme, it's pretty nice: but it's absolutely annoying the way the selection bar in the playlists insists on forever fading in and out. I wish i could turn off the infernal title scrolling in the player window. (Just like animated GIFs on web pages are usually annoying, this stuff annoys me.) And also while the level display embedded in the bottom of the playlist is extremely nifty, i'd like to turn it off too. I find that just having amarok running, not even playing anything, increases my system load more than any other player, which annoys me. Yes it only increases it slightly; a few tenths or so, but still... it's needless. I like my cpuload display to be as flat as possible when i'm not doing anything on the system.

But ... well, amarok is still the best for me for now.
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Skips with gstreamer/alsa
by til on Thursday 30/Sep/2004, @03:03
I'm using amarok 1.1 from the kalyxo debian package with gstreamer 0.8 outputting to alsa and experience short skips frequently in cpu usage peaks, e.g. when konqueror renders a complicated page. Any well known problems with this setup?

This is a recent pentium M machine that definitely should be capable of playing uninterrupted. xmms outputting directly to alsa works fine, even under higher load.
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never been able to get it to work
by Gogs on Thursday 30/Sep/2004, @03:42
I'd love to join in the praise/criticism of amaroK, but I've been completely unable to get it to play anything. I've been trying each new version for the last 2 or 3 months, and I always have the exact same problem....namely that everytime I try to use amaroK to play an mp3, it starts up, splash screen stays for ages, and then I get a message saying amaroK could not be started, try running it from the command line (this is while the blue amaroK speaker icon is in my systray btw)

Now, I'm not necessarily saying that it's amaroK itself - I mean on my system I'm running LFS, with everything freshly compiled from source - so it could be that I've not compiled something correctly. Also, I run KDE cvs, updating every few days... so again, that could be the problem.

Any advice, hints etc.. would be appreciated.

PS

xmms, juk, and other media players seem to work ok
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Stuck with XMMS
by Iuri Fiedoruk on Thursday 30/Sep/2004, @04:41
I'm still using xmms sometimes because arts dosen't have some plugins I like for playing videogames songs like spc (super nintendo) and psf (playstation)
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Sounds great.
by Super Pet Troll on Thursday 30/Sep/2004, @16:11
I haven't tried it yet, but when I can reboot back to Linux, I'll give it a shot. I'm completely fed up with Noatun, KPlayer works -ok- for video, so I've been using Juk. There are a few things with Juk I would like to change, but I just don't have the time ATM. From the little I've read and screenshots of amaroK, it looks like maybe I don't have too. :)

Just from a users persepective, later today I'll give it a shot, and give my own little review -- someone MAY care :)
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The best player ever :)
by wygiwyg on Friday 01/Oct/2004, @05:42
I dunno about you guys but playlist and how it is organized is most important to me. AmaroK is simply superior here. I love the possibility to add album covers. All other features are intelligently implemented.

Excellent job developers.
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amarok is good
by chris on Saturday 02/Oct/2004, @18:48
as the most people only write if they want to complain , and no-one writes if they like the app , i thought i will write that amarok is really nice and has a excellent interface !

dont change , i think most people like it - you can't count the comments here as the impression of *all* users , just the one that complain.
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Replacing XMMS? I doupt that!
by Jouni H. on Sunday 03/Oct/2004, @11:08
AmaroK is nowhere near replacing XMMS. It's probably more usable, but it can't handle exotic file formats, like tracker or C-64 sound files, and XMMS really rocks with its other plugins too. So stop that nonsense!
[ Reply To This | View ]

 
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