[KDE Dot News]
 faq
 flatforty
 contribute
 subscribe
 configure
 search
 rdf
 main


  Application of the Month: amaroK
Applications Posted by Jonathan Riddell on Thursday 02/Jun/2005, @18:20
from the only-one-month-late dept.
The latest application of the month is KDE's most feature-packed media player amaroK. The overview takes a look at functionality including Audioscrobbler, cover management and scripting. We also have an interview with amaroK's team of developers covering their development process, usability and accusations of being hopeless IRC junkies. Enjoy application of the month in Dutch, English, French, German and for the first time in Turkish.


<  |  >

 
  Related Links
 ·   Articles on Applications
 ·   Also by Jonathan Riddell
 ·   Contact author

Thread Threshold:

The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whomever posted them.
( Reply )

Great app
by Corbin on Thursday 02/Jun/2005, @20:09
amaroK is an amazing app, my friend has a play list with at least 10,000 mp3s (he has a total of over 47,000, I know its disturbing) and there isn't any lag in the user interface.
[ Reply To This | View ]
  • Re: Great app
    by Levi Durham on Thursday 02/Jun/2005, @20:36
    Well, the handling of music is great, but there seems to be a general lag in all passive popups when it comes to UTF-8 encoded Japanese (probably other large character sets as well). Unfortunatly, this is mostly only noticable to me in amaroK and juK. It's been kinda bugging me for a while, I guess you can take this as my bug report....
    [ Reply To This | View ]
    • Re: Great app
      by cartman on Thursday 02/Jun/2005, @23:36
      Qt's unicode support is not that impressive when it comes to speed, Qt4 should be better in that respect.
      [ Reply To This | View ]
    • Re: Great app
      by trythil on Friday 03/Jun/2005, @08:54
      I think this is a general issue with FreeType -- it tends to be a little slow when loading large character sets. I see the same lag when doing (say) ls on a directory containing filenames with Japanese characters.

      I did an informal test of this - some results, if you're interested:

      http://www.livejournal.com/~trythil/265350.html
      http://www.livejournal.com/~trythil/265702.html
      [ Reply To This | View ]
      • Re: Great app
        by trythil on Friday 03/Jun/2005, @09:15
        I guess I should say that the ls behavior I described occurs both in konsole and in a stock xterm, otherwise the freetype - ls association makes no sense :)
        [ Reply To This | View ]
Works for me
by SuSE_User on Thursday 02/Jun/2005, @20:45
amaroK has worked very well for me as it has progressed from the first version I used-1.0 (a touch buggy at times, liked to hate arts) to the very stable, usable, and thankfully ad-free player it is now. It is impressive that it can play virtually every kind of audio file out there without much ado at all.
[ Reply To This | View ]
amaroK
by Mark K on Thursday 02/Jun/2005, @21:26
This application is my favorite. It's simple to use and handles a large music collection with ease. Thanks to all the developers who worked many hours to help make other's lives more enjoyable. I am grateful to each of you who work on this project. You have provided me with a music experience which brings me peace in my life.

Thank You.

Mark
[ Reply To This | View ]
Graet ipod mini support ...
by Joerg Mertin on Thursday 02/Jun/2005, @23:04
and would be much greater if the polaylist stuff would work.
Best is however - they are working on it in the new release :) So - waiting a little bit and wishing the developers all the best for their efforts :)
[ Reply To This | View ]
Agreed
by Paul Eggleton on Friday 03/Jun/2005, @00:25
Another satisfied amaroK user here. I had been using XMMS for a very long time, and hadn't really found anything I liked enough to replace it, until I finally tried amaroK two weeks ago that is.

Some of the features I like the most:
* Album cover images
* Being able to update metadata for all songs in an album
* Lyrics
* Scripting

Great work, thanks!
[ Reply To This | View ]
AmaroK is in a league of it's own
by Andy on Friday 03/Jun/2005, @01:02
AmaroK was the final nail in the coffin for Windows XP for me. I'm now totally Linux. Well done guys!
[ Reply To This | View ]
much better than command-line mplayer
by David House on Friday 03/Jun/2005, @01:07
Before picking up amaroK I thought command-line mplayer was as good as linux media got :)

amaroK is *brilliant*. I reccommend anyone who likes to listen to music whilst working to check it out.
[ Reply To This | View ]
It beats all out there
by Hugo Costelha on Friday 03/Jun/2005, @01:47
I think it beats the hell out of other player, you have to use to see it.
I also thanks you guys very much for amarok...
[ Reply To This | View ]
Some "clean-up"
by charles on Friday 03/Jun/2005, @01:54
What about some clean up? I mean, turning the "play" button to "pause" when in the "playing" mode and vice-vera. This space can then be used for a "record" button to record audio streams. When you return from work, you can then play the stream.
[ Reply To This | View ]
  • Re: Some "clean-up"
    by Seb Ruiz on Friday 03/Jun/2005, @04:21
    a) You can already have a button which is a Play/Pause toggle. You need to alter your toolbar settings. (Right Click > Configure Toolbars)

    b) There has been a lot of talk and many requests about stream recording, but we don't see this happening soon - sorry, there are too many issues to deal with.
    [ Reply To This | View ]
    • Re: Some "clean-up"
      by Veton on Friday 03/Jun/2005, @08:00
      PLAY/PAUSE is GREAT!!
      IT would be nice to have this behaviour available through the kicker applet :-)
      [ Reply To This | View ]
      • Re: Some "clean-up"
        by Anthony Moulen on Friday 03/Jun/2005, @11:41
        MediaControl works this way now. I assume you mean the system tray icon but this is a kicker applet.
        [ Reply To This | View ]
      • Re: Some "clean-up"
        by Seb Ruiz on Friday 03/Jun/2005, @17:23
        Click with the middle mouse button to play/pause from the system tray :)
        [ Reply To This | View ]
    • Re: Some "clean-up"
      by Sebien on Friday 03/Jun/2005, @09:49
      Seems to be a good "Google Summer Code" project, isn't it?
      Or is amaroK not architectured to do that?
      [ Reply To This | View ]
    • Re: Some "clean-up"
      by charles on Sunday 05/Jun/2005, @07:15
      Are we talking about the same version? I have ver 1.2 but cannot see what you say! Thanx.
      [ Reply To This | View ]
great job
by superstoned on Friday 03/Jun/2005, @01:55
... and another person who loves amarok. its really an amazing player. i use the SVN at the moment, and it's lovely. nice work on the wiki, works very well. same with the sidebar, much better. and some other stuff that has been improved, keep up the good work!
[ Reply To This | View ]
nice
by Joergen Ramskov on Friday 03/Jun/2005, @02:48
/me kneels before the Wise amaroK Bot Overlord :p
[ Reply To This | View ]
amarok and tenor
by Pat on Friday 03/Jun/2005, @03:47
what will happened when kde4 comes out with tenor? will amarok switch to tenor and drop the sqlite backend?
[ Reply To This | View ]
  • Re: amarok and tenor
    by Ian Monroe on Friday 03/Jun/2005, @08:20
    I hope so. It depends on whether Tenor is something every KDE program can rely on being configured or not.
    [ Reply To This | View ]
  • Re: amarok and tenor
    by Evan "JabberWokky" E. on Friday 03/Jun/2005, @11:34
    As an aside, I use amaroK on my laptop and switched to MySQL to try to solve an annoying problem (it wound up relating to certain ID3 tags and a setting in amaroK... the solution is on the amaroK wiki). It didn't solve my problem, but it did substantially speed up amaroK searches and playlist creation by a factor of "waiting... okay" to instantaneous action. Very impressive, but it highlights that SQLite, while convenient, is not an ideal solution.

    In short: Got a large collection? Switch to MySQL.
    [ Reply To This | View ]
Great _player_
by Renato Sousa on Friday 03/Jun/2005, @19:32
AmaroK is the best player that I've tried until now. It can do about everything I want to do with my music, except for these two things:

* Order chronologically by album. I mean, group music by album, order albums by year, order music inside the album by number (for most bands I can just order by track number, then year, but I couldn't find out how to do it if you have more than one album in the same year. I hear this is somehow better in SVN

* Mass renaming/tagging. This is the one thing for which I open JuK nowadays. I get a lot of albums in different naming/tagging schemes, and it is a matter of five minutes to rename and tag them in a consistent manner in JuK. AmaroK is good for manual tagging, but lags behind in Tag Guessing/File Renaming

But still, my favorite player, and I really wish it was in kdemm (so it could get the deserved visibility).
[ Reply To This | View ]
ID tags
by Juan on Wednesday 15/Jun/2005, @10:59
I have found that after spending hours fixing ID tags... Amarok just turns around and cuts them short. Is it so odd that a song title has a HUGE name (about 100+ chars plus)?

Probably the most annoying bug of amarok but otherwise the apps treats my 10,000+ collection of mp3/ogg perfect. No lag.
[ Reply To This | View ]
  • Re: ID tags
    by ac on Wednesday 15/Jun/2005, @14:48
    > Is it so odd that a song title has a HUGE name (about 100+ chars plus)?

    Yes.

    Besides what ID3 tag version did you use? Maybe Amarok is just displaying the ID3v1 version to you. That version only supports a song title of 30 characters.
    [ Reply To This | View ]
    • Re: ID tags
      by Tim on Tuesday 12/Sep/2006, @08:49
      100 characters is not "weird." id3v1 is horrendously useless and amarok should most certainly not be writing them to a file. It should have an option at least, to ignore id3v1. It's the only thing that really annoys me about amarok.
      [ Reply To This | View ]
Hey! wtf with amarok.kde.org site ?
by vorph on Thursday 16/Jun/2005, @11:14
and what the current version of amarok ?
[ Reply To This | View ]
The Fine Print: The previous comments are owned by whomever posted them.
( Reply )
  "Being part of KDE is quite a character building experience." -- Matthias Ettrich
KDE®, "K Desktop Environment", "KDE Dot News", "got the dot?" and the KDE Logo® are trademarks or registered trademarks of KDE e.V. in the European Union, the United States and other countries. All other trademarks and copyrights on this page are owned by their respective owners. Comments are owned by the poster. The rest: Copyright © 2000-2008 KDE e.V. for The KDE Project. For further information or comments on this site, please contact the Webmaster.
[ home | post article | flat forty | subscribe | search | rdf ]