Amarok

Amarok is a music manager from the KDE Community

 See footnote

Amarok is a free, cross-platform, versatile, powerful and feature-rich music player. It allows easy collection management, automatically retrieves information and covers, and has built-in compatibility with services such as Jamendo, Last.fm, Magnatune, and Librivox. It also can be completely customized, so users can modify its look and layout so it fits their needs. The current stable release is version 2.5

If you are new to Amarok, you might want to have a look at the Amarok Quick Start Guide.

Tip

Click on an image to view the enlargement

Interface

Amarok sports a three-pane interface by default.

The left pane (Media Sources)

The Media Sources pane on the left is the place where you access your local collection as well as other services: Local Music on top, which is the primary interface to your local collection and connected media such as mp3 players and CDs. There is a section for all Internet Services that you have enabled. Here, you can browse listings of radio stations and podcasts; listen/subscribe to them, interact with your last.fm account, purchase music from online stores such as Magnatune and download independent artists' music from Jamendo and more. The Playlists section allows you to create and manage Dynamic Playlists, access your Saved Playlists as well as the Automatic Playlist Generator. The Files section displays an integrated file browser and the Podcasts section will let you access your podcast subscriptions.

The central pane (Context View)

This is where all the information is displayed. The central pane contains 3 applets that dynamically change to display context information about the track that is currently playing. You can see the rating, score and play count of the Current Track applet or the last played tracks if nothing is playing, the Lyrics of the song and the Wikipedia page on the artist. More applets can be added, removed or rearranged using the settings icon on the Applet Bar at the bottom of the pane.

The right pane (Playlist View)

Amarok has the most configurable playlist of any music player in existence. It puts the power in your hands to shape the playlist any way you see fit. To start you off, there are three pre-configured playlist layouts that you can use as starting points to create the layout that fits your flow the best. You can generate playlist dynamically with various bias or use the Automatic Playlist Generator, shuffle, play at random or repeat, queue tracks and save the existing playlists for later use.

Features

Music Playback

Amarok can support most popular formats for music files. The actual list of formats is dependent on the codecs and audio backend in use on your system. There's also support for traditional playlists — you can create, save and load all the playlists you want.

Device Support

Amarok offers support for a great variety of Media devices such as iPods, MTP and UMS devices. The button Merge View at the top of the collection lets you merge collections. This means songs from your local collection, audio CD, mp3-player and so on will be shown in one unified collection. It is a toggle switch so you can easily revert to showing the separate sources.

Configurable Context View

The Context view, the centerpiece attraction in Amarok, can automatically fetch contextual information about the currently playing song (such as album art, lyrics or Wikipedia information) from the Internet and display them. This is one of the unique features of the Amarok series.

More Internet Services

Amarok opens the gateway to a rich multimedia experience on the Internet. Sporting interfaces to services such as Ampache music servers and mp3tunes lockers, it allows you to listen to your music from anywhere in the world. You can sample and buy music from Magnatune. Using the Jamendo service, you can listen to and download music from independent artists who can be supported by your donations. With integrated last.fm functionality, you can scrobble your tracks, use last.fm features like statistics, charts and subscribers can listen to radio streams customized to your music taste — all from Amarok. Depending on your region, you may have access to the Amazon MP3 music store. And that is just the beginning — you can add even more Internet services using the Script Manager.

Information

There are many scripts available through the scripts manager. Go to Settings -> Configure Amarok... -> Scripts -> Manage Scripts and browse the list of available scripts. You can narrow the choices by entering a phrase in the search box. When you have found a script that you want to try, just click the Install button next to it. The next time you run Amarok, you will find the script listing a number of streams in the Internet section of the Media Sources pane.

Script Manager

Scripts are add-ons that allow you to extend Amarok’s functionality in innovative ways. In the new Amarok 2.5, you use the Manage Scripts option to open the Amarok Add-on Installer window. In Amarok 2.3.1 you can accomplish this using the Script Manager, you can manage these scripts in that it allows you to install/remove or enable/disable scripts you already have. You can also use the Get More Scripts feature to download new scripts submitted by other users.

Cover Manager

You can browse through your music collection using the nifty Cover Manager that displays the album art, download covers from various sources or let Amarok check automatically for covers in the internet.

Rating and scoring

You can show your love for the songs by rating them. Amarok supports ½⋅✩ ratings, too. In addition, Amarok can calculate a score (a sort of guessed rating) depending on metrics such as how often you listen to or skip a song.

Pop-Up Dropper

This is an innovative interface that offers contextual options (such as the ones you see in a right-click menu) that you can "drop" a song into. Grab a track and see the Pop-Up Dropper appear in the context view pane!

Configurable Playlist View

The currently loaded playlist is highly configurable and can show information about the songs in any form you like. If you are used to the Spreadsheet View found in Amarok 1.x series and other music players, you can have that, too! The Playlist View also allows you to save or export the current playlist.

Dynamic Playlists

Amarok allows you to create weighted random playlists that adhere to various criteria exactly (Proportional bias) or approximately (Fuzzy bias). For example, you can create a playlist that will be randomly populated by songs that are rated more than 3 stars and are approximately from around the year 1967!

Replay Gain Support

Amarok supports Replay Gain tag information embedded in files and automatically adjusts the overall volume of the song to a common level.

Rediscover your music!

Hints, Tips and FAQs

Folder not properly picked up

If you find that most of your music is recognized by Amarok, but some folders are not properly picked up, open a console and type

touch folder

where folder is the path to the folder that has the problem. Then select Settings -> Configure Amarok in Amarok main window menu, and open Collection -> Rescan Collection page. Your folder should be visible again now.

Warning

this will not work on Windows, as the touch command is specific to Linux and BSD-like systems.

How to play mp4 and mka files

When using some phonon backend, like the gstreamer one, Amarok might refuse to play mp4 and mka files. This is a known problem, see bug #290168 for more technical information.

A very simple workaround is to change the file extension. Change mp4 extension to m4a and for mka change it to mkv. Of course you must be sure the files contains audio only. You can use the ffprobe command to look at what data streams are present in the file. If the file has a video stream it must be stripped out. There are a lot of tools able to edit these formats and most of them are based on ffmpeg/libav, which you can use if you are familiar with them. If you prefer graphical tools one possible choice is avidemux.

This is a quick example how you can remove a video stream from an mp4 video with ffmpeg. Stripping a video stream from an mkv file is the same. First check if there is a video stream

$ ffprobe example.mp4 2>&1 | grep Video

Stream #0.1(und): Video: h264 (Baseline), yuv420p, 480x360 [PAR 1:1 DAR 4:3], 242 kb/s, 25 fps, 25 tbr, 25k tbn, 50k tbc

If the output of the previous command is null there is no video stream in the file. To create an m4a file with just the audio stream you can use something like

ffmpeg -i example.mp4 -acodec copy -vn example.m4a

You can also use avconv in place of ffmpeg with the same options, where

• -i example.mp4 option is the input file name
• -acodec copy is used to not encode again the audio stream but just copy it. This to avoid quality loss, but you can also encode in a different format if you want, and you are not forced to use m4a container in this case
• -vn strips the video stream
• example.m4a is the output file name

Another possible workaround is to change the phonon backend. For example the VLC backend doesn't suffer this problem.

Tutorials

• How to scrobble to Libre.fm

More Information

• The Amarok Handbook
• Amarok Homepage
• Amarok Forum

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Support for this application can be found from the project's home page