Amarok - A Review

Writing by admin on Friday, 1 of June , 2007 at 10:50 am

Before my full-time migration to Linux, I always used iTunes for playing my music and managing my iPod. I had always thought iTunes was as good as it could get as far as playing and managing MP3 files, especially when I after testing Linux software such as Banshee and Rythmbox. I have nothing bad to say about these 2 pieces of software, but they just did not seem to have the overall polish iTunes presented. All of this led me to trying the feature of this article, Amarok.

When I began to use Amarok (1.4.5) I immediately noticed a sense of polish and completion. Lets face it, when it comes to media players the interface is what can make or break a program as any player can playback a file by using the necessary codecs.

Personally, I find the interface extremely informative and easy to use. As you can see with the screenshot below there is a general menu at the top, another menu along the left-hand side, a control menu with visualizations at the bottom, and a list of the songs that makes up the bulk of the interface. You may have also noticed the list of artists that makes up about the left 1/4 of the screen. Depending on what left-sided menu item is chosen this area changes and is the focus of some great features that Amarok offers.

Follow this link for details on some of the features!

As I just mentioned, the left-hand menu provides some great information. Now, lets go through what each menu item provides, starting at the bottom.

Devices

Amarok makes it extremely easy to connect almost any MP3 device allowing songs to be transferred. My iPod was immediately detected and it took just a couple of clicks to get it fully functioning with Amarok. I was pleasantly surprised at how well Amarok performed this task.

Magnatune

This is the music store that Amarok provides. Not a lot of mainstream bands, but any purchases made are split 50/50 between the artist and Magnatune. At least this way the artist is not making a fraction of a percent as is so common with the big record labels. You can read more about Magnatune here.

Files

If you do not have all of your music in one location you can easily use this menu to add more songs to your collection from any folder/device connected to your computer.

Playlists

This section allows the creation and managing of and playlists you may create or have imported from a folder. However, the greatest part of the playlists menu is that you can stream internet radio within Amarok. There are thousands of streams available through two major providers; Cool and Shoutcast. Anyone who has streamed radio in the past will find this a well working piece of Amarok.

Collection

When music is added to Amarok it is all aggregated in the collection menu. This provides alphabetically groupings of artists and by clicking on the expand (+ button) the list of albums (along with album art) and songs within the album are present for easy addition to the current playlist on the right. Throughout all of the music playing software I have used I have found this to be the best organization of music offered.

Context

The context section is what truly separates Amarok from the others. Three tabs are provided (Music, Lyrics, and Artist).

The music tab provides a ton of information included song details, album art, favourite tracks by that artist, all albums (with art) by that artist, as well as meta tags that you can add to make finding music even easier.

The lyrics tab fetches the lyrics to the song from the Lyrc database online. The only times when no lyrics were found seemed to happen when I was playing a song that has been released in the past few months (the tab even provides an “Add” button that allows you to upload lyrics to songs missing lyrics).

The artist tab provides the Wikipedia entry for the current artist. While it can sometimes be tedious to read a large entry in a skinny window, the window can be stretched and the content dynamically changes to be more readable. I generally use this feature to find out information such as years active, record labels and to get the band website.

Conclusion

There you have it, Amarok is a fantastic program for playing music within Linux. Did I mention you can also download themes and other scripts to add as much function to Amarak as you wish? You can! To find out more about Amarok please visit their website here.

For Windows users, the next full release (version 2) of Amarok will be able to run on Windows as well. I hope that when this happens many of you will consider switching from iTunes and Winamp.

Cole

Category: Linux, Open-source, My Computer, Review

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