Amarok

Amarok is an audio player for KDE offering a wealth of features, yet being intuitive to use. It has an attractive interface where music can be drag and dropped into the playlist.

Amarok serves many functions rather than just playing music files. For example, Amarok can be used to organize a library of music into folders according to genre, artist, and album, can edit tags attached to most music formats, associate album art, attach lyrics, and automatically "score" music as it is played.

Amarok does not support any media types directly, but instead uses a backend independent approach.

There are plugins available for the iRiver media devices, Apple iPod, Creative Nomad and Zen.

Features include:

• Support for multiple backends (xine, Helix, Gstreamer, aRts, and NMM), so that Amarok can play lots of different music formats.
• Internet functionality: Streaming including Radio Streams, and Podcasts, full support for last.fm, automatic downloading of cover art using Amazon servces, lyrics downloads.
• Support for iPodŽ, iRiverŽ and generic UMS mp3 players with the all new media-browser.
• Album Cover Manager for managing your album covers.
• Queue Manager allowing complete control over playlists.
• Crossfading.
• 10 band equalizer.
• Visualizations from libvisual and XMMS.
• KDE integration.
• Automatic completion of ID3 tags.
• Translated into more than 35 languages

More Advanced features:

• K3B (CD/DVD burning) integration.
• Dynamic Playlists; self-generating playlists, created accordingly to defined rules.
• DCOP interface providing an easy way to control Amarok with custom scripts which can be written in many different languages including Python and PHP.
• Support for sqlite, MySQL and PostgreSQL databases ensuring fast collection access.
• Shortcuts enabling the software to function whilst minimised to the system tray.

If you prefer GNOME applications, you might want to check out Banshee instead.

Amarok also features in our 'Linux Equivalents to Windows Software' section. The category selector below allows you to filter the different types of software included in that separate article.

Last Updated Tuesday, August 11 2009 @ 02:38 PM EDT