Amarok Amarok is the Inuit word for wolf. It's the name of an enigmatic album by the equally enigmatic Mike Oldfield. This article is about neither of these, as interesting as they both are, but rather about the powerful audio player that shares the name. amaroK has plenty of tricks up it's sleeves (or paws), but at heart it is like every other audio player you have ever met. If you just want a small player that doesn't get in your way, amaroK can do that. If you prefer a fully featured media library manager for your music collection, amaroK can do that too. You'll be asked to choose which of these you like when you run it the first time, but you can easily switch between the two later if you'd like to try a walk on the other side of the tracks. Getting started: You're probably raring to get started - at it's most simple, amaroK is just like any other music player, and works as you would expect. In either the playlist window or the player, you always have the usual play, pause, skip and stop buttons, along with a volume slider. You might like to go find some music files in Konqueror, right click them and you'll see you have acquired a couple of new entries. The first, "Open With" -> "amaroK" will immediately open the files you selected, and start playing them, as will dragging them to the player window. If you already have something playing you may just want to queue your newly selected files to play when the current track or playlist is done. In that case, just choose "Actions" -> "Add to amaroK playlist". The real power of amaroK however, is in it's overview of your entire music collection. During that first run wizard, you were also asked for the location of your music files on your hard drive. Assuming you weren't tempted to press the "Skip this" button in a hurry to try out your new software, amaroK has now built a database of your entire music collection. If you were tempted, you can run the wizard again from the "Tools" menu in the playlist window, or by right clicking in the player window. amaroK now knows all about your music, not just by filename or the directory it is in, it has also read out all the meta information you have stored inside the files in "tags". In the collection browser, you can now sort your music by album, artist, year, or genre, or any combination of these. In the screenshot, you can see the albums arranged under their artists. However you choose to arrange things, you can at any point drag any selection you make in the collection browser to the playlist, click on something directly to replace the current playlist, or right click for other options. About those tags: All modern audio formats allow you to store information about their contents inside the files themselves. This allows you to arrange them on disk any way you like, without having to use the filenames and directory hierarchy to keep things organised. If you want to toss them all in a single folder with cryptic names, you can, and amaroK can still make sense of things. It does mean that for best performance and access to all the features, you need to have your music tagged correctly, at least with the artist name and the song title, although there is much more information you can store if you want, including the album each song is from, the year of release, and even free form comments. You can edit the tags of any track in the playlist window from the right click context menu, and you can even select multiple files and change tags for them all at once. This context menu is clever enough to usually figure out what you want - allowing you to copy the artist from one song to a dozen others, or number tracks in order. amaroK can also ask the musicbrainz database what it thinks your file is - this is terribly useful for those CD's you ripped at 3 am and forgot to fill in all the information at the time, and now can't remember precisely which album they came from, or who sang which song. Musicbrainz is a clever system based on a mathematical analysis of the music. Right click on a file and choose "View/Edit metadata", and press the "Fill-In Tags using MusicBrainz" button. It's not infallible, and sometimes returns the wrong answer, especially for lesser-known artists, so you can always choose cancel if need be, or simply save the answer if your song was correctly identified. Along with other metadata, you can fetch the cover art from the albums you have, to spice up your display a little, and if you already have a scan of the cover art in the same directory as the tracks, amaroK will happily display that directly. Context Browser: Once your music is tagged and you have a playlist made, you'll find some of the other fun things amaroK can do jumping to your attention. The most obvious of these is the context browser, the "all about your music" panel that's down the left hand side of the playlist. At the top, you have some information about the song that's currently playing, such as it's length and if you have it, the cover art for the album it's from. At the bottom there's a collapsible list of other albums by the same artist. If you'd like to listen to more from the same artist, it's simply a click away. You will also see that amaroK keeps track of what you play, and sets scores for things. If you play a song often, and all the way through, it will have a high score, and if you don't play it much, or often skip or stop it before it's finished, the score lowers. Over time, amaroK learns which are your favourite tracks, and automatically creates playlists based on your favourite tracks overall, and by artist. Then there's the Lyrics tab. Who among us can resist a little karaoke now and then? Satisfy your urge to sing along, by getting the lyrics right - if you load the Lyrics tab, amaroK will query a lyrics server on the internet for the lyrics to the currently playing song. Playlist Shuffleboard Of course, amaroK offers all the usual suspects for spicing up your playlist. There's Shuffle (where you mix up the playlist yourself and then play it through in the resulting order and Random, where amaroK plays songs out of your list by picking any other random track as each one finishes playing. You can carefully arrange a playlist in the precise order you like and let amaroK play it through end to end. One of the really smart features amaroK provides that you may not be familiar with is suggesting songs. It does this by asking the audioscrobbler servers what other people who listen to the current artist also listen to, then suggesting songs out of your own collection to play next. amaroK never suggests songs you don't have and can't listen to - but if you'd like to get some hints on artists you don't know in order to widen your collection, www.last.fm uses the same data to provide this for you too, and if you have an account on AudioScrobbler, the same username and password work on Last.FM. Turning on "Append Suggestions" from the "Settings" menu turns up the heat even more. When this is turned on you can simply start a playlist by adding a song or two you are in the mood to listen to, and amaroK will build you a playlist of similar tracks as it plays. If you'd like more control over your listening, leave the Append Suggestions feature off, and simply right click and choose "Append to playlist" if one of the suggestions catches your eye. If you have a long playlist of many songs, and don't want to wait for the off the wall suggestion to show up at the end of the list, or just are inspired to hear a track you spot in the context browser, you can cut to the chase by queuing a track (or several tracks) directly after the one that's currently playing. amaroK will keep track of as many tracks as you like in this manner. This way you can have a long mixed playlist of your favourite songs or albums saved, and still have complete control of the order you listen to songs in. The suggestions feature is one of the most innovative in amaroK, and you may be surprised how much fun you can have with it. In our house, everyone keeps their music on the same hard drive and we have it shared everywhere. Since I live with a 14 year old, whose taste can only be described as inexplicable, a 5 year old who prefers Disney songs and nursery rhymes, my partner the "AOR/Power Ballad with a bit of Country" guy, and my own tastes leaning to noisy industrial metal. Picking entirely random playlists is more or less doomed to annoy someone. Worse, we have so much music between us, that picking something specific out to listen to ends up taking a long time. With amaroK I can just seed the playlist with a couple of songs suited to whoever is listening, and let the suggestions add more, and it does a very good job of keeping fairly close in genre and general atmosphere. Now we don't have the Lion King sound track suddenly being followed up by mixture of German heavy metal and perky Japanese pop songs, as entertaining as that mixture may sound. If you've nothing better to do, or just want to explore, another way to use it is to turn off the automatic adding of suggested songs, and play 6 degrees with your music. Pick a random artist, think of another one entirely, and see how many suggestions it takes to get you from one to the other. Be careful though, messing with your playlists can be curiously addictive! Get Smart: Finding a particular track amongst your collection is incredibly simple. In nearly every pane in the window, is a filter box - just type a part of the name you are looking for, and the list will begin to narrow to just the items that match. This works in playlists, and the collection browser, and there's even a dedicated tab to search amongst filenames, which is especially useful when you haven't got tags in the files. Any playlist you have created in the main window, you can quickly save for future use from the Actions menu, or by pressing Ctrl-S. These saved playlists are in a common format that almost all media players can understand, so if you have cause to use another player, you can use your amaroK created playlists there, and of course you can import playlists created by other media players too. [screenshot: playlists.png] You don't have to do all the work though, since amaroK not only knows all about your music, it learns your listening habits too. In the smart playlists section, as you can see from the screenshot, you can pick out your favourite artists, your favourite tracks, or choose an entire genre to create a playlist with. If you want to go through all the songs you have but haven't got around to listen to, there's a playlist ready for that too. And if you just can't decide what you want to listen to, let amaroK be your DJ and choose a hundred tracks at random. Even better, you can create these dynamically updated playlists for yourself. Choose "Create Smart Playlist" and you will find you can select by almost any criteria amaroK knows about. Want a playlist of all the songs you have that start with the letter A and haven't been played in the last three weeks? Or all the songs you have that contain the word "Tuesday" in the title? You probably don't want such a list, but if you did, both are only a few clicks away. Since they're created on the fly when you load them, if you add new files that fit the criteria, next time you load the playlist, those tracks will be included. Other tricks: amaroK can play audio cd's using KDE's integrated audio ripper (also known as the "audiocd:/ kioslave"). Pop the CD into your drive, choose "Play Audio CD" from the actions menu, and you'll be shown the tracks on the disc in the form of wav files. Simply drag them to the amaroK playlist and you'll be cooking with sound. A playlist, despite it's name, is not just for playing music in amaroK. If you have k3b available, you can burn your playlists directly to CD from the context menu. You can also choose any album in the collection browser, and burn it directly to CD, in your choice of format. How about music you don't even have? The internet is full of streaming radio stations, and amaroK is happy to play those too. In fact, you an save them as playlists in the playlist window, and amaroK comes with a handful of radio station streams preconfigured in the "Cool Streams" playlist. [Sidebar: Choices] amaroK can play sound via several different "engines". The most common are aRts, gstreamer, and xine, and any of these should work fine for most people. The specific file formats that you can play depend mostly on the engine you choose, but all the common ones should be able to play the most common formats: mp3, ogg, and wav. They may also support less common formats such as flac and wma, and in addition to the above you may find your distribution has enabled support for other engines. Each of them have different methods of dealing with performance, (such as avoiding stutter) and different support for features such as crossfading between songs. While this sounds complicated, really any of the choices should work. Since you can change between engines at will, there's no harm in trying them all and experimenting which one works for you best. The other major choice you may need to make, is what kind of storage to use for the collection database. All the information collected needs to be stored somewhere, and you have two choices here. The default SQLite database engine is small and doesn't require a server or any extra configuration, it just works. However, if you have MySQL available and amaroK was installed with the MySQL support enabled, you can choose to use that instead, by providing the server information in the settings dialog. [Sidebar: Audioscrobbler] The suggestions feature of amaroK calls on the services of the AudioScrobbler service. This uses the collected listening habits of many thousands of people to create personalised recommendations of other music similar to what you're currently listening to. It's similar in principle to the "Other people who bought this product..." suggestions seen on commercial websites, but since it's based on what listeners are actually listening to, not what they might have purchased for grandma's birthday, the suggestions are often surprisingly accurate. You do not need to sign up for any service in order to use the suggestions feature, and just fetching suggestions does not submit any information about what you are playing. As might be obvious however, the more people who are submitting data, the more accurate the suggestions get over time, and this is especially true for less mainstream artists. To this end, amaroK can also submit your play history to the audioscrobbler service, if you choose to. You can set this up in the Settings dialog, and it can be enabled and disabled there as you wish. The data submitted is only your audioscrobbler user name, and the artist, track and album names for the songs played. There is no information sent indicating if you are playing a CD or an mp3 or any other format. If you do join audioscrobbler, why not sign up with the amaroK user group there too! [Further reading on the matter: http://www.audioscrobbler.com/help/ ] (I think this is probably worth mentioning, to allay privacy/spyware concerns.)