[Review] amaroK 1.2

By g-n-t
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amaroK 1.2 Review

amaroK 1.2 final has been released recently. This will be my first review. I took a bunch of screenshots for it too :p.

Intro:

amarok is an audio player for KDE. However, it runs on just about any window manager, provided the correct libraries are there(kdelibs and taglib are the most important). Compared to 1.1, amarok 1.2 is much more stable and the interface has been greatly improved.

amarok24ex.th.jpg

The Player Window:

amarok has two modes. One is the player as seen in the screenshot above, and the other is the playlist window. For now, we will focus on the player window. The player has 8 visualizations. Three of them are openGL. In addition to these, amaroK has support for xmms visualizations. The one below is called Infinity.

amarok39uq.th.png

It is also worth noting that the embeded ones can be detached from the player window. The one below is an example of one of the openGL ones.

amarok42bk.th.png

amaroK 1.2 introduces an equalizer. It was disapointing to see that it does not have support for presets, however.

amarok59cg.th.png

Another new feature in amaroK is support for scripts. Honestly, I have not yet taken the time to find out what these do and how far they can go. Here is a screenshot with the about box of the alarm script that is included with it. The other two are pretty self-explanatory.

amarok63no.th.png

All these features are accessible with the right-click menu

amarok79xa.th.jpg

The Playlist Window:

This is where the bulk of amaroK's features are. It is worth noting that you can choose not to use the player window and use this as the default amaroK interface.

This is what you see when playing a song. The pane on the right is your playlist(more on those later) and the pane on the left is the context browser. The brain picture next to the album will open up a browser window displaying information about the album in musicbrainz.com. The box labeled "suggested songs" uses infromation from audioscrobbler.com to suggest songs from your collection to you. There is an option to have these suggested songs automatically append to your playlist. The one below that displays your favourite songs by the current artist. Rating of songs is based off of how many times they are played. If you skip a song, it's rating will go down. Further down, there is a box containing all the albums by the artist(with a matching album cover next to the title). If you click the title of the album, it expands and lists all the songs in the album. You can add songs to your playlist from here.

amarok112tm.th.png

The "Home" tab lists your favourite songs, your newest tracks and your least played tracks.

amarok125uw.th.png

The third tab is the most interesting to me. It is the "Lyrics" tab. Due to copyright issues, the lyrics cannot be saved locally and have to be downloaded every time. The lyrics are automatically downloaded and displayed when the tab is clicked. It uses information found in the meta tags in a song file to search for the lyrics.

amarok139hy.th.png

After the context browser, comes the "Collection" pane. To use this, you specify folders for amarok to search for music in and it automatically imports them and organizes them for you.

amarok150fc.th.png

amaroK has an album cover manager built in. It uses amazon.com(or a custom site) to search for covers. Clicking the "Fetch Missing Covers" button downloads covers for all your albums and applies them. Like the playlist, the album manager too has a Filter box.

amarok141td.th.png

amaroK can import playlists and automatically adds them to your "Playlists" pane. You will also notice the "Cool-Streams" playlist. This allows you to listen to streaming internet radio.

Another major feature is "Smart Playlists". These are similair to the ones in iTunes. They can create playlists based on criteria like ratings, dates, genre and etc. You can create your own custom smart playlists. The following screenshot also shows the "Filter" functionality in the playlist i had mentioned earlier.

amarok171bg.th.png

The next pane is the "Media Device" pane. I personally do not have a portable mp3 player, so i was unable to test this feature. However, it looks very straight-forward. Yes, it does support the iPod(need gtkpod installed) as well as other mp3 players.

amarok180ub.th.png

The final pane is a file browser. It is just a file browser with search funtionality to search for songs. I don't think it needs a screenshot...

Configuration:

amaroK has very good configuration options and the Preferences page is not too complex.

amarok88fb.th.png

The Appearance tab allows you to choose colors for amaroK as well as fonts. amarok 1.2 has added support to "skin" the left-hand pane using CSS.

Playback options allows you to set the startup volume and crossfading options.

The OSD is a small box that appears temporarilly on top of your other windows displaying information about the currently playing song. Here you can customize colors, fonts and display duration.

The Engine tab allows you to choose the ouput engine. I use xine and it is the highest quality sound i have ever heard. Other engines in linux had poor sound output. xine is as good as any windows mp3 player I have used. The other engine that you may use with great sound quality is the GStreamer engine. I do not have it installed however, so i cannot comment much. You may also choose the arts engine, which sounds horrible next to xine, but your mileage may vary.

amarok95fi.th.png

The Collection tab allows you to configure which folders are scanned for music.

The Scrobbler tab allows you to configure audioscrobbler.com options. amaroK 1.2 is the first mp3 player that comes with out-of-box support for audioscrobbler. For those that don't know, audioscrobbler allows you to upload the songs you play to their site and it recommends songs to you(plugins for most other popular mp3 players are available at their site). Here you can type in your username and password and say whether you want to upload your songs and whether you want amaroK to recommend songs to you.

amarok105xd.th.png

Well that about wraps it up. Honestly, i have to give amaroK a perfect 10. I cannot find much wrong with the application, and unlike previous versions, 1.2 is very stable and bug-free. The amaroK devs have done a wonderful job with it.

You can download it at amarok.kde.org

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https://www.neowin.net/forum/topic/287189-review-amarok-12/
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