Navaho Gunleg

Introduction
Yesterday I was upgrading the KDE and noticed the media player ‘Amarok‘. I did look at this a long time ago but forgot all about it. Actually, when I saw the package I initially mistook it for the Amusing Mis-use Of Resources….

Amarok’s main screen while playing media; the right panel showing the playlist and the left
panel, on the Context-tab, showing track information and any related albums, tracks or artists.

Anyways, I installed it and was, like, amazed at what it does. It delivers all that it promises and gives one a real new experience listening to music (and getting to know about the artists, etcetera).

Music Selection
After specifying where your MP3 collection resides, you can easily browse through your whole collection. Because the artists and albums are grouped, any errors in the MP3 tags stand-out and thus are easily modified. There’s a major typo in a whole subdirectory of songs? No problem, this program supports changing the tags of multiple MP3 tags in one go.

One of the nice features is the ability to search through your collection to find files that contain a specific word, for instance ‘free‘:

With a few clicks of a button the results can then be added to your playlist.

Lyrics
In the Context-tab there are a couple of tabs which by default shows the Music tab. On this tab you can see the rating for currently played songs and other contextual information. There’s a couple of other tabs as well.

For instance, the Lyrics-tab. After specifying what script to use (Lyrc is just fine), you can quickly look up the lyrics for currently played song. Pretty nice if you mis-hear stuff and want to know what’s said.

Artist
The Artist tab will load the Wikipedia article if it is present. Of course, if it isn’t, you could use your Wikipedia account to update it.

Remote Music Collections
It is possible to connect ‘Media Players’ to Amarok which it can then play music of. The nice thing is, that this doesn’t necessary have to be a real device.

For instance, on my home-network I have got a NAS that contains all our media. If you have a similar set-up, you can add the remote resource as a Media Player, like so:

Note that I specify it as aGeneric Audio Player this device. After having added this, you can specify a Post-Connect and a Pre-Disconnect command:

When you close the Amarok settings dialog, a new button will have appeared on the left panel, ‘Media Devices‘. If you click it, you can select on of the configured media players and can press the Connect-button. Having specified the mount and umount commands, pressing Connect and Disconnect should automagically mount it.

The moment it has been mounted, you can browse the collection, play music from it and copy it to your local filesystem.

iPod Integration
I was already accustomed to using the utility ‘retune.py‘ to update my girlfriends’ iPod Nano. That utility converts the database on the iPod to a ‘human-readable’ directory structure which one can easily manage. If one is done managing the music on the iPod, the utility simply has to be run again and it will convert the information back to the format that the iPod’s software understand.

So that was already possible, but I really lacked a decent user-interface to perform copy, move and renaming operations in.

Looking around Amarok, I discovered that this too can easily be integrated by specifying the mount and retune.py as Post-Connect, and retune.py umount as the Pre-Disconnect command. Take into account that retune.py might take up quite a lot of time depending on your USB speed. As the Pre-Disconnect commands don’t show any progress on screen, this might be a little irritating.

Conclusion
All in all this media player is very, very nice. The integration of Wikipedia for artist and albums lookups; and Lyrc for lyric searches really sets this media player apart from the others I’ve found.

I’m giving this thing a well-deserved 8 / 10.

Amarok, Media Players, KDE, Linux