amaroK Review

I have always been skeptical of media players and music management softwares ... using a bare minimum player like xmms to play my digital music. I have tried to use quite a few of them, Rythmbox banshee and also giving a fair time to demo's of iTunes and Yahoo Music engine by excited mac and windows weenies.

So, when a friend came to me and said, try amaroK. I said, "Yeah! right!" and blew the idea out with a puff of smoke.

And then, yesterday morning I got stuck in a traffic jam and as a result I didn't feel like writing any kind of code. So, I decided to install amaroK :) Installing it on FreeBSD 4.11 could be only covered under a full fledge technical orientation session. It might scare many people so we will not dwell into the perils of using FreeBSD.

After I installed amaroK was I blown? or was I blown?

The really cool thing about amaroK is, that you can install it and its ready to serve you in its full glory within a couple of minutes.

Tracks are imported into the "collection." The music collection is displayed in the left pane in a file manager like fashion. Tracks must be added to a playlist before one can hear them. There is a playlist tab which has "Smart Playlists" and of course you can create your own.

Unlike most application on Linux eye-candy is not overlooked here, but, actually given as much importance as usability and features. I specially like the "on-screen display" which comes up every time amaroK starts playing a new track, the mouse over on the task bar icon shows the name of the current playing song and also adds a little album cover. A lot of work has gone into creating such a visually appealing tool and it is an effort spent worthwhile.

amaroK copies the winamp/xmms shortcuts and does a better job of it. It adds xmms shortcuts it to a meta key of your choice and you've got "Global Shortcuts." Dont like the current song? dont have to get distracted and switch applications/virtual desktop and find amaroK to skip. Just press WIN+B :) sweet?

And did I tell you it gives you lyrics of the current song in a little box? did I tell you it also does musicminds recommendation? maybe I forgot about the fact that it also looks wikipedia on the artist and shows the information in a little box. and yes I forgot to mention that it automatically downloads album covers from amazon.

I really like amaroK and am really looking forward to 1.4. What I particularly like about amaroK, is, cover/lyrics/tag fetching, the potential value of dynamic mode and its iPod support, of course.

I have linux on my laptop and its also running amaroK now. I noticed that gstreamer is a whole lot more stable than arts, since arts is a piece of junk and unmaintained and comes with overhead.

Some features I'd love to have in it.

1. Burn Playlist.
2. Configurablity for where to get lyrics from.
3. Digging out wikiquotes/wikipedia info and scroll it where the song name traditionally scrolls

Amarok appears to be written by hackers who themselves are truly fond of music. amaroK is a increasingly attractive and capable tool and these guys are just getting their hands warmed up. Cheers! to you guys, you know who you are *clink* *clink*