Amarok (pronounced /ˈæmərɒk/)^[2] is a free software Free software, software libre or libre software is software that can be used, studied, and modified without restriction, and which can be copied and redistributed in modified or unmodified form either without restriction, or with minimal restrictions only to ensure that further recipients can also do these things and that manufacturers of consumer- music player for Linux Linux refers to the family of Unix-like computer operating systems using the Linux kernel. Linux can be installed on a wide variety of computer hardware, ranging from mobile phones, tablet computers and video game consoles, to mainframes and supercomputers. Linux is predominantly known for its use in servers; in 2009 it held a server market share and other varieties of Unix A Unix-like operating system is one that behaves in a manner similar to a Unix system, while not necessarily conforming to or being certified to any version of the Single UNIX Specification, as well as Windows since version 2.0 (through KDE for Windows). It makes use of the KDE Platform KDE is an international free software community producing an integrated set of cross-platform applications designed to run on Linux, FreeBSD, Windows, Solaris and Mac OS X systems. It is best known for its Plasma Desktop workspace, a desktop environment provided as the default working environment on many Linux distributions, such as openSUSE,, but is released independently of the central KDE release cycle.

A new major version of Amarok, version 2.0, was released on December 12, 2008, which was a complete æsthetic and functional redesign of Amarok 1.4. On June 3, 2009, version 2.1 was released which reintroduced a few of the 1.4 features which had been missing from the initial 2.0 release, and introduced some features such as native Replay Gain support for the first time.^[3]

History

The project was originally started by Mark Kretschmann as a means of improving XMMS The X Multimedia System is a free software audio player very similar to Winamp, that runs on many Unix-like operating systems due to several usability problems, which interfered with the addition of new files to the playlist due to several user interface elements existing for one task. The original amaroK was created based upon the idea of a two-pane interface seen in Midnight Commander GNU Midnight Commander is a free cross-platform orthodox file manager and a clone of Norton Commander, and the first version of the software released solely by Kretschmann, was based upon the ideal of allowing users to drag-and-drop music into an interface in which the playlist was displayed on the right and information on the left.

After the initial release of AmaroK, several developers joined the project to form the "Three M's" the first of whom was Max Howell, who acted as an interface designer and programmer for the project, alongside Muesli (Christian Muehlhaeuser), who also provided user interface insight and programming till the late 1.4 versions.

Amarok 1.4 established a reputation for innovation after its release, but maintaining development with the old framework became more difficult as Amarok grew. With the release of KDE4 the developers decided to give Amarok a complete overhaul aesthetically as well as functionally leading to the birth of a new media player named Amarok 2.

Originally named amaroK, it was renamed to Amarok in June 2006.

Amarok Logo

Despite the fact that Amarok uses wolf-based artwork, and that the name "amarok" or "amaroq" literally refers to the Inuktitut Inuktitut (Inuktitut syllabics: ᐃᓄᒃᑎᑐᑦ , literally "like an Inuk") is the name of some of the Inuit languages spoken in Canada. It is spoken in all areas north of the tree line, including parts of the provinces of Newfoundland and Labrador, Québec, to some extent in northeastern Manitoba as well as the territories of Nunavut, word for "wolf The grey wolf , often known simply as the wolf, is the largest wild member of the Canidae family. Though once abundant over much of Eurasia and North America, the grey wolf inhabits a reduced portion of its former range due to widespread destruction of its territory, human encroachment, and the resulting human-wolf encounters that sparked broad", it was originally named after the album Amarok by Mike Oldfield Michael Gordon "Mike" Oldfield is an English multi-instrumentalist musician and composer, working a style that blends progressive rock, folk, ethnic or world music, classical music, electronic music, New Age, and more recently, dance. His music is often elaborate and complex in nature. He is best known for his hit 1973 album Tubular. The 1.2 release originally had a wolf icon, but this was later withdrawn due to similarity with the logo of WaRP Graphics Inc. Amarok's wolf logo has now been modified sufficiently so as not to infringe on WaRP's trademarked logo, and reinstated.

Development goals

Amarok's tagline is "Rediscover Your Music", and its development is based around this ideology. Amarok's core features such as the unique "context browser", integrated Wikipedia Wikipedia is a free, web-based, collaborative, multilingual encyclopedia project supported by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Its 15 million articles have been written collaboratively by volunteers around the world, and almost all of its articles can be edited by anyone with access to the site. Wikipedia was launched in 2001 by Jimmy Wales lookup and lyrics download help users to find new music, and to learn more about the music they have. Amarok also features integration with last.fm Last.fm is a popular Internet radio site for streaming music, founded in the United Kingdom in 2002. It claims over 40 million active users based in more than 200 countries. On 30 May 2007, CBS Interactive acquired Last.fm for £140m, giving users suggestions about what to listen to next and which artists may fit their mood, as well as with Magnatune integration, allowing no-cost full listening of all the music in their catalog, and DRM Digital rights management is a generic term for access control technologies that can be used by hardware manufacturers, publishers, copyright holders and individuals to impose limitations on the usage of digital content and devices. The term is used to describe any technology that inhibits uses of digital content not desired or intended by the-free purchasing.

Features

Basic uses and functions

Amarok serves many functions in addition to the basic function of 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 by keeping play count statistics.

Although a more technical list of features is listed below, here are the primary functions or uses for Amarok:

• Playing media files in various formats including but not limited to (depending on the setup) FLAC Free Lossless Audio Codec is an audio compression codec primarily authored by Josh Coalson. As its name implies, FLAC employs a lossless data compression algorithm: a digital audio recording compressed by FLAC can be decompressed into an identical copy of the original audio data. Audio sources encoded to FLAC are typically reduced to 50–60% of, Ogg Ogg is a free, open standard container format maintained by the Xiph.Org Foundation. The creators of the Ogg format claim that it is unrestricted by software patents and is designed to provide for efficient streaming and manipulation of high quality digital multimedia, MP3 MPEG-1 Audio Layer 3 or MPEG-2 Audio Layer 3 or MPEG-1 or 2 Audio Layer III, more commonly referred to as MP3, is a patented digital audio encoding format using a form of lossy data compression. It is a common audio format for consumer audio storage, as well as a de facto standard of digital audio compression for the transfer and playback of music, AAC Advanced Audio Coding is a standardized, lossy compression and encoding scheme for digital audio. Designed to be the successor of the MP3 format, AAC generally achieves better sound quality than MP3 at similar bit rates, WAV WAVE or WAV, short for Waveform Audio File Format, is a Microsoft and IBM audio file format standard for storing an audio bitstream on PCs. It is an application of the RIFF bitstream format method for storing data in “chunks”, and thus is also close to the 8SVX and the AIFF format used on Amiga and Macintosh computers, respectively. It is the, Windows Media Audio Windows Media Audio is an audio data compression technology developed by Microsoft. The name can be used to refer to its audio file format or its audio codecs. It is a proprietary technology that forms part of the Windows Media framework. WMA consists of four distinct codecs. The original WMA codec, known simply as WMA, was conceived as a, Apple Lossless Apple Lossless is an audio codec developed by Apple Inc. for lossless data compression of digital music, WavPack WavPack is a free, open source lossless audio compression format developed by David Bryant, TTA True Audio is a free, real-time lossless audio codec, based on adaptive prognostic filters. Also, .tta is the generic extension to filenames of audio files created by True Audio codec and Musepack Musepack or MPC is an open source lossy audio codec, specifically optimized for transparent compression of stereo audio at bitrates of 160–180 kbit/s. It was formerly known as MPEGplus, MPEG+ or MP+. Amarok does not play digital music files embedded with DRM Digital rights management is a generic term for access control technologies that can be used by hardware manufacturers, publishers, copyright holders and individuals to impose limitations on the usage of digital content and devices. The term is used to describe any technology that inhibits uses of digital content not desired or intended by the.
• Tagging digital music files (currently FLAC Free Lossless Audio Codec is an audio compression codec primarily authored by Josh Coalson. As its name implies, FLAC employs a lossless data compression algorithm: a digital audio recording compressed by FLAC can be decompressed into an identical copy of the original audio data. Audio sources encoded to FLAC are typically reduced to 50–60% of, Ogg Ogg is a free, open standard container format maintained by the Xiph.Org Foundation. The creators of the Ogg format claim that it is unrestricted by software patents and is designed to provide for efficient streaming and manipulation of high quality digital multimedia, WMA Windows Media Audio is an audio data compression technology developed by Microsoft. The name can be used to refer to its audio file format or its audio codecs. It is a proprietary technology that forms part of the Windows Media framework. WMA consists of four distinct codecs. The original WMA codec, known simply as WMA, was conceived as a, AAC Advanced Audio Coding is a standardized, lossy compression and encoding scheme for digital audio. Designed to be the successor of the MP3 format, AAC generally achieves better sound quality than MP3 at similar bit rates, MP3 MPEG-1 Audio Layer 3 or MPEG-2 Audio Layer 3 or MPEG-1 or 2 Audio Layer III, more commonly referred to as MP3, is a patented digital audio encoding format using a form of lossy data compression. It is a common audio format for consumer audio storage, as well as a de facto standard of digital audio compression for the transfer and playback of music, and RealMedia RealMedia is a proprietary multimedia container format created by RealNetworks. Its extension is ".rm". It is typically used in conjunction with RealVideo and RealAudio and is used for streaming content over the Internet).
• Associating cover art with a particular album, and retrieving the cover art from Amazon Amazon.com, Inc. is an American-based multinational electronic commerce company. Headquartered in Seattle, Washington, it is America's largest online retailer, with nearly three times the Internet sales revenue of the runner up, Staples, Inc., as of January 2010
• Creating and editing playlists, including smart and dynamic playlists. The dynamic playlists can use such information as the "score" given to a song by an Amarok script, and the playcount which is stored with the song.
• Synchronizing, retrieving, playing, or uploading music to the following digital music players: iPod The iPod is a portable media player designed and marketed by Apple and launched on October 23, 2001. As of June 2010, the product line-up includes the hard drive-based iPod Classic, the touchscreen iPod Touch, the video-capable iPod Nano, and the compact iPod Shuffle. Former iPod models include the iPod Mini and the spin-off iPod Photo . iPod, iriver iriver is a consumer electronics company headquartered in Milwaukee, Wisconsin and widely known for its digital audio players and other portable media devices iFP, Creative NOMAD The NOMAD was a range of digital audio players designed and sold by Creative Technology, and later discontinued in 2004. Subsequent players now fall exclusively under the MuVo and ZEN brands, Creative ZEN The Creative ZEN is a range of digital audio players (DAPs) and portable media players (PMPs) made by Creative Technology. The players evolved from the now-defunct NOMAD brand through the NOMAD Jukebox series. Three of its players won the Best of CES award from 2004 to 2006 in their respective categories, with one winning the overall award. The, MTP The Media Transfer Protocol is a devised set of custom extensions to the Picture Transfer Protocol . Whereas PTP was designed for downloading photographs from digital cameras, Media Transfer Protocol supports the transfer of music files on digital audio players and movie files on portable media players, Rio Karma and USB Universal Serial Bus is a specification to establish communication between devices and a host controller (usually personal computers), developed and invented by Ajay Bhatt while working for Intel. USB is intended to replace many varieties of serial and parallel ports. USB can connect computer peripherals such as mice, keyboards, digital cameras, devices with VFAT File Allocation Table or FAT is a computer file system architecture now widely used on many computer systems and most memory cards, such as those used with digital cameras. FAT file systems are commonly found on floppy disks, flash memory cards, digital cameras, and many other portable devices because of their relative simplicity. Performance of (generic MP3 players) support.
• Displaying artist information from Wikipedia and retrieving song lyrics.
• Last.fm Last.fm is a popular Internet radio site for streaming music, founded in the United Kingdom in 2002. It claims over 40 million active users based in more than 200 countries. On 30 May 2007, CBS Interactive acquired Last.fm for £140m support, including submitting played tracks (including those played on some digital music players) to Last.fm, retrieving similar artists and playing Last.fm streams.
• Podcast A podcast is a series of digital media files (either audio or video) that are released episodically and often downloaded through web syndication. The word usurped webcast in common vernacular, due to rising popularity of the iPod and the innovation of web feeds

From version 1.4.4, Amarok introduced the integration of Magnatune, a non-DRM Digital rights management is a generic term for access control technologies that can be used by hardware manufacturers, publishers, copyright holders and individuals to impose limitations on the usage of digital content and devices. The term is used to describe any technology that inhibits uses of digital content not desired or intended by the digital music store, enabling users to purchase music in Ogg Ogg is a free, open standard container format maintained by the Xiph.Org Foundation. The creators of the Ogg format claim that it is unrestricted by software patents and is designed to provide for efficient streaming and manipulation of high quality digital multimedia, FLAC Free Lossless Audio Codec is an audio compression codec primarily authored by Josh Coalson. As its name implies, FLAC employs a lossless data compression algorithm: a digital audio recording compressed by FLAC can be decompressed into an identical copy of the original audio data. Audio sources encoded to FLAC are typically reduced to 50–60% of, WAV WAVE or WAV, short for Waveform Audio File Format, is a Microsoft and IBM audio file format standard for storing an audio bitstream on PCs. It is an application of the RIFF bitstream format method for storing data in “chunks”, and thus is also close to the 8SVX and the AIFF format used on Amiga and Macintosh computers, respectively. It is the and MP3 MPEG-1 Audio Layer 3 or MPEG-2 Audio Layer 3 or MPEG-1 or 2 Audio Layer III, more commonly referred to as MP3, is a patented digital audio encoding format using a form of lossy data compression. It is a common audio format for consumer audio storage, as well as a de facto standard of digital audio compression for the transfer and playback of music formats.

Some of these features depend on other programs or libraries that must be installed on the computer to operate.

More technical features

• Three main window panes: playlist browser,collection and player window.
• Systray (panel notification area) icon support.
• Song collection, which includes specific folders on the filesystem.
  • Searching Files/Artists/Album/Genre in Collection can be performed using Simple and Advanced options
• Intelligent Playlists support(Dynamic Playlists)
• Integration with online services such as Magnatune, Jamendo, MP3tunes Michael Robertson is the founder and former CEO of MP3.com, which quickly became one of the most popular Internet music sites. In the years following his departure from MP3.com, Robertson launched several small start-up companies, including Linspire, SIPphone, MP3tunes, and Ajax 13, Last.fm Last.fm is a popular Internet radio site for streaming music, founded in the United Kingdom in 2002. It claims over 40 million active users based in more than 200 countries. On 30 May 2007, CBS Interactive acquired Last.fm for £140m and Shoutcast SHOUTcast is cross-platform proprietary software for streaming media over the Internet. SHOUTcast Radio is a related web site which provides a directory of SHOUTcast servers. The software, developed by Nullsoft, allows digital audio content, primarily in MP3 or HE-AAC format, to be broadcast to and from media player software, enabling the creation^[4].
• Songs can be rated both dynamically (based on how much the song is played) and by hand (giving rating of 1-5 stars to the song).
• Amarok File Tracking (since 1.4.3): Stores file checksum in the collection. This allows the file be moved around in the filesystem without Amarok losing track of the song statistics.
• Collection filter (newest songs, highest rated, most played, etc.).
• Support for Phonon engine. The audio engine also dictates which media types Amarok can play.
• Support for moodbars.
• Uses TagLib for tags.
• Amarok can be controlled via D-Bus In computing, D-Bus is a simple inter-process communication (IPC) system for software applications to communicate with one another. Heavily influenced by KDE2–3's DCOP system, D-Bus has replaced DCOP in the KDE 4 release. Most POSIX operating systems support D-Bus, and a port for Windows exists. It is used by Qt 4 and GNOME. In GNOME it has.
• Amarok Scripts, for example, when writing lyrics fetching plugins, can be written in QtScript The scripting language is based on the ECMAScript standard with a couple deviations and extensions. The library contains the engine, and a C++ API for evaluating QtScript code and exposing custom QObject-derived C++ classes to QtScript.

Amarok 2.0

Amarok 2 was released on 10 December 2008 bringing along a plethora of new features, but still less than Amarok 1.4, spawning considerable discussion, and a completely redesigned interface. New features include:

• Tight integration with online services such as Magnatune, Jamendo, MP3tunes, Last.fm Last.fm is a popular Internet radio site for streaming music, founded in the United Kingdom in 2002. It claims over 40 million active users based in more than 200 countries. On 30 May 2007, CBS Interactive acquired Last.fm for £140m and Shoutcast.
• Completely overhauled scripting API and plugin support to allow better integration into Amarok.
• Migration from the KDE 3 to KDE 4 framework, and utilization of core technologies such as Solid, Phonon, and Plasma.

The user interface has been redesigned to make context information like lyrics and albums from the same artist more catchy, accessible and allows the user to decide which information is available by adding applets to the Context View in the middle. The new Biased Playlists offer a way to let Amarok take care of the playlist in an intelligent way similar to Dynamic Playlists in previous versions. New services can easily be added via GetHotNewStuff in Amarok or from kde-apps.org. The migration to the KDE 4 framework allows Amarok 2 to make use of technologies like Plasma, Phonon, and Solid which make Amarok easier to use and maintain.

Changes Since 1.4

• Service Framework: This integrates networked music sources directly into Amarok. This includes online music stores, media servers, Web music lockers, and more. Due to this the users will be able to get easy access to music provided by Magnatune, Jamendo, Last.fm, MP3Tunes Locker and Ampache.
• Biased Playlists : Biased Playlists extend the old Dynamic Playlists. They allow users to define an automatically populated playlist, based on specific probability driven criteria called "biases".
• Context View: This view occupies the central place of the Amarok's window, replacing the old Context Browser from the 1.x series. It displays contextual information about the music one plays, like the album cover, track rating, labels, lyrics, artist information, related songs and artists and track mood.
• Other Features : Additional changes in Amarok 2.0 include new SVG-based scalable theme, advanced scripting, dynamic collections, usability changes, updated media device handling, new podcast manager and support for more software platforms.

Forks and Variations

• Pana is a fork of Amarok 1.4. The intention is to keep the original program alive. Website Launchpad Site
• Amarok Live was a live CD Linux distribution with the sole purpose to demonstrate Amarok. Website
• Clementine is a port of Amarok 1.4 to the Qt 4 framework. Website

Release History

See also

• Comparison of audio player software
• Exaile

References

1. ^ SourceForge.net
2. ^ "Amarok: Call for Jingle, July 06 2007". http://ccmixter.org/media/thread/1095#25856.
3. ^ Prior versions of Amarok required a third-party plugin for Replay Gain functionality.
4. ^ Shoutcast support is no longer officially included in version 2.2 and above due to licensing issues.
5. ^ http://ljubomir.simin.googlepages.com/awnissue10 full list here
6. ^ http://amarok.kde.org/en/releases/2.0.1.1 full list here
7. ^ http://amarok.kde.org/en/releases/2.0.2 2.02 release notes
8. ^ http://amarok.kde.org/en/releases/2.1
9. ^ http://amarok.kde.org/en/releases/2.1.1
10. ^ http://amarok.kde.org/en/releases/2.2
11. ^ http://amarok.kde.org/en/releases/2.2.1
12. ^ http://amarok.kde.org/en/releases/2.2.2
13. ^ http://amarok.kde.org/en/releases/2.3.0

External links

• Amarok homepage
• #amarok on freenode

Categories: KDE | 2003 software | Free audio software | KDE Extragear | Linux media players | Online music database clients | Free media players | MusicBrainz clients | Podcasting software | Jukebox-style media players | Free software programmed in C++ | Free multilingual software | Applications using D-Bus | Software that uses Qt

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