Amarok is a

free and open-source Free and open-source software (FOSS) is a term used to refer to groups of software consisting of both free software and open-source software where anyone is freely licensed to use, copy, study, and change the software in any way, and the source ...

music player. It is available for

Unix-like A Unix-like (sometimes referred to as UN*X or *nix) operating system is one that behaves in a manner similar to a Unix system, although not necessarily conforming to or being certified to any version of the Single UNIX Specification. A Unix-li ...

, as well as for

Windows Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for serv ...

and

macOS macOS (; previously OS X and originally Mac OS X) is a Unix operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc. since 2001. It is the primary operating system for Apple's Mac computers. Within the market of desktop and lapt ...

systems. Although Amarok is part of the KDE project, it is released independently of the central

KDE Software Compilation The KDE Software Compilation (KDE SC) was an umbrella term for the desktop environment plus a range of included applications produced by KDE. From its 1.0 release in July 1998 until the release of version 4.4 in February 2010, the Software Compi ...

release cycle. Amarok is released under the terms of the GPL-2.0-or-later.

History

The project was originally started by Mark Kretschmann as a means of improving

XMMS X Multimedia System (XMMS) is an audio player (software), audio player for Unix-like systems released under a free software license. History XMMS was originally written as ''X11Amp'' by Peter and Mikael Alm in November 1997. The player was made t ...

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 (also known as mc, the command used to start it, and as mouseless commander in older versions) is a free cross-platform orthodox file manager. It was started by Miguel de Icaza in 1994 as a clone of the then-popular Nor ...

, 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. The program was originally named AmaroK after a

Mike Oldfield Mike may refer to: Animals * Mike (cat), cat and guardian of the British Museum * Mike the Headless Chicken, chicken that lived for 18 months after his head had been cut off * Mike (chimpanzee), a chimpanzee featured in several books and documen ...

album of the same name. Later the artwork changed to reference Amarok, a wolf in

Inuit mythology Inuit religion is the shared spiritual beliefs and practices of the Inuit, an indigenous people from Alaska, northern Canada, parts of Siberia and Greenland. Their religion shares many similarities with some Alaska Native religions. Traditional I ...

. The app's capitalization was changed to Amarok in June 2006. A new major version of Amarok, version 2.0, was released on December 12, 2008. 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

ReplayGain ReplayGain is a proposed technical standard published by David Robinson in 2001 to measure and normalize the perceived loudness of audio in computer audio formats such as MP3 and Ogg Vorbis. It allows media players to normalize loudness for indi ...

support for the first time.

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 FLAC (; Free Lossless Audio Codec) is an audio coding format for lossless compression of digital audio, developed by the Xiph.Org Foundation, and is also the name of the free software project producing the FLAC tools, the reference software p ...

Ogg Ogg is a free, open container format maintained by the Xiph.Org Foundation. The authors of the Ogg format state that it is unrestricted by software patents and is designed to provide for efficient streaming and manipulation of high-quality d ...

Opus ''Opus'' (pl. ''opera'') is a Latin word meaning "work". Italian equivalents are ''opera'' (singular) and ''opere'' (pl.). Opus or OPUS may refer to: Arts and entertainment Music * Opus number, (abbr. Op.) specifying order of (usually) publicatio ...

MP3 MP3 (formally MPEG-1 Audio Layer III or MPEG-2 Audio Layer III) is a coding format for digital audio developed largely by the Fraunhofer Society in Germany, with support from other digital scientists in the United States and elsewhere. Origin ...

AAC AAC may refer to: Aviation * Advanced Aircraft, a company from Carlsbad, California * Alaskan Air Command, a radar network * American Aeronautical Corporation, a company from Port Washington, New York * American Aviation, a company from Cleveland, ...

WAV Waveform Audio File Format (WAVE, or WAV due to its filename extension; pronounced "wave") is an audio file format standard, developed by IBM and Microsoft, for storing an audio bitstream on PCs. It is the main format used on Microsoft Wind ...

Windows Media Audio Windows Media Audio (WMA) is a series of audio codecs and their corresponding audio coding formats developed by Microsoft. It is a proprietary technology that forms part of the Windows Media framework. WMA consists of four distinct codecs. The or ...

Apple Lossless The Apple Lossless Audio Codec (ALAC), also known as Apple Lossless, or Apple Lossless Encoder (ALE), is an audio coding format, and its reference audio codec implementation, developed by Apple Inc. for lossless data compression of digital music. ...

WavPack WavPack is a free and open-source lossless audio compression format and application implementing the format. It is unique in the way that it supports hybrid audio compression alongside normal compression which is similar to how FLAC works. I ...

TTA TTA may refer to *Tan Tan Airport, Morocco, IATA code *Teacher Training Agency, former name of the Training and Development Agency for Schools, England * Technical Theatre Awards, UK *Terran Trade Authority, the setting for a series of science-fict ...

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 (manual set allows bitrates up to 320) kbit/s. It was formerly known as MPEGplus, MPEG+ or MP+. ...

. Amarok does not play digital music files embedded with

DRM DRM may refer to: Government, military and politics * Defense reform movement, U.S. campaign inspired by Col. John Boyd * Democratic Republic of Madagascar, a former socialist state (1975–1992) on Madagascar * Direction du renseignement militai ...

. * Tagging digital music files (currently

Ogg Vorbis Vorbis is a free and open-source software project headed by the Xiph.Org Foundation. The project produces an audio coding format and software reference encoder/decoder (codec) for lossy audio compression. Vorbis is most commonly used in conjun ...

, WMA,

, and

RealMedia RealMedia is a proprietary multimedia container format created by RealNetworks with the filename extension . RealMedia is generally used in conjunction with RealVideo and RealAudio, while also being used for streaming content over the Internet. T ...

). * Associating cover art with a particular album and retrieving the cover art from

Amazon Amazon most often refers to: * Amazons, a tribe of female warriors in Greek mythology * Amazon rainforest, a rainforest covering most of the Amazon basin * Amazon River, in South America * Amazon (company), an American multinational technology c ...

. * 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 play count which is stored in the database. * Synchronizing, retrieving, playing, or uploading music to the following digital music players:

iPod The iPod is a discontinued series of portable media players and multi-purpose mobile devices designed and marketed by Apple Inc. The first version was released on October 23, 2001, about months after the Macintosh version of iTunes ...

, iriver iFP,

Creative NOMAD The NOMAD was a range of digital audio players designed and sold by Creative Technology Limited, and later discontinued in 2004. Subsequent players now fall exclusively under the MuVo and ZEN brands. The NOMAD series consisted of two distinct bran ...

Creative ZEN ZEN is a series of discontinued portable media players designed and manufactured by Creative Technology Limited. The players evolved from the NOMAD brand through the NOMAD Jukebox series of music players, with the first separate "ZEN" branded mo ...

, MTP,

Rio Karma The Rio Karma is a digital audio player originally made by the now-defunct Rio. It was released in August 2003. It measures 2.7 × 3 × 0.9 inches (6.9 × 7.6 × 2.3 cm) and weighs 5.5 ounces (160 grams). It has a 20 gigabyte (18.6 gibiby ...

and

USB Universal Serial Bus (USB) is an industry standard that establishes specifications for cables, connectors and protocols for connection, communication and power supply (interfacing) between computers, peripherals and other computers. A broad v ...

devices with

VFAT File Allocation Table (FAT) is a file system developed for personal computers. Originally developed in 1977 for use on floppy disks, it was adapted for use on hard disks and other devices. It is often supported for compatibility reasons by c ...

(generic MP3 players) support. * Displaying artist information from Wikipedia and retrieving song lyrics. *

Last.fm Last.fm is a music website founded in the United Kingdom in 2002. Using a music recommender system called "Audioscrobbler", Last.fm builds a detailed profile of each user's musical taste by recording details of the tracks the user listens to, e ...

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 program made available in digital format for download over the Internet. For example, an episodic series of digital audio or video files that a user can download to a personal device to listen to at a time of their choosing ...

. From version 1.4.4, Amarok introduced the integration of

Magnatune Magnatune is an American independent record label based in Berkeley, California, founded in spring 2003. It only sold music for download through its website but added a print-CD-on-demand service in late 2004 and in October 2007 began selling co ...

, a non-

digital music store, enabling users to purchase music in

, and

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

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

Jamendo Jamendo is a Luxembourg-based music website and an open community of independent artists and music lovers. A subsidiary of Belgian company AudioValley, and Independent Management Entity (IME) since 2019. Originally, Jamendo was a music platform ...

MP3tunes Michael Robertson (born 1967) is the founder and former CEO of MP3.com, an Internet music site. In the years following his departure from MP3.com Robertson has launched several companies, including Linspire, SIPphone, MP3tunes, and Ajax13. He ...

and Shoutcast. * Songs can be rated both dynamically (based on how much the song is played) and by hand (giving a 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 to 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 backend of Phonon dictates which media types of Amarok can play and how they play. When using

Xine xine is a multimedia playback engine for Unix-like operating systems released under the GNU General Public License. xine is built around a shared library (xine-lib) that supports different frontend player applications. xine uses libraries ...

, Amarok supports crossfading, but not seeking in seek pointless FLAC files. When using

Gstreamer GStreamer is a pipeline-based multimedia framework that links together a wide variety of media processing systems to complete complex workflows. For instance, GStreamer can be used to build a system that reads files in one format, processes them, ...

, Amarok supports seeking and gapless playback, but not crossfading. * Support for

moodbar Moodbar is a computer visualization used for navigating within a piece of music or any other recording on a digital audio track. This is done with a commonly horizontal bar that is divided into vertical stripes. Each stripe has a colour combinati ...

s. * Uses TagLib for tags. * Amarok can be controlled via

D-Bus In computing, D-Bus (short for "Desktop Bus") is a message-oriented middleware mechanism that allows communication between multiple processes running concurrently on the same machine. D-Bus was developed as part of the freedesktop.org project, ...

. * Amarok Scripts, for example, when writing lyrics fetching plugins, can be written in

QtScript QtScript is a scripting engine that has been part of the Qt (framework), Qt cross-platform application framework since version 4.3.0. The scripting language is based on the ECMAScript standard with a few extensions, such as QObject-style signal a ...

Amarok 2.0

Amarok 2 was released on 10 December 2008. New features include: * Tight integration with online services such as

, MP3tunes,

and Shoutcast. * Completely overhauled scripting API and plugin support to allow better integration into Amarok. * Migration from the

KDE 3 K Desktop Environment 3 is the third series of releases of the K Desktop Environment (after that called ''KDE Software Compilation''). There are six major releases in this series. After the release of KDE 4, version 3.5 was forked into the Trinit ...

KDE Software Compilation 4 KDE Software Compilation 4 (KDE SC 4) was the only series of the so-called KDE Software Compilation (short: KDE SC), first released in January 2008 and the last release being 4.14.3 released in November 2014. It was the follow-up to K Desktop En ...

, and utilization of core technologies such as

Solid Solid is one of the State of matter#Four fundamental states, four fundamental states of matter (the others being liquid, gas, and Plasma (physics), plasma). The molecules in a solid are closely packed together and contain the least amount o ...

Phonon In physics, a phonon is a collective excitation in a periodic, Elasticity (physics), elastic arrangement of atoms or molecules in condensed matter physics, condensed matter, specifically in solids and some liquids. A type of quasiparticle, a phon ...

, and

Plasma Plasma or plasm may refer to: Science * Plasma (physics), one of the four fundamental states of matter * Plasma (mineral), a green translucent silica mineral * Quark–gluon plasma, a state of matter in quantum chromodynamics Biology * Blood pla ...

. The user interface had been redesigned to make context information like lyrics and albums from the same artist more accessible and allow the user to decide which information is available by adding applets to the Context View in the middle.

Changes since version 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 can get easy access to music provided by

, MP3Tunes Locker and

Ampache Ampache is a free software web-based audio file manager and media server. The name is a blend of the words "amplifier" and "Apache". It was originally written to take advantage of Apache's mod_mp3 module but has since been adapted to use its own s ...

. * 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 a 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

The transition from version 1.4 to version 2 was criticized by many users. As a consequence, some new projects have been established, based on Amarok version 1.4.x. * Amarok Live was a

live CD A live CD (also live DVD, live disc, or live operating system) is a complete bootable computer installation including operating system which runs directly from a CD-ROM or similar storage device into a computer's memory, rather than loading fro ...

Linux distribution A Linux distribution (often abbreviated as distro) is an operating system made from a software collection that includes the Linux kernel and, often, a package management system. Linux users usually obtain their operating system by downloading one ...

created as a co-promotion with magnatune.com to promote the idea of Free Software and Open Music. The self-bootable CD was distributed with songs mostly selected from the

library by the developers. *

Clementine A clementine (''Citrus × clementina'') is a tangor, a citrus fruit hybrid between a willowleaf mandarin orange ( ''C.'' × ''deliciosa'') and a sweet orange (''C. × sinensis''), named in honor of Clément Rodier, a French missionary who fir ...

is a fork of Amarok 1.4 to port it to the Qt 4 framework. *

Exaile Exaile is a cross-platform free and open-source audio player, tag editor and library organizer. It was originally conceived to be similar in style and functions to KDE's Amarok 1.4, but uses the GTK widget toolkit rather than Qt. It is writte ...

is a

GTK+ GTK (formerly GIMP ToolKit and GTK+) is a free and open-source cross-platform widget toolkit for creating graphical user interfaces (GUIs). It is licensed under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License, allowing both free and proprie ...

clone of Amarok 1.4. * Gereqi is a clone of Amarok 1.4, written in

PySide PySide is a Python binding of the cross-platform GUI toolkit Qt developed by The Qt Company, as part of the Qt for Python project. It is one of the alternatives to the standard library package Tkinter. Like Qt, PySide is free software. PySide sup ...

. * Pana was a fork of Amarok 1.4. The intention was to keep the original program alive. The author has now discontinued the project.

Release history

References

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Amarok (Software) 2003 software Applications using D-Bus Audio player software that uses Qt Extragear Free audio software Free media players Free multilingual software Free software programmed in C++ Jukebox-style media players KDE Applications Linux media players MacOS media players Online music database clients Windows multimedia software no:Liste over KDE-programmer#Amarok