14 DAY TRIAL // I was never a fan of music management software like Rhythmbox or Banshee. I always used to manage my music by myself, the old fashion way, in a lot of folders, by my own criteria. Then I just imported it in a light and very easy to use player like XMMS. It got stuck with me forever. I have always seen the AmaroK icon in the KDE menu, but it never aroused my curiosity until now. The first time I clicked the icon, a very nice wizard appeared and guided me into setting it up to be able to just play my music after that. When I saw this I just said WOW! If you point the wizard in the right directions, the tracks are automatically imported in the music collection.
The Interface
The music collection appears in the left pane of the program, in an explorer-like style. It is absolutely practical. From here you have to put them in a playlist and the best part is that it allows you to create such lists very quickly and with no hassle at all.
The playlist is located in the right side of the program and has a lot of advanced features such as "Smart Playlists". There is very nice feature called Dynamic Mode which enables AmaroK to automatically removed played items and add new ones that suit your taste.
One of the most important things that the developers haven?t forgotten is the eye candy. This is one of the best looking applications in Linux. Usually people who develop in Linux put accent on usability and features. AmaroK has seven different graphical analyzers which bring joy to my eyes. We should not forget the OSD, which is definitely the coolest I have ever seen in Linux. Every time the track is changed it displays the artist and song name and in the left side of the screen (it can display the cover of the album as well). It is highly customizable and also supports translucency.
AmaroK has built in ?Global Shortcuts?. Suppose that you are working hard in KDE?s Desktop number 2 and AmaroK is minimized in Desktop 1. Suddenly a song that you don?t like just starts to play. All you have to do to put an end to this and go back to work without much distraction is to press Win+B and it skips to the next song.
On the very left side there are several tabs that switch between Context, Collection, Playlists, Media Devices and Files. Under the Context the first thing that appears is the Current tab. Here are listed things like Album cover, how many times the song was played, last time played, favorite tracks and albums by the current artist. If you take a closer look, the Lyrics and Artist tabs will catch your attention. From the Lyrics tab you can fetch the lyrics and if they are not found, the program shows some suggestions, but there is still some work to be done here. The Artist tab shows what information is available on Wikipedia. I like this feature a lot, because on Wikipedia you can find out about a lot of stuff related to a subject.
Other things you should know
AmaroK has built in support for iPod and it is really easy to use. Click the Media Device button, then the Connect button and here you go. Start transfer music to have it on the go.
AmaroK is very scriptable and a lot of the scripts can be downloaded from the internet. They will make the player much more powerful than it is out of the box. Two of the sound engines from which you can choose are some of the best, GStreamer and xine. Both of them are actively maintained, support cross-fading and equalizer. In theory, these two sound engines support every format known to man.
The Good
On the good side is the interface that doesn't get in your way, the eye candy, the support for portable MP3 players and the possibility to choose from several sound engines.
The Bad
With the Dynamic Mode switched on I managed to crash amaroK quite often. Also, the lyrics search engine is not that good. I hope that in the feature versions these inconveniences will be fixed.
The Truth
I can honestly say that I find AmaroK the best music management software on all operating systems. There might be a better one, but I haven?t found it yet. It is certainly worth it to give a try.
