In Linux, find a variety of programs for playing music files, such as Ogg Vorbis or WAV. Ogg Vorbis is a free audio compression format that is now supported by the majority of audio players and even portable MP3 players. The file types supported by the applications depend on the engine used.
![[Note]](admon/note.png) | Playing MP3 Files |
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openSUSE® also comes with MP3 support. If your music collection consists of both MP3 and Ogg Vorbis files, you do not need to convert any files to a different format. Just open Amarok (KDE) and start listening. | |
The Amarok music player allows you to play various audio formats, create playlists, import music from removable media such as portable MP3 players or external hard disks (or upload files to removable media), and listen to streaming audio broadcasts of radio stations on the Internet. The file types supported depend on the engine used.
To start Amarok, press Alt+F2 and enter amarok.
By default, the Amarok main window is divided into three main parts: the browser pane on the left, the context view in the middle and the playlist on the right side. Both the browser pane and the context view include several tabs. Click a tab to switch view and to access the information available from there. Clicking a tab twice hides the browser pane and expands the context view to the left.
- Bowser Pane
Includes the following tabs:
Collection: Shows your personal music collection. The search field on top allows you to filter for certain artists or titles configure. Click the wrench icon at the right of the browser pane if you want to configure the way your collection is displayed, or to reorganize the collection.
Internet: Shows the Internet services configured for Amarok. For details on how to configure the services, refer to Section 19.2.1.4, “Configuring Amarok”. Click an entry to access the respective service. To get back to the list of services, click the arrow icon in the top left corner.
Playlists: Lets you generate based on certain criteria. To access and organize any playlists you have saved before, click . From the playlist tab, you can also add or update .
Filelists: Shows a file browser that corresponds to the standard KDE file manager. This view is designed for finding audio files you want to play, but not to add to your collection. Use the icons at the top to navigate the file system, change the view or to create bookmarks.
- Context View
Shows information about the currently played track. Depending on your configuration of this view the follows tabs are available: , , , , , , and . To change view, click one of the tabs.
For example, to learn more about the artist, switch to the tab. When you click the tab Amarok starts a search for the lyrics and displays the results.
- Playlist
Shows the list of tracks that has been added there to be played. This can include tracks from your music collection, streams from the Internet, podcasts, or tracks from a CD. The currently played track is highlighted in the list. Use the icons at the bottom of the playlist to clear, modify, save or export the current playlist or click the wrench icon to configure the playlist layout.
Amarok offers a variety of configuration options, for example, which folders to scan for your music collection, which backend and sound system to use for playback and if to display the current track on an on-screen display or not.
Apart from that, Amarok comes with integrated Internet services
that you can activate or deactivate, like for example support for
Last.fm, a popular Internet radio and music community
Web site.
At first start-up, the most important thing to configure is the place where Amarok should search for your music collection. Although you can use Amarok without a music collection, it is recommended to create a collection because most of the powerful, advanced features are only available with an existing collection.
Procedure 19.1. Defining Basic Amarok Settings
Select + to access the Amarok configuration dialog.
Click and in the tree view, select the folder (or multiple folders) where Amarok should scan for your music files.
Activate the respective options to make Amarok scan the folders recursively or watch for changes in your music folders.
If you want to import an existing music collection (for example, dating from an older Amarok version), click and follow the steps on the screen.
From the category of the configuration dialog, you can also adjust the backend and the output device for playing music, if necessary. To do so, click to open the module that is also accessible from the . For more details about the output devices available from the list, hover your mouse pointer over the respective entries to display a tooltip.
To discover the Web services integrated with Amarok, click the category. From there, you can activate, deactivate or configure access to several services like Web media server, legal and free music download, music community, , music locker or podcasts and shoutcasts directories.
Some of the services require registration. To sign up for a service or enter your data for an already existing account, click the wrench icon next to the service.
To use and customize the appearance of an showing information like cover and artist of the currently played track, activate .
Set the appearance options as desired and drag the preview to the desired place to define the position where the on-screen display should appear.
Confirm your changes with .
![[Tip]](admon/tip.png) | Using Amarok Widgets |
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Instead of using the on-screen display to show information about the current track, you can also add external widgets to your desktop for displaying information or controlling Amarok, for example, the widget. For details on how to add or download widgets, refer to Procedure “Adding Widgets to the Desktop” (↑KDE User Guide). | |
With Amarok, you can assign a cover to each album of your collection. With the easily add, delete, and retrieve album covers.
Start the cover manager with +. A tree view in the left part of the window lists all artists in your collection. The main part of the window lists the covers of all albums. To filter the covers displayed, click an individual artist in the tree view or enter a term in the input field at the top of the window. Use to toggle between displaying all albums, albums with covers, or albums without covers.
There are three different methods for assigning covers to albums:
- Automatically Assign Covers
Amarok can automatically retrieve all missing covers displayed in the main windows from Amazon. Use to determine from which Amazon Web server the covers should be retrieved then click .
![[Important]](admon/important.png)
Proper Tagging Needed Amarok retrieves the covers from Amazon using the query string
Artist - Album. This information is extracted from the tags of your music files. The better they are tagged, the better the hit rate is when automatically retrieving covers.- Manually Choose a Cover Fetched from Amazon
If you want more control over what image to use and what query string to use to retrieve a cover, right-click an album in the main window and choose . lets you cycle through all images available. selects the actual cover and assigns it to the album selected. If you are not satisfied with the covers displayed, use to refine the search. Use from the toolbar of the main window to determine from which Amazon Web server the covers should be retrieved.
- Manually Assign Covers
If you already have your own cover images, you can assign them by right-clicking an album and choosing .
If visualizations for Amarok are installed, you can select various graphical effects for the music played with +. Native Amarok visualizations are displayed in the player window. Cycle through the various available display modes by clicking the animation.
Like other KDE applications, Amarok adds an icon to the KDE system tray. You can use this icon to control a large number of Amarok's features. Hovering the mouse pointer over the icon displays information about the track currently played. By scrolling the mouse wheel simultaneously you can reduce or increase the playback volume. A single left-click closes the application window without affecting playback. Click again to reopen the window. Clicking with the middle mouse button pauses playback—middle-click again to resume playback. Right-clicking opens a context menu where you have access to the player controls and can exit Amarok.
Using the Shift and Ctrl keys together with the mouse gives you access to more advanced features. Holding Shift while scrolling the mouse wheel seeks through the current track. Holding Ctrl while scrolling the mouse wheel skips through tracks in the playlist.
You may also drag items and drop them on the tray icon to add them to the current playlist. A pop-up menu opens, asking whether to append the track to the playlist, append and play it, or queue it after the current track.
JuK
(kde4-juk package) is a
jukebox application that lets you manage your music file collection and
playlists. JuK maintains a list of all files it knows about. This is
called the collection list. The list is specific to JuK and is not
shared with other applications. Independent of the collection list are
playlists. You can have as many playlists as you want and you can share
your JuK playlists with other media players. You can also edit the tags
of your music files.
Start JuK with the main menu or press Alt+F2 and enter juk. On initial start-up you are prompted for the folders Juk should scan for your music collection. Find more information about JuK in the online help.