On start-up, amaroK scans the folders that are part of your collection for music files. Although you can use amaroK without building a collection, it is recommended to do so, because most of the powerful, advanced features are only available with an existing collection.

The amaroK main window is divided into two parts. The sidebar on the left providing different views: your music collection, a context browser, your playlists, a file browser, etc. Change the browser by clicking a tab on the far left. The right part contains the playlist window and, below it, the player (if you have not configured it to be shown in a separate window).

To play music, just drag and drop items from any of the sidebar browsers to the playlist area. Use Shift or Ctrl to select multiple items. Double-click an item in the playlist to play it. You can add or delete items from the list during playback with the context menu. Use the icons located above the playlist area to Clear the playlist, to Save playlist as, to Undo and Redo changes or to Search for a certain track. To manipulate play modes, either click the Repeat or Random icons in the amaroK status bar several times to switch mode or select the desired Mode from the main amaroK menu.

With amaroK, you can assign a cover to each album of your collection. With the Cover Manager, easily add, delete, and retrieve album covers.

Start the cover manager with Tools+Cover Manager. 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 View to toggle between displaying all albums, albums with covers, or albums without covers.

There are three different methods for assigning covers to the albums:

If visualizations for amaroK are installed, you can select various graphical effects for the music played with Tools+Visualizations. 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.

Ogg Vorbis (package vorbis-tools) is a free audio compression format that is now supported by the majority of audio players and even portable MP3 players. The Web page of the project is http://www.vorbis.com/.

Your system comes with several tools supporting Ogg Vorbis. oggenc is a command line tool used for encoding WAV files to Ogg. Just run oggenc myfile.wav to transform a given .wav file into Ogg Vorbis. The -h option displays an overview of the other parameters. Oggenc supports encoding with a variable bit rate. In this way, an even higher degree of compression can be achieved. Instead of the bit rate, specify the desired quality with the parameter -q. -b determines the average bit rate. -m and -M specify the minimum and maximum bit rate.

ogg123 is a command line Ogg player. Start it with a command like ogg123 mysong.ogg.

KAudioCreator is a lean CD ripper application (see Figure 20.3, “Ripping Audio CDs with KAudioCreator”). Once started, it lists all the tracks of your CD in the CD Tracks tab. Select the tracks to rip and encode. To edit the track information, use the Album Editor under File+Edit Album. Otherwise just start the ripping and encoding with File+Rip Selection. Watch the progress of these jobs using the Jobs tab. If configured accordingly, KAudioCreator also generates playlist files for your selection that can be used by players like amaroK, XMMS, or Helix Banshee.

Figure 20.3. Ripping Audio CDs with KAudioCreator¶

Before you start the actual ripping process with Konqueror, configure the handling of audio CDs and the Ogg Vorbis encoder in the KDE Control Center. Select Sound & Multimedia+Audio CDs. The configuration module is divided into three tabs: General, Names, and Ogg Vorbis Encoder. Normally, a suitable CD device is detected automatically. Do not change this default setting unless the autodetection failed and you need to set the CD device manually. Error correction and encoder priority can also be set here. The Ogg Vorbis Encoder tab determines the quality of the encoding. To configure online lookup of album, track, and artist information for your ripped audio data, select Add Track Information.

Start the ripping process by inserting the CD into the CD-ROM drive and entering audiocd:/ in the Location bar. Konqueror then lists the tracks of the CD and some folders (see Figure 20.4, “Ripping Audio Data with Konqueror”).

Figure 20.4. Ripping Audio Data with Konqueror¶

To keep uncompressed audio data on your disk, just select the .wav files and drag them into another Konqueror window to copy them to their final destination. To start the Ogg Vorbis encoding, drag the Ogg Vorbis folder or files from this folder to another Konqueror window. The encoding starts as soon as you drop the Ogg Vorbis folder at its destination.