Linux Multimedia Hacks

Let amaroK Rock Your Music Collection

Use amaroK to integrate great music features such as album art, Audioscrobbler, Musicbrainz, song lyrics, and great playlist management into one application.

As more people have started listening to their music collections on their computers, a number of Internet services have appeared to help manage collections and to utilize all this great metadata that exists on MP3s. The services have ranged from CDDB and FreeDB, which provide album and track information based on CD signatures, to services that provide album art and lyrics. A number of the music players under Linux have utilized one or two of these types of services either natively or through the use of plugins, but the amaroK music player seems to be one of the best at integrating them all by default into a useful and powerful interface. In this hack, I discuss many of the different features of the amaroK player and how to get the most out of them.

Get amaroK

amaroK is becoming a pretty popular music player, and many distributions already provide packages for it, so you can probably use your standard packaging tool to install it—but if your distribution doesn’t provide it, go to the official page at http://amarok.kde.org and download a package for your distribution. If your distribution doesn’t have a package, just grab the source and build it according to the installation instructions.

Once amaroK is installed, launch it from your desktop menu or type amarok into a console. The first time ...