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I've been using amaroK since about 0.9. I liked it immediately since my music was already organized into directories and the integrated file browser makes it easy. It doesn't make sense that you should have to open a seperate window just to select a directory to listen to, like you do with XMMS. Since then amaroK has improved greatly, I don't know how I lived with some of these features before (its support for album cover downloading an example of this).

amaroK is beerware, if you feel like it, give amaroK devs beer money at their website.

this program makes me happy......best audio player for linux?*BSD/etc....

Nice interview Christian. But I missed the red line. You are jumping a little bit to much around.

I've been looking for a good music player for a while now, without finding one that I really like. I've tried most of the available ones, but for some reason I didn't try Amorak until now.

After playing with it for a few minutes, I really like it. The UI is very nice and easy to use and it has lots of nice features. However, I won't be using it for one simple reason: it uses far too much RAM for my system. I only have 128 MiB and can't upgrade.

Oh well, I'll probably stick with XMMS, or perhaps use one of the command-line based ones like mpd or vux (plus Easytag to tag and organize files).

is it just me or is no one else talking about XINE-ui

i think xine is the most brilliant and best multimedia player there is not even any windows alternative has been able to beat it. it just so fast, and good.

;)

Cool... very flexible, lots of promising things possible with this!

The Amarok team is fantastic and great to work with!

XMMS is beautiful (as said above), light, practical, skinnable and gets the job done wonderfully (now with lotsa new plug-ins, eg. mplayer-plugin).
I have never tried xine-ui to say if it's good for anything, but i sure did try amaroK.. didn't like it at all, too complex and bloated for my needs - not to mention the software crashes and CPU & RAM it uses.
One strong point of XMMS in this "fight" with amaroK is its resemblance and similarity with Window' WinAmp (R.I.P.) which counts a lot for users coming from MS Windows to *nix.

Thanks for the feedback, when you mention it I guess I maybe should have decided on a sequence of topics or a development line for the interview and made sure the questions and answers flowed with that as I edited it. I try to do that next time. Anyway I doubt I would have won any Pulitzer prizes anyhow

>XMMS is beautiful

I disagree: by default on my RHE9, XMMS window decoration is half the size of the normal window decoration (as you said there trying to imitate winamp which has also very small buttons), bleach, this is a serious violation of any IHM usability guideline you can find.

I still use xmms, I find Amarok crashes alot and is a bit too cumbersome in anything other than the xmms-like compact mode. I hope once KDE's audio subsystem get's sorted (or totally replaced ie. goodbye faRts) things will be better..

Have found Amarok to be a good, straighforward, easy to use player - simlpy drag and drop an mp3 directory into the window and go - no fuss - just easy music.

>I disagree: by default on my RHE9, XMMS window decoration is half the size of the normal window decoration (as you said there trying to imitate winamp which has also very small buttons), bleach, this is a serious violation of any IHM usability guideline you can find.

XMMS rules! If the buttons is too small, it just increase it so it get Double size :d

Have you people tried BMP(Beep Media Player)? It's a port of XMMS to GTK2 and it's absolutely awesome. The recent versions are so stable and easy to use. And you get Winamp skin support and lots of other stuff. However XMMS will remain the big player in the game for quite some years and I don't think amaroK will replace it.

Cheers,
gamehack

Beep Media Player is better than XMMS (and amaroK) for Gnomers, but I'm still waiting on a good HIG player with native GTK+ widgets that isn't a jukebox like Rhythmbox (which isn't bad itself btw). Perhaps Gamp will grow into that in the future.

Market share numbers in free software is a rather dubious thing and tend to reflect more often the wishes of the quoter than any true objective measurement. I still dare to claim thought that XMMS has historically been the most used GUI media player on Linux and FreeBSD systems and maybe still is. Still there have been a lot of alternatives popping up all hoping to dethrone XMMS over the years and maybe the time has now come when either there will be no clear leader or someone else will ascend. One of the alternatives I really like is amaroK.
>
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The wannabe tech guru's are at it again......

Who the heck *CARES* what freaking GUI Media player you are using?

They are *ALL BASICALLY THE SAME* and *PRETTY MUCH DO THE SAME THINGS*

God save us from those who claim they *AREN'T* and *DON'T*.

Man I thought/had hoped the kind of utter lameness expressed within this "article" died out with the Amiga.

If you want to use amaroK, use it and *SHUT UP*.

I agree, xmms is both buggy (ever run it through valgrind?) and clunky. I am watching beep-media-player and enjoyed with its slick gui but still notice some development bugs.

Why is it we are the problem, it appears you are in the minority. Just about any self [l]user prefers logical and elegant Graphical User Interface. This kind of backs up why we use gnome/kde/fluxbox/enlightenment and not msdos on 80x10 Green and Black CRTs.

> XMMS rules! If the buttons is too small, it just increase it so it get Double size :d

Thanks for the tip but I won't use double size, it looks ugly, and this time it is too big..
Still, this is a nice feature for usability, but it looks as a solution of a problem which shouldn't be here in the first place..

Muine has the best UI I've ever seen in a music player, I can start playing any album in less then 5 seconds.

The only serious problem I've had with it so far were related to embedded jpgs in id3 tags. Now I just remove all the bloat from my mp3 tags when I'm editing them.

Does it support a whole album in just one file ? As for FLAC albums with .cue files ? Can you edit tags with it ?

While Gstreamer is laudable architecturally, practically it is flaky, fragile, problematic and a pain to use from a user's perspective. For instance, I have been unable to playback DVDs and audio CDs with Totem using Gstreamer as a back-end. Today, Rhythmbox decides to crash while importing my music folder and complains about a Gstreamer plug-in and a corrupt registry and so on. I hope the Gstreamer developers begin to work on the "Just Works" factor.

They seem to have many similar goals, only one is Gt based and other Gtk. I tend to use Rhythmbox as I'm primarily a Gnome user, but this article as tempted me to try out AmoraK.

Have you checked out Muine? I think HIG compliance is a strong part of Muine's interface, although it may be more like a 'Jukebox' than Rhythmbox. Rhythmbox isn't really Jukebox like IMHO.

I prefer Amarok's interface and feature-set to Juk. However, Juk is more stable for me and also provides one feature I find indispensable: Internet tagging. Often I find MP3s with bad tags on them or no album name associated with them. Juk solves this for 95% of the files.

On the other hand, I've mostly been ripping my own CDs so it's a smallish issue for me.

I used to use xmms, but now I am a very happy JuK user. JuK has a nice interface, is good for managing several sets of playlists, I like the one-window approach, JuK works very well with arts (I don't understand why so many people have problems with arts, for me it works like a charm) and I also think the "Internet tagging" is aboslutely indispensable. For me JuK is the best out there.

wow, it seems musicplayers are the new hot holy wars topic.

I personally like the design ideas in Muine, it's simple and to the point - but since it's based on Mono it might see some problems in the adoption department.

amaroK does, of course, also support automatic tagging with Musicbrainz. Tracks are recognized by a fingerprint, and the tags are fetched from the Musicbrainz server.

Why on earth should a media player not offer many features, useful or not? Use the features you need, ignore the others. And, and that's the great thing about KDE, the additional features usually need neither memory nor CPU cycles, since all they do is integrating features from other KDE apps/ libs. Check, for example, the amaroK/ K3B integration - it's not like amaroK would burn CD's. Or the audio CD ripping, it's also a KDE feature, no amaroK bloat.

And amaroK is quite stable, GStreamer isn't. I use the ARTS backend, and amaroK is rock solid. I consider GStreamer broken by design, it has lot's of problems with ALSA, and the GStreamer devs always blame ALSA for that - quite funny, considering many other, even more demanding systems like JACK or ARTS work perfectly with ALSA...

>amaroK does, of course, also support automatic tagging
>with Musicbrainz. Tracks are recognized by a fingerprint,
>and the tags are fetched from the Musicbrainz server.

Please tell me how... I'll go back to amaroK.

I'm quite serious, I have no been able to find the method of doing this... can't be automatic, as that makes no sense.

Right click on a track in your playlist, choose "View/Edit Meta Information", then click "Fill-In Tags Using MusicBrainz" (it's the large button in the middle).

[i]I use the ARTS backend, and amaroK is rock solid.[i]

I like amarok, but that's not true (both for v.1.1.1 and v.1.2beta1). Arts itself crashes from time to time and amarok is not able to recover, but dies with it. Using the cover-manager crashes amarok to, due to kio (cover fetching) issues.

While a wonderful part of the kde framewok, the _lots_ of bugs regarding kio_slaves affect so much applications and need definitely more attention.

Then tell me why amarok deveopers are so trying hard to use Gstreamer as backend?

Because they know Gstreamer has more features and advantages over others.

NMM (http://www.networkmultimedia.org/) is far more interesting than GStreamer.

I've tried several audio players on Linux (XMMS, Juk, Rythmbox, etc) and prefer Amarok over all others. It clearly blows the competition out of the water with features such as fetching for streaming radio online, integrated burning tools (syncs with K3B), fetching for album covers, etc. What I would like to see with Amarok is that ability to sync on it's own with portable players such as an iPod with out needing users to install a third party plug-in such as KPod. Other than that there's not much that Amarok can't do. After testing the software the project appears leaps ahead of other audio player developers in the Linux community. It's the only one that I see closely resembles the feature set of iTunes with out requiring a user to run iTunes on Wine. Not unless you want access to the Apple store which I'm not a fan of due to there's other secure online alternatives that are just as competitive.

The alsa problem's where fixed in the latest release of gst-plugins. One of the reasons we had so much trouble was because we used alsa-lib instead of targeting alsa directly (like most other stuff out there). Anyway I hope things will work better for you from here on.

"I still use xmms, I find Amarok crashes alot and is a bit too cumbersome in anything other than the xmms-like compact mode. I hope once KDE's audio subsystem get's sorted (or totally replaced ie. goodbye faRts) things will be better.."

Actually amaroK uses GStreamer by default and doesn't need to rely at all on aRts. And I've got news for you: GStreamer also has issues. It's not 100% stable, no matter what you'd like to believe.

XMMS is light and acceptable, but if you're running a modern computer, amaroK is just so much more enjoyable. I love the on screen display, cover manager and combination of file based AND meta based sorting. Thanks amaroK team!

I stick with XMMS for one simple reason: it requires neither KDE or Gnome libraries. As I run neither DE, I have none of the associated libraries installed on my machine and refuse to install any applications that require said libraries. (KDE and Gnome are too bloated and too slow on my older system.) As a result, AnoraK, JuK, and Rhythmbox will not find a home on my system anytime soon.

Zinf looks interesting (just from a quick browse of the web site), but does anyone know whether it supports other audio formats besides mp3? I looked through the site (including the FAQ) but could not find that information. For instance, does it support CD playback (the main thing I use XMMS for)? I am assuming it does, but could not find the definitive word on the Zinf site.

walt_huntsman[at]myrealbox[dot]com

It is a rule of every KDE developer to bload every application no matter how simple should be?

Gee, I dunno why they BLOAD it, maybe to not reinvent the wheel? That's the general philosophy behind linux anyhow.

XMMS packs it's own decoding tools, but GStreamer/aRts are readily available and almost BOUND to be included.

Amarok is supposed to be a small mp3 players but is so damn bloated, KDE needs a HIG real quick.

1) No, it's not. It's an audio player, but it's not intended to be "small". If a KDE user wants a "small" player they'll just use Noatun or XMMS. amaroK is a "full featured audio playback" program with way more features than something like XMMS or Noatun.

2) HIG doesn't fix software bloat. Software bloat has nothing to do with the user interface. ( And also these vaunted HIG guidelines, in many people's opinion, often end up ruining interfaces. )

Great to hear this - I'll give it another spin!

I had this strange bug that all MP3's I tried to play via GStreamer where played 3 times the usual speed, but with no sound output. Hope this is fixed now.

Maybe you should go out and read try to get some infos about the KDE/ GStreamer relation. When aRts was intoduced, it was lightyears ahead of everything else. aRts is a very mature and powerful framework, but it has several flaws: it has stuff nobody uses these days (eg, audio synthesis), and it's so complex and complicated that only the original developer, Stefan Westerfeld, really understands what it does. But he did only very little on aRts recently, and announced to finally give up aRts some days ago. Due to the very complex design, it's very hard to improve and fix it. That's why KDE is looking for a replacement these days, with GStreamer and NMM being the most viable options right now.

If a new maintainer would take on aRts and really improves it, I think it might even be possible that KDE would keep it. But I doubt this will happen...

And, keep in mind, GStreamer and aRts are only two amaroK backends. There are more, including Xine, NMM and MAS.

Can it play MP3s without any gap between tracks like Foobar2k on Windows? I could never get XMMS to do it perfectly, there was always an annoying "tick" between tracks.

I use madplay.. I used XMMS for a bit but it reminded me too much of my winamp(which I had used until I heard of foobar2k) days
who needs a GUI?
madplay -v -r -a -10 _Downloaded/_Artist/Deep Dish(live)/*
madplay -v -r -a -10 _Electronica/*/*

I hate "me too" comments, but I also use a console music player, mpg123. If a person keeps their mp3s organized in a directory structure, and tends to play whole albums or streams, then really I think they owe it to themselves to give mpg123 (or mpg321 for a "Free" player) a try. I've been using it for years, and it's great to just play mp3s in the background, and not have to worry about fiddling with a gui interface.

I thought I should add that amaroK only has two library requirements:

kdelibs >= 3.2
taglib >= 1.3

We have a good deal of GNOME users and we give them as much priority on integration and bug reports as anyone else.

We are very sensitive to usability and bloat issues, and would very much like to hear your comments at our site or on our mailing list or in the irc channel. We wan to produce an intuitive, fun and, above all else, useful audio-player for whatever system you use.

KDElibs is a pretty small package, especially if you compile it yourself so you can keep its dependencies down.

>Amarok is supposed to be a small mp3 players but is so damn
>bloated, KDE needs a HIG real quick.

Don't use it if you think this, don't use Kde and let kde users be happy with powerfull apps! Kde HIG rules for me, i don't like gnome apps but i
don't think gnome have to change, i'm happy with kde, others with gnome, so where is the problem?

And switch to Windows because bash is so bloated, too many commands, i think dos is better for you

Can it play MP3s without any gap between tracks like Foobar2k on Windows? I could never get XMMS to do it perfectly, there was always an annoying "tick" between tracks

Try the crossfade plugin in XMMS or whatever music player you're using. It mixes the last part of a given audio file together with the first part of the following (if possible). Not nice with every 'music genre' (e.g. classic music) but you can minimize the effect as well. Not sure if amaroK or whatever music player you use supports it. Winamp does, btw.

Its way cool the amaroK people support innovative initiatives such as Libvisual. Kudos!

Most definatly the best media player on "nix". Go Amarok!

For instance most people who fear KDElibs don't want aRts on their system either, so just configure:

./configure --without-arts --enable-final --disable-debug

Then KDElibs only depends on Qt, and common things like libpng. amaroK doesn't require aRts, we generally recommend you use the GStreamer or xine engines.

enable-final speeds up the compile but only if you have a lot of RAM. You should always disable-debug for KDElibs, otherwise you'll get so much debug output it's silly and slower.

Wow, I love the lyrics lookup, nice touch. It was the clincher for me, but only one of many loved features.

>I disagree: by default on my RHE9, XMMS window decoration is half the size of the normal window decoration (as you said there trying to imitate winamp which has also very small buttons), bleach, this is a serious violation of any IHM usability guideline you can find."

This is a petty nonissue. What do you care if it works fine? Besides it uses Motif anyways.

(I personally like NON-HIG apps anyways..Rhymtbox is quite ugly if usable, but XMMS is jsut as usable, it looks different, SO DOES WMP and people like that)

>2) HIG doesn't fix software bloat. Software bloat has nothing to do with the user interface. ( And also these vaunted HIG guidelines, in many people's opinion, often end up ruining interfaces.

Thank you!! Sometimesz an interface can be taken too far.

The interview is great, and the guys in the Amarok/GStreamer teams deserve all our recognition. The same goes for Christian and the Fluendo guys, they do an amazing work!

Judging by the screen in the article, Amarok looks very nice, but the selection of music shown in the browser could be a little more varied. May I suggest some other groups, like Cooper? They have a new album, 'Retrovisor', worth a look (can be found at FNAC here in Spain). Yello is right, but a little bit of (good) pop-rock doesn't hurts either :-)

I use Rhythmbox now because it's neat, but before I wanted a player like you, and what I actually used was Totem; it's not just a movie player, and when it's playing audio it's basically what you're asking for - a simple player with proper UI and native widgets. Give it a shot...

I remember that MP3 bug; for me it was fixed on Mandrake Cooker relatively recently, so I guess there was some kind of fix for it in something. I couldn't tell you what component specifically, though. Sorry. I find Rhythmbox quite stable these days, it certainly never used to be (up till 0.8x it was utterly unusable on any reasonably sized music collection, I have ~30GB and it would just die). Recently it's got a lot, lot, lot better. gstreamer's still nowhere near mature and I'd hate for Mandrake to switch Totem back to the gstreamer backend, but for audio via Rhythmbox and CD ripping via sound-juicer, gstreamer's up to the task now, IMO.

"(I personally like NON-HIG apps anyways..Rhymtbox is quite ugly if usable, but XMMS is jsut as usable, it looks different, SO DOES WMP and people like that)"

Really? What people? No-one I know who uses Windows like WMP. They *use* it, but they don't *like* it. If the non-standard interface is so popular, why is Media Player Classic (the third-party Windows player which takes the old, non-bloated, looks-like-a-normal-app WMP interface and allows it to work with modern codecs and features) so popular?

>Really? What people? No-one I know who uses Windows like WMP. They *use* it, but they don't *like* it.

Well i for one like it, many polls show users like it.

>If the non-standard interface is so popular, why is Media Player Classic (the third-party Windows player which takes the old, non-bloated, looks-like-a-normal-app WMP interface and allows it to work with modern codecs and features) so popular?

I guess for the same reason non-standard WINAMP is popular. Different tastes.

BTW you can get codecs through Kazaa Lite Codec pack and not bother with Media Player Classic. How can anyone use an app like thisw tihout an explorer window open? Sure it's useful for a movie or 2 but can't people use mplayer2.exe then

The problem which xmms to me is that: It's support on internationization is rather weak. I have much ogg/mp3s having meta info and filename as chinese or japanese. When using those it sucks. amaroK solves all these.

Amarok is the default player in SUSE 9.2 but I couldn't figure out how to get an equalizer to work with it.

Is there an eq for Amarok?

Rhythmbox is more like Juk. The big difference between those and amaroK is that amaroK like Winamp5 (but better imho) and kjukebox (kde1 application, downright ancient but I loved it) combines a library, playlists, and an excellent filebrowser (which is sorely lacking from all that iTunes clones. I think most people have some sort of order on their hard disk, why not let them use it) with a persistant "current playlist" like xmms.

That interview was more about gstreamer than amaroK. Why would you use gstreamer if you can have the xine engine? It uses less resources is more stable (some report that amarok is unstable; gstreamer with alsasink or arts are both recipies for deasaster) and doesn't skip when you do strange stuff like browsing the web at the same time

Yes, there is indeed an EQ for amaroK, however it has only been implemented in the newest version, i.e. 1.2. This is now out in a version 1.2beta2, so get that It also has a very wide range of improvements, both in interface and stability.

Plz linuxer around the world don't be foolish not all things on windows are bad!
Winamp is an open-source project "REMEMBER!".
Amarok is definetly a gr8 project without any doubt 2 steps ahead of any other linux player
just remember that amarok is just a music player providing nice eye-candy for fan-users!