Wednesday, February 10, 2010

Using Amarok

Music is one thing I couldn’t live without. Especially while working, music keeps me sane. Whether I am writing a lot of documentation or testing software, background music helps me from going ballistic. And because Amarok was installed when I installed the Kubuntu desktop package, I thought of giving it another try.


So Amarok looks really overwhelming to me. The layout looks cluttered because of the amount of information available to me:



  • playlist

  • media library

  • lyrics and wikipedia page


The playlist and media library are on two different panes, and they are loaded with information that will help us figure out what to listen to, who are the artists, what possible ways are there to view the information. There is a way to view the directories you have when you want to be specific about what media you’re looking into. Whether it’s your external hard drive or your local disk. Or your local media library. At first I did not realize that it was possible. I had a problem playing from my external hard drive because every time I right-clicked on it and selected the option “Read Device,” Amarok ends up hanging. Anyway, when you’ve decided on what view you will use, you could use that view to have a list of directories or songs and then drag them to the playlist pane. And then play your music. Sweet.


I have a Last.fm account so I am also taking advantage of the scrobler to see how many times I’ve played some tracks as well as mark some songs as loved. There’s a heart button on the top part of Amarok which you could click while the song is playing. It will show up on your Last.fm page as a loved track.


There are probably a whole lot of Amarok features but these are the ones I’ve only started maximizing this week, so far. If you’ve got more Amarok tips and tricks, please feel free to comment. I’d love to learn from you.


Post from: New Linux User

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