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Journal: Amarok Replacement

Update: The Return of Amarok

As you may have noticed, Amarok is not available any more.

The 1.4 version that was previously installed was part of KDE 3 and cannot be used correctly with KDE 4. The Amarok developers thought it would be a very good idea to wreck the player for KDE 4 and have thus destroyed one of the crown jewels of the KDE environment: fantastic.

"Amarok 2" is not usable, we'll just leave it at that and Amarok 1.4 does not work correctly with KDE 4, as a result, no more Amarok.

Of course now the problem remains: what to replace Amarok with? The bad news is that there is no comparable library-based music player on the UNIX platform.

The good news is that UNIX media players are (except for this one segment) generally quite good. VLC is one of the most popular and it is--indeed--a top-notch player, but not for music. VLC does not have useful library and cataloging features. VLC's strength is clearly videos.

For now the best bet seems to be Rhythmbox. Rhythmbox hails from the Gnome platform and does not quite integrate into KDE quite right (an annoying "feature" of UNIX is that there are multiple, rival, slightly incompatible desktop systems).

Rhythmbox works quite differently (its manual can be obtained from "Help" → "Contents" or on-line at the Gnome Documentation Library). Wheras Amarok organized music by artist on a side-pane, Rhythmbox organizes music by artist & album in a set of panes in the main view (labeled "music" in the side pane). The playlist view is labeled "Play Queue" in the side pane.

This sounds much more confusing than it is, all will be more apparent upon examination of the window:

The "Music" view

The "Play Queue" view

At the moment, this is the best we can do. Rhythmbox does "work". Future solutions will be researched and made available as needed.

You will have to specify /home/music as the directory where music is stored in the preferences under music, also check "watch for changes" there.

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