| Open source music player rev's up |
Dec. 10, 2008
 A popular open source music player has achieved its second major release. Two years in the making, and aimed at helping users "rediscover music," Amarok 2.0 adds an updated interface, online service integration, and behind-the-scenes changes like KDE 4.0 integration and new plugin and script APIs.
Work on Amarok 2.0 began in May of 2006, following the launch of Amarok 1.6. According to "rosegarden," who announced the release on the project's homepage, Amarok 2.0 boasts "tight" integration with online services that include Magnatune, Jamendo, MP3tunes, Last.fm, and Shoutcast. It also adopts KDE 4 technologies such as Solid, Phonon, and Plasma, while moving to new programming interfaces (APIs) for scripting and plugins, and a new user interface.
 
Amarok 2.0 homescreen, and Magnatune integration
(Click either screenshot to enlarge)
In announcing the new release, Amarok developer "rosegarden" wrote, in part:The user interface has been redesigned to make context information like lyrics and albums from the same artist more accessible and allow you to decide which information you want to see by adding applets to the Context View in the middle. The new Biased Playlists offer a way to let Amarok take care of your playlist in an intelligent way similar to Dynamic Playlists in previous versions. A new service framework allows for a tight integration of online services like Jamendo, Magnatune and Ampache. New services can easily be added via GetHotNewStuff in Amarok or from kde-apps.org. More applets and scripts are being worked on and users are welcome to contribute more to make Amarok suit their needs. The migration from the KDE 3 to KDE 4 framework allows us to make use of technologies like Plasma, Phonon and Solid which make Amarok easier to use and maintain and ready for the future of music on your computer and on the internet. Availability
Amarok 2.0 can be downloaded now, prebuilt for many popular Linux and BSD distributions, here. Unsupported builds for Win32 and MacOS X are also offered. Alternatively, users can wait for Amarok 2.0 to arrive in their distribution, as most support the popular player. The project homepage is here.
What's your favorite player?
Another popular open source music player, Banshee, recently achieved its first stable release.
I'm embarrassed to say I still use mpd and phpmp, and sometimes xmms, with my digital collection. It was built up over many years, during which many changes occurred in both file and meta-data formats. Thus, I have found it easiest to simply use the filesystem to organize my media, and then write scripts to extract metadata from the filesystem when needed, in the meta-data format du jour. What are you using? Let me know in the Talkback below.
-- Henry Kingman
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