Amarok (software)

Last updated
Amarok
Original author(s) Mark Kretschmann
Developer(s) KDE
Initial releaseJune 23, 2003;21 years ago (2003-06-23) [1]
Stable release
3.0 [2]   OOjs UI icon edit-ltr-progressive.svg / 29 April 2024
Repository
Written in C++ (Qt)
Operating system Unix-like, Windows
Type Audio player
License GPL-2.0-or-later [3]
Website amarok.kde.org

Amarok is a free and open-source music player for Linux, macOS, Windows, and other Unix-like operating systems. Amarok is part of the KDE project, but it is released independently of the central KDE Software Compilation release cycle. Amarok is released under the terms of the GPL-2.0-or-later.

Contents

History

Amarok is one of the oldest Linux music players in active development, being started in 2003. [4] The program was originally stylized as amaroK, after a Mike Oldfield album of the same name. [5] The artwork references Amarok, a wolf in Inuit mythology. The app's capitalization was changed to Amarok in June 2006.

A new major version of Amarok, version 2.0, was released on December 12, 2008. On June 3, 2009, version 2.1 was released, which reintroduced some of the 1.4 features which had been missing from the initial 2.0 release, and introduced some features such as native ReplayGain support. [6] [7]

Version 3.0 of Amarok was released in April 2024, after a six year hiatus of major updates. It ported the application to Qt5 and added support for FFmpeg 5, along with other smaller changes. A port to Qt6, the newest version of the Qt library, is scheduled for later in the year. [8] [9] [10]

Features

Amarok supports a wide variety of music formats due to the use of audio engines. It can retrieve cover art information and lyrics from the internet [11] It includes a sidebar that displays the user's music collection, saved playlists, and internet radio stations on the left and the active playlist on the right. [6] Amarok can also display the Wikipedia entry for the band or album in the sidebar. [12] Other features include dynamic playlists, bookmarking, file tracking, and smooth fade-out settings. [13]

Amarok includes integration with online music services such as Last.fm, OPML Podcast, Jamendo, Magnatune, and Ampache. [7] [4]

Amarok can be used to manage music on iPods and other MP3 players. [14]

Notable forks

Clementine: A fork of Amarok 1.4. Clementine 0.6 in Windows.png
Clementine: A fork of Amarok 1.4.

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Qt (software)</span> Object-oriented framework for software development

Qt is cross-platform application development framework for creating graphical user interfaces as well as cross-platform applications that run on various software and hardware platforms such as Linux, Windows, macOS, Android or embedded systems with little or no change in the underlying codebase while still being a native application with native capabilities and speed.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">GNOME Files</span> File manager

GNOME Files, formerly and internally known as Nautilus, is the official file manager for the GNOME desktop. Nautilus was originally developed by Eazel with many luminaries from the tech world including Andy Hertzfeld (Apple), chief architect for Nautilus. The name "Nautilus" was a play on words, evoking the shell of a nautilus to represent an operating system shell. Nautilus replaced Midnight Commander in GNOME 1.4 (2001) and has been the default file manager from version 2.0 onwards.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">PyQt</span> Python GUI library

PyQt is a Python binding of the cross-platform GUI toolkit Qt, implemented as a Python plug-in. PyQt is free software developed by the British firm Riverbank Computing. It is available under similar terms to Qt versions older than 4.5; this means a variety of licenses including GNU General Public License (GPL) and commercial license, but not the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL). PyQt supports Microsoft Windows as well as various kinds of UNIX, including Linux and MacOS.

Music Player Daemon (MPD) is a free and open source music player server. It plays audio files, organizes playlists and maintains a music database. In order to interact with it, a client program is needed. The MPD distribution includes mpc, a simple command line client.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Audacious (software)</span> Free and open source audio player

Audacious is a free and open-source audio player software with a focus on low resource use, high audio quality, and support for a wide range of audio formats. It is designed primarily for use on POSIX-compatible Unix-like operating systems, with limited support for Microsoft Windows. Audacious was the default audio player in Ubuntu Studio in 2011–12, and was the default music player in Lubuntu until October 2018, when it was replaced with VLC.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Poppler (software)</span> Free library for creating PDF documents

Poppler is a free and open-source software library for rendering Portable Document Format (PDF) documents. Its development is supported by freedesktop.org. Commonly used on Linux systems, it powers the PDF viewers of the GNOME and KDE desktop environments.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Phonon (software)</span>

Phonon is the multimedia API provided by KDE and is the standard abstraction for handling multimedia streams within KDE software and also used by several Qt applications.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Kdenlive</span> Free and open-source video editing software

Kdenlive is a free and open-source video editing software based on the MLT Framework, KDE and Qt. The project was started by Jason Wood in 2002, and is now maintained by a small team of developers.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Exaile</span> Open source audio player

Exaile is a cross-platform free and open-source audio player, tag editor and library organizer. It was originally conceived to be similar in style and functions to KDE's Amarok 1.4, but uses the GTK widget toolkit rather than Qt. It is written in Python and utilizes the GStreamer media framework.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">KDE Partition Manager</span> Disk partitioning application for KDE desktop environment

KDE Partition Manager is a disk partitioning application originally written by Volker Lanz for the KDE Platform. It was first released for KDE SC 4.1 and is released independently of the central KDE release cycle. After the death of Volker Lanz in April 2014, Andrius Štikonas continued the development and took over as the maintainer.

The following comparison of audio players compares general and technical information for a number of software media player programs. For the purpose of this comparison, "audio players" are defined as any media player explicitly designed to play audio files, with limited or no support for video playback. Multi-media players designed for video playback, which can also play music, are included under comparison of video player software.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">KVIrc</span> IRC Client

KVIrc is a graphical IRC client for Linux, Unix, Mac OS and Windows. The name is an acronym of K Visual IRC in which the K stands for a dependency to KDE, which became optional from version 2.0.0. The software is based on the Qt framework and its code is released under a modified GNU General Public License.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Clementine (software)</span> Free and open source audio player

Clementine is a free and open-source audio player. It is a port of Amarok 1.4 to the Qt 4 framework and the GStreamer multimedia framework. It is available for Unix-like, Windows, and macOS operating systems. Clementine is released under the terms of the GPL-3.0-or-later.

mpv (media player) Free and open-source media player software

mpv is free and open-source media player software based on MPlayer, mplayer2 and FFmpeg. It runs on several operating systems, including Unix-like operating systems and Microsoft Windows, along with having an Android port called mpv-android. It is cross-platform, running on ARM, PowerPC, x86/IA-32, x86-64, and MIPS architecture.

The Qt Project is an open collaboration effort to coordinate the development of the Qt software framework. Initially founded by Nokia in 2011, the project is now led by The Qt Company.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">KDE Frameworks</span> Collection of libraries and software frameworks for the Qt framework

KDE Frameworks is a collection of libraries and software frameworks readily available to any Qt-based software stacks or applications on multiple operating systems. Featuring frequently needed functionality solutions like hardware integration, file format support, additional graphical control elements, plotting functions, and spell checking, the collection serves as the technological foundation for KDE Plasma and KDE Gear. It is distributed under the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">KDE Gear</span> Set of applications and supporting libraries

The KDE Gear is a set of applications and supporting libraries that are developed by the KDE community, primarily used on Linux-based operating systems but mostly multiplatform, and released on a common release schedule.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Otter Browser</span> Free and open source web browser

Otter Browser is a cross-platform web browser that aims to recreate aspects of Opera 12.x using the Qt framework. Otter Browser is free and open-source software and is licensed under GPL-3.0-or-later. It works on Linux-based operating systems, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, macOS, Haiku, RISC OS, OS/2, and Windows platforms.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">KDE Projects</span>

KDE Projects are projects maintained by the KDE community, a group of people developing and advocating free software for everyday use, for example KDE Plasma and KDE Frameworks or applications such as Amarok, Krita or Digikam. There are also non-coding projects like designing the Breeze desktop theme and iconset, which is coordinated by KDE's Visual Design Group. Even non-Qt applications like GCompris, which started as a GTK-based application, or web-based projects like WikiToLearn are officially part of KDE.

References

  1. "SourceForge.net". SourceForge.net. Retrieved 2014-08-05.
  2. Tuomas Nurmi (29 April 2024). "Amarok 3.0 "Castaway" released!" . Retrieved 29 April 2024.
  3. "license notice placed at the top in one of the source files of the project's repository, probably in each of its source files" . Retrieved November 22, 2017. This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.[ permanent dead link ]
  4. 1 2 Hossain, Rubaiat (2021-01-30). "The 15 Best Linux Music Player Apps". MUO. Retrieved 2024-05-05.
  5. "AmaroK - the audio player for KDE". amarok.kde.org. Archived from the original on 15 June 2004. Retrieved 11 January 2022.
  6. 1 2 "Amarok gets a facelift". Linux.com. 2008-12-11. Retrieved 2024-05-05.
  7. 1 2 Modine, Austin. "Native-Linux music player Amarok gets major overhaul". www.theregister.com. Retrieved 2024-05-05.
  8. Nestor, Marius (2024-04-30). "Amarok 3.0 Open-Source Music Player Officially Released, Here's What's New". 9to5Linux. Retrieved 2024-05-05.
  9. Sneddon, Joey (2024-04-30). "Amarok 3.0 Released, Ported to Qt5/KDE Frameworks 5". OMG! Ubuntu. Retrieved 2024-05-05.
  10. Larabel, Michael (2024-04-29). "KDE's Amarok 3.0 Music Player Released After Six Year Hiatus - Now Ported To Qt5". www.phoronix.com. Retrieved 2024-05-05.
  11. Rankin, Kyle (2006). Linux Multimedia Hacks: Tips & Tools for Taming Images, Audio, and Video. "O'Reilly Media, Inc.". ISBN   978-0-596-10076-6.
  12. Pataki, Daniel (2008-03-25). "Amarok - The music player - gHacks Tech News". gHacks Technology News. Retrieved 2024-05-05.
  13. Okoi, Divine (2018-04-17). "Amarok - A Powerful Cross Platform Music Player". www.geeksmint.com. Retrieved 2024-05-05.
  14. "How to use Amarok to manage your iPod". How-To Geek. 2009-10-12. Retrieved 2024-05-05.