The New Face of Amarok
Desktop Apps Training - Amarok
The word "Amarok" comes from Inuit mythology and is used to describe a gigantic wolf-like creature that will hunt down, kill, and devour anyone foolish enough to hunt during the night time. I think the word describes the free music player software well due its dominance in the free music software world. Amarok has been around for over 4 years and in that time has changed significantly and secured a spot as a well respected leader of digital music management. Amarok servers as more than a music managerĀ  providing users with advanced features like community developed scripts, dynamic playlists, and database importing while maintaining the simplicity of a good music player with drag and drop options, tagging, renaming, and easy sorting features along with cross platform support for Linux, Windows, and Mac.Among the recent changes to Amarok was the release of Amarok version 2 which was released on 12/10/08 and now version 2.0.1.1 codenamed Megellan. Amarok 2 was loaded with new features and offered a completely re-designed interface for managing music, tight integration with the increasingly popular on-line services Magnatune, Jamendo, MP3tunes, Last.fm and Shoutcast. Amarok 2 also has better plugin support and has been migrated from KDE 3 to KDE 4 framework taking advantage of what KDE 4 has to offer. The most recent versions of Amarok have brought back a few features from the 1.4 releases and made some new features and improvements as well. Familiar features from 1.4 now available on Amarok 2.0.1.1 include queuing, playlist search and filtering. Amarok users can also now enjoy pleasant functionality such as sorting their collections by composer, custom album covers, custom emblems on service script items, "stop after track" on the playlist menu, podcasts channels are automatically updated once per hour if autoscan is turned on, filtering has been added to the service browser and much much more. If you're in looking for something to manage your digital music files and have looked at Amarok when it was version 1.4, it's worth another look.