HELIOLITH

Amarok has kept me quite busy over the last 24 hours. It’s the nicest jukebox/ music player I’ve ever used. A year ago before I broke off my relationship with Windows, I used iTunes and Winamp, and since switching over to linux have pretty much stuck with Xmms which was very slim and low-resource, much like winamp. But Amarok is so cool!

So cool, that I thought I needed the bleeding edge version, and compiled it from source, along with a few other dependencies including taglib, xine, and zlib…. I got it fully loaded with all the right configure options, but in the end I failed, as there was some sort of memory leak (I’m not a doctor, that’s a layman’s diagnosis) as it tried to parse the meta-data from my 40Gb mp3/m4a collection. Ugh. I guess Amarok 1.4 is supposed to support m4a (Apple’s codec) meta-data (tags that let you sort and play your music). I gave up after some unknown glitch brought my system down to a complete halt a few times. The unique thing about the experience, is although I felt defeated, I wasn’t even slightly upset with the developers. They do it for free. It’s open source. It’s free software! How could I have anything but gratitude?

This piece on Windows is not Linux by Dominic Humphries (ty daveb for the link) is very well written and reminds me of many of the reasons why the Open Source world has made software and computing a much more wonderful experience for me. It rather explains my attitude that has been turned upside down.

So now I’m in the process of using Grip (such an excellent ripper) to convert my cd collection back to mp3s, (about 4000 out of 8000 songs) as I’m not purist enough to go with Ogg, as I want a broader range of support for my audio. How did I ever subscribe to that iTunes/Apple hype about their wonderful ‘AAC’ codec? Reading Thomas Hawk’s “1 Billion Suckers Served” was quite humorous, but also sadly quite close to the truth. Subscribing to a proprietary codec that one company invents, especially if you’re buying DRM-ed music is not a good long term strategy.

My favorite feature in Amarok is the ‘Lyrics’ tab that allows you to query a vast lyrical database using the tags of the song you’re listening to. This is indispensible when listening to songs in other languages, and studying music I believe is one of the fastest paths to fluency in another language. I broke out my German-English dictionary and was listening to some old music by ‘Die Aerzte’ looking up a few of the words I’ve forgotten. There’s nothing like having the meaning of a hilarious song like ‘Die banane‘ click for the first time as you listen to it and decipher each pun and riddle in real-time.

In case you’re curious about its feature-set but aren’t about to go googling, here’s a few of the cooler features I lifted from the amarok page on Wikipedia:

# Integrated cover manager with automatic album cover download from Amazon.com.
# Display of Wikipedia article about the currently playing artist.
# Automatic lyrics retrieval and display.
# Playlist browser for managing collections of playlists.
# Music-rating system.
# Integrated iPod support.
# Podcasting support.
# Integrated CD-burning support using k3b.
# Extended tag dialog with MusicBrainz and mass-tagging support.
# Choice between using SQLite3, MySQL and PostgreSQL databases.
# Native Audioscrobbler support. Dynamic playlists can be generated from suggestions given by Last.fm. (amaroK users are invited to join the amaroK users Last.fm group.) Very neat concept! Check out my profile.
# A powerful scripting interface, allowing amaroK to be extended through any DCOP-supported language.

Now that I’ve finished my own spiel, I notice that daveb posted his own Amarok fetishizing dogma. While often nsfw, his style is guaranteed laughter.