Brian's Blog

I've been a die hard xmms fan pretty much since I started using Linux about 5 years ago. I've heard good talk about amarok though and gave it a half-hearted try some months ago and decided I didn't like it. I found it to be slow and difficult to use at the time. Looking back I don't think I gave it a fair shake though. So I decided to try it out again and I'm kind of glad I did. I mean, it's still way to system intensive for a music player but it's got some really cool features I didn't realize were there. Ones that make me willing to use a heavier music player than xmms. So far I really dig the cover art manager. It's kind of nice to see the CD cover art of whatever song is playing. The only thing that is somewhat annoying is that it doesn't always guess the correct cover is. But, to be fair, that's probably because I don't have all of my stuff tagged properly so it just goes the best that I can. It's just a but odd seeing it display a kids music CD when Green Jelly is playing. I also never knew it had a tab to pull artist and album info from the Wikipedia. I often Google for artist info when I hear a song and this just saves me the step. Pretty cool. Still, I don't think I'd use it on a low power system, but I've got CPU cycles to spare on my main workstation so why not?

One other hang up I had was that amarok didn't play the way I wanted with windowmaker. I like having my music player pretty much hidden, but amarok always left the big app icon on the bottom of the screen. And I couldn't easily control it with right click menus. After a bit of searching I found a cool dockapp called docker that creates a small "system tray" area. The only thing is when it's in windowmaker mode you only have room for 4 icons or so. But that's better than none. And it lets me put gaim in it too so I can clear up a little clutter by putting two icons into one.

Oh, one more cool thing is that it can be setup to transfer songs to and from your digital music player. Up until now I've plugged in my player, opened a command prompt, mounted the device, copied over what I wanted, then unmounted and disconnected. Amarok was easy to setup to essentially to that for me. It won't mount the player, but the connect button makes it easy. Then I can tag a bunch of songs in my collection for transfer and as soon as I hit the transfer button it just copies them all over. Then I can hit the disconnect button and I'm done. I know, it's the same steps, but it's still nice to queue up a bunch of things then have them go over to the player in a batch rather than all the cding to directories and cp -R over and over to get what I want.

Oh, and the search features of amarok are incredible when compared to xmms. don't get me wrong though, I still like my little xmms. I may switch back with time, but I'm still having fun playing around with something new.