rfunk | Amarok: Upgrading has its benefits

I spent most of the first half of this week upgrading my desktop computers at home and work from a two-year-old Debian installation to a seven-month-old Kubuntu installation.

When this goes well, it's really cool because it just requires one reboot, at the end. (It's also cool because the home machine started as a 2003 Libranet installation, so it's now run three different distributions without a reinstall. All hail apt-get dist-upgrade.) Unfortunately the home machine had some quirks that I had to work through before it would boot up properly, but that's done now, and I spent all day yesterday upgrading the work machine.

One of the big reasons for this upgrade was to get a more recent version of the KDE desktop environment, complete with lots of software, such as the Konqueror web browser, which has had many many improvements in the past two years.

But I'm discovering that the best part of this upgrade is a working (non-crashing) Amarok music player. It gives me a unified interface to play my MP3s, CDs, Internet radio streams, Last.fm streams, and almost anything else. It gives quick access to artist information, cover art, lyrics, links to related artists, and includes a rating capability (actually two, one manual and one automatic/guessing).

Unfortunately it doesn't integrate with Pandora, but its Last.fm integration beats anything I've used before. Oh, and if I had an iPod it would work with that. (I'll have to try my non-iPod portable MP3 player, but it should work as well.)

Yeah, you Windows and Mac people are probably thinking that you have all this (or similar) with iTunes or Windows Media Player, but there's one thing I know those don't have -- Amarok is extensible with user-written or downloaded scripts. So, for example, with one script I'll be able to play and control the SlimServer at home (which will, with some firewall fiddling, let me pipe my entire home music collection to work). Another one automatically pauses the music when I lock my screen (useful at work, probably not so much at home).

It's a strange feeling for my music player to make me feel like exploring all its obscure capabilities.

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I'll have to give it another try then - I remember AmaroK being really unstable and haven't given it any attention since then (although I always dutifully installed it). Pandora integration would be pretty neat.. I found a neat set of hacks sometime back that can easily capture/categorise the MP3s that Pandora gets from their servers and that can, to a certain extent, control Pandora. I wonder how hard it'd be to find them again and glue them into AmaroK.

Yeah, up until now Amarok was completely unusable for me. It would either crash quickly or go into livelock trying to catalog my music. This is Amarok 1.4.3 in KDE 3.5.5, and it works great.

I'd be interested in those Pandora hacks you found. I'm sure they could be combined with Amarok scripting, though I'd be a bit concerned about Pandora banning people doing that.

psst

I love konqueror to pieces. I use gnome at home, but only because I don't want to reinstall. konqueror is the best file browser out there, for my money (none).

I'm surprised that amarok doesn't play well with pandora, though. Apparently it's because pandora is a closed source webapp (though doesn't it seem like it should be open source? it has that feel). I'm sure someone will create a plugin soon enough, though it'll probably just be a front end for tiny web browsing.

"I use gnome at home, but only because I don't want to reinstall."

apt-get install kubuntu-desktop

If I could get from Debian sarge to Kubuntu dapper with a change of sources.list plus:
apt-get update
apt-get dist-upgrade
apt-get install ubuntu-minimal ubuntu-base kubuntu-desktop
and one reboot, it should be much easier for you to go from Ubuntu (Gnome) to Kubuntu (KDE).

Pandora's player is all Flash, though it's rumored that it's streaming 128kbps MP3. I think their TOS may prohibit usage outside their Flash or other authorized player (like my Squeezebox).

dachte's mention of finding a "neat set of hacks" has me intrigued, however.

last time I did a kde install it broke my laptop, but I'll give it a shot. What's the worst thing that could happen?

Bah! broken package. I can't even start the download.

Boo, hiss!

Depending on the error, "apt-get install -f" *may* help clean things up.

Maybe. I'm sure I can just go find the official sources.list and that'll take care of it, but it was too late to worry about it last night.

Here's where I got my Ubuntu sources.list:
http://www.ubuntu-nl.org/source-o-matic/

Oh yeah, I also added these to that sources.list, based on updates at the Kubuntu site:
# These KDE updates are signed with Jonathan Riddell's key:
# GPG key: DD4D5088
# wget http://people.ubuntu.com/~jriddell/kubuntu-packages-jriddell-key.gpg
# sudo apt-key add kubuntu-packages-jriddell-key.gpg
#
# Kubuntu KDE 3.5.5# These KDE updates are signed with Jonathan Riddell's key:
# wget http://people.ubuntu.com/~jriddell/kubuntu-packages-jriddell-key.gpg
# sudo apt-key add kubuntu-packages-jriddell-key.gpg
#
# Kubuntu KDE 3.5.5
deb http://kubuntu.org/packages/kde-355 dapper main
# Kubuntu KOffice 1.6
deb http://kubuntu.org/packages/koffice-16 dapper main
# Kubuntu Amarok 1.4.3
deb http://kubuntu.org/packages/amarok-143 dapper main

deb http://kubuntu.org/packages/kde-355 dapper main
# Kubuntu KOffice 1.6
deb http://kubuntu.org/packages/koffice-16 dapper main
# Kubuntu Amarok 1.4.3
deb http://kubuntu.org/packages/amarok-143 dapper main

I hate it when I double-paste.

You know where I'm going with this, right?

Amarok is a giant wolf in Inuit mythology.

Smilla would be happy.

According to the FAQ, they got the name from a 1990 Mike Oldfield album, which the record company wanted him to call "Tubular Bells II". Where Oldfield got the title seems to be a matter of some debate.

(Hmm, I wonder if Smilla would enjoy Mike Oldfield music? Or maybe she'd prefer Sigur Rós.)

It would make sense that they pulled the name from Mike Oldfield. That still doesn't diminish my self-satisfaction of recognizing amarok as an Inuit word, and being right!

Smilla likes modern classical music, the kind with awful dissonance that makes you feel the end of society as we know it.

She might like throat singing, though.

Amarok: Upgrading has its benefits

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Amarokrash

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Get KDE!

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sources.list

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Amarok

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