Managing Your Music Collection

KDE's amaroK music player allows you to play various audio formats, create playlists, import music from an iPod* (or upload files to your iPod), and listen to streaming audio broadcasts of radio stations on the Internet. The file types supported depend on the engine used for amaroK.

amaroK is not yet available as a KDE 4 application, but you can use the KDE 3 version of amaroK on your KDE 4 desktop. To start amaroK, press Alt+F2 and enter amarok. On first start, amaroK launches a First-Run Wizard with which to define the folders where amaroK should look for your music files.

amaroK's main window shows a sidebar on the left providing different views: your music collection, a context browser, your playlists, a file browser, etc. The right part of the window shows the current playlist. To play music, just drag and drop items from any of the sidebar browsers to the playlist area. Double-click an item in the playlist to start playback.

If your music files are properly tagged (containing at least information about the artist and album), you can make use of several nice amaroK features. To automatically fetch the album cover images from Amazon, select Tools+Cover Manager and click Fetch Missing Covers. The next time you play a track from this album, the cover is displayed in the context browser and on the on-screen display. To learn more about the artist, switch to the Context browser in the sidebar. Click the Artist tab to make amaroK search for the appropriate Wikipedia article, which is then displayed in the context browser. To view a track's lyrics, click the Lyrics tab to start a search and display the results.

To configure the use of another engine (or various other amaroK features), select Settings+Configure amaroK.