Clementine 0.4 Released (Amarok 1.4 Style Music Player For Linux, Windows And MacOS X)

Clementine is a port of Amarok 1.4, the famous and still very popular KDE music player. But Clementine also runs under GNOME with no need to install the KDE libraries thanks to Qt4; further more, Clementine runs on Windows and Mac OSX too.

Clementine 0.4 was just released, bringing some very interesting new features such as: support for multiple, tabbed playlists, support for loading and saving XSPF, M3U, PLS and ASX playlists, global hotkeys, fullscreen visualisation support using projectM, music transcoder that can convert your music to mp3, ogg, flac, spx, 3gp or m4a from any format that's supported by Clementine, replayGain support for volume normalisation, a playlist search field and many other features and fixes.

Just like Amarok, Clementine is not a lightweight music player - memory wise - as it uses around 32 MB of RAM on my system (tested on a music database of 1500 files). Still, that's not that much either. But the interface is clean and overall it still feels light. If you loved Amarok 1.4, you should definitely give Clementine a try!


Clementine 0.4 is not yet available in its official Ubuntu PPA, but you can download Ubuntu .deb packages via Clementine's Google Code page. (.rpm. .dmg and .exe files are also available for download from the same location)

Amarok 2.3.1 To Get Cover Bling

So what's up with all that cover bling-bling? Banshee has a Clutter Flow, Nautilus Elementary comes with Clutter Flow (via Gloobus of course) for image previews and now Amarok.

Except the applet in Amarok 2.3.1 is not called ClutterFlow but CoverBling:

CoverBling lets you browse your collection in an animated 3D view.


Amarok 2.3.1 will also bring an automated Playlist Generator which allows smart creation of playlists that match user-specified constraints. The Playlist Generator combines the features of "Smart Playlists" in Amarok 1.4 with the Bias system of Amarok 2.0.

Other changes in Amarok 2.3.1 include lots of bug fixes, some polishing and also the new file browser will finally support "places". Another new feature will be a Last FM similar artists applet:

If only Amarok 2.x would require less system resources... I'd even start using KDE for it.


Amarok 2.3.1 is currently in beta and there's no date set (that I could find) for the 2.3.1 release.

{Image credits: amarok.kde.org}

Amarok 2.3

Amarok 2.3 was released yesterday and I wanted to see how the new version is working, the system resources it uses and so on.

I've installed it (see here Karmic and Lucid PPAs), and then tried to load my ~30.000+ music collection. Now that's a nice memory usage:

and it took Amarok 2.3 about ~30 minutes to index my music collection. So my review ended here. There's no point in using such an application when we have so many to choose from. I'll be sticking with GMPC.


Now, I realize Amarok is a KDE application and I was running it in Gnome, but I used to do that all the time with Amarok 1.4 and it worked just fine.

Amarok 2.2.2 "Maya Gold" Released

After 8 weeks of development, Amarok 2.2.2 "Maya Gold" has been released.

This is mostly a bug-fix and UI improvements release, but new features have been added too, such as the Custom Labels (these are actually reintroduced) which allow you to add your personal touch to your music. Another new addition is the moodbar, which you can use to change the progress bar to fit with your current mood: normal, angry, frozen or happy:

Other minor additions include:

• Easy lyrics editing edit
• Filter and sort your music by BPM (beats per minute)
• The podcasts section has seen many new features and improvements
• The inline playlist editor now also allows resizing of auto sized items that are invisible because fixed sized items already use up 100% width
• Enhanced the playlist sorting breadcrumb items to separately highlight the order inversion arrow on hover
• The automatic character set detection for tags has been disabled; it caused too many problems with legitimate UTF-8 tags. It can be re-enabled from Settings->Collection
• Dynamic mode is now automatically disabled when replacing the playlist
• The collection search filter now also searches for file names as a fallback

An important note before you upgrade: Amarok now depends on KDE 4.3.x and Qt 4.5 as minimum versions.


The next version of Amarok, 2.2.3 is scheduled to be ready at the beginning of March.

Download Amarok 2.2.2

Ubuntu 9.10 users can already install it from the Kubuntu backports PPA:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:kubuntu-ppa/backports

KDE SC 4.4 Beta 2, Amarok, KDevelop Betas Available In Kubuntu Beta PPA

The second beta of KDE SC 4.4 has packages available in the Kubuntu beta PPA. There are also betas of Amarok and KDevelop available.

Users of the latest development release, Lucid, can upgrade to the latest packages:

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

Users of the stable Kubuntu Karmic 9.10 release can install it from the Kubuntu Beta PPA (installation instructions inside).

Cuberok: Multi-Platform Audio Player - Amarok 1.4 Style (Qt Based)

Cuberok is a music player and collection manager which resembles a lot to the very popular Amarok 1.4. It is based on Qt4 and has a lightweight interface, music collection support and many features, e.g. music autorating and Last.FM scrobbler.

Cuberok works on Linux, Windows and Mac OSX but for now I have only tested it in Linux (Ubuntu).

Cuberok features

* English and Russian interface.
* CUE support. Codepage selection for CUE sheets
* Shoutcast/icecast support (for GStreamer and Phonon)
* Support internet services Jamendo and MagnaTune (New in v.0.0.9)
* Last.FM and Libre.FM scrobblers
* Downloading images for albums and artists from Last.FM
* Loading artist and album info from Last.FM, loading lyrics from LyricWiki.org
* Auto rating for songs. Rating for albums, artists and genres automatically calculated from rating of songs.
* Easy collection browsing. Just double click on genre to view all artist in this genre.
* Smart playlists (custom SQL requests)
* Support for AlbumArt as separate file on disk. Art can be assigned to genre and artist too.
* Many supported music formats.
* DND (drag-and-drop) support to collect music and append playlists.
* Support for many play lists at one time. Play lists may be played in a certain configurable order, or browsed through like the main music library.
* Tag editing capability. Built-in tag converter QTagConvert
* Save/Load play lists to/from XSPF and M3U.
* Collect playlist files into Library. Supported XSPF, M3U, ASX/ASP and CUE files.
* Installer for Windows.
* Clean and fast database backend using SQLite 3.
* Configurable user interface.


I only wish I have kept my Amarok 1.4 library, as Cuberok has an option to import the Amarok 1.4 library:

Cuberok is not perfect. Actually, far from that: it still has bugs, not a lot of configurable options, but the look, feel and a lot of Amarok 1.4 features can be found in Cuberok:

To install Cuberok in Ubuntu (even though the package is called _jaunty_, it also works in Karmic), download the Ubuntu .deb file from HERE.

To get it to work, I installed a lot of dependencies manually. I don't remember them exactly, but these must be most if not all of them (sorry, I didn't keep a list of each dependency installed): phonon phonon-backend-gstreamer libaudiere-1.9.4 libtaglib2.0-cil sqlite3 libqt4-sql libqt4-sql-mysql libqt4-sql-sqlite libqtscript4-sql

To install them all in Ubuntu Karmic with one command, run this in a terminal:

sudo apt-get install phonon phonon-backend-gstreamer libaudiere-1.9.4 libtaglib2.0-cil sqlite3 libqt4-sql libqt4-sql-mysql libqt4-sql-sqlite libqtscript4-sql

More about the dependencies, on Cuberok homepage.

DOWNLOAD: For Debian, Windows, Mac OSX and source files, see the download page.

Amarok 2.2.1 Preview

Amarok 2.2.1 hasn't been yet released but it's developers posted a preview which sounds interesting. Among the improvements in Amarok 2.2.1:

Optional support for KNotify.

• New toolbar with nicer looks (you will also be able to select a "slim" version for small screens).
• "Jump To" feature for quick playlist navigation.
• Better Podcast support.
• Enhanced playlist inline editor.
• Full screen mode toggle, allowing to show Amarok without window decorations.

But what I like the most is the way collection scanner now adds new files: it uses incremental recursive scan, so Amarok will now no longer scan subdirectories whose mtimes have not changed:

For instance, in a setup like 3,000 files in your main folder, plus a few thousand files each in a few subfolders for a total of 10,000 tracks, if you added a single file to the top-level folder and had incremental recursive scanning turned on (the default), you'd cause a rescan of your entire music collection -- all 10,000 tracks or so. Now, if you add a single file to the top-level folder, you'll only cause a rescan of 3,000 tracks...which is still a lot, but even more of a reason to use a hierarchy.

[via Amarok blog]

The Final Version Of Amarok 2.2 "Sunjammer" Released [Linux]

Amarok 2.2 comes with an almost completely new look and feel. It now has a new layout for the Browser Pane on the left and an easier navigation using "bread crumbs" on top. All elements, the Browser Pane, Context View and the Playlist are dockable widgets, which you can place how and where you like. It is even possible to stack or remove them. Of course it's up to you to change the position, width and height to your liking.

Read the complete Amarok 2.2 release announcement to see what's new.

Amarok 2.2 marks the start of a series of 2.2.x releases that will focus on improving what is there rather than adding major new features. A new release will follow approximately every 6 weeks and bring with it bugfixes and improvements, as well as a few new features. So look forward to more regular Amarok updates in the near future.

(K)ubuntu Linux 9.10 the "Karmic Koala" will include Amarok 2.2 as its default Audio player! Packages for 2.2 will be uploaded to Karmic shortly.

Instructions for installing Amarok 2.2 in (K)Ubuntu Jaunty Jackalope (it also includes instructions for installing Amarok 2.2 in Fedora).

Other Linux distributions: download / installation instructions for Amarok 2.2

Install Amarok 2.2 In Ubuntu Jaunty and Fedora

Amarok 2.2 was released a few days ago. For complete changelog, visit this page.

I loved Amarok 1.4 and even used it in Gnome. Then, I really hated all the 2.x series until this 2.2. It's kind of slow, but it finally looks like a real music player and reminds me why I liked Amarok so much. I'm currently using it in Ubuntu Jaunty and since there are only .deb files for Ubuntu Karmic posted on the announcement download link (actually those are for version 2.2 beta), I thought I'd let you know how to install it in Ubuntu Jaunty.

Installing Amarok 2.2 In Ubuntu Jaunty

1. Add the following repository (run the command in a terminal):

sudo sh -c "echo 'deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/project-neon/ppa/ubuntu jaunty main' >> /etc/apt/sources.list"

2. Add the GPG key:

sudo apt-key adv --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-keys 0F7992B0

3. Install Amarok 2.2:

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install amarok-nightly

This will install Amarok 2.2 separately of any version of Amarok you may have installed. To run it, click the "Amarok Nightly" icon, not "Amarok".

Installing Amarok 2.2 In Fedora

1. Add the KDE RedHat repository:

su -c "wget http://apt.kde-redhat.org/apt/kde-redhat/fedora/kde.repo -O /etc/yum.repos.d/kde.repo"

2. Install Amarok 2.2 in Fedora:

su -c "yum --enablerepo=kde-unstable -y install amarok"

Fedora installation credits: Fedora-ES.com

Update: I updated the post from Amarok 2.2 RC to Amarok 2.2 Final as now the Uubntu PPA contains the final build of Amarok 2.2.