Amarok: Best media player period!

Okay reason number 5 for using Linux. If you love music and have a lot of it on your computer, as I do, you need a good media player. I've used a lot of them--XMMS and Winamp, Beep Media Player, iTunes and Windows Media Player but of all of them the best, hands-down, has been Amarok. Here's just some of the features in the 1.4 release:

• MySQL database support for media library (makes exporting your media library as easy as a SQL query)
• iPod/iRiver support
• Automatic download of lyrics from Wikilyric (or other services)
• Automatic download of artist information from Wikipedia
• Download of album art from Amazon.com
• Easy organization of media files from tag information
• LastFM support
• Support for mp3, AAC, FLAC, ogg and WMA files
  

So what's the big deal with those? As I said at the start of the post, I have a lot of music. On my laptop, I have close to a thousand songs. My desktop machine I have some 30 gigs of music on two Linux partitions. I have about that same amount sitting on an NTFS partition that is mostly WMA files. Now, I have one media player for all of my music. But it gets better than that.

I converted a fair number of the WMA files to ogg or mp3 format about three months ago. Since this ran as a batch job, it just threw all of the output files onto the Linux partition higgely-piggely. Well, that didn't matter all that much to me at the time because Amarok organizes the files in the media player itself but not on the file system. Everything was fine until I did something silly and broke Amarok and then tried to use XMMS. Suddenly, there's two-thousand media files sitting on the root of my /music partition. Not good, unhappy, bad juju. Well, when I upgraded to Amarok 1.4 I discovered that I could, with a couple of mouse clicks, have all of my media files organized for me! I almost wept with happiness. Now all of my Grateful Dead is in one place!. Try THAT in WMP!

Because Amarok uses a database as the backend for everything, when I download lyrics they get written to the database meaning I don't have to download them every single time. I also like being able to simply click on a tab and automagically have a Wikipedia article pop up about the author. Again, I know of no such features in any other media player at least not without installing add-on components. Everything I have mentioned in Amarok so far is the normal install.

Also, Amarok includes Audioscrobber/LastFM support natively. Check out the little "this is what I'm listening to box" just to the left of this post. That is updated weekly based upon what Amarok sends to my LastFM account.

Lastly, I just got an iRiver T30 a month ago. At the time, it seemed like I was going to have a problem because in the States, iRiver is programmed to behave like a MTP device. However, that is not the case in Europe or Asia. I found this site that allowed me to upgrade the firmware and now my iRiver looks to be just an ordinary UMS device (think thumb drive). I can sync anything I want to my iRiver with a couple of clicks. iTunes didn't know how to talk to my iRiver, Windows Media player would sync mp3 and wma files but not ogg, and Yahoo music was the only thing that would really do the trick with it this also meant having to either reboot at home (yuck!) or sync from my work computer.

Impressed yet? Drooling? I can understand. That said, here's the bad news. You have to be using Linux. There is, at present, no port to Windows or OSX although it would be great if there were.

Amarok is everything I could've ever wanted in a media player. Get it, get it now, you can thank me later.

Cheers
The Dreadlocked Geekgrrl