Well it’s no secret that I’m a music fan and love to keep my music organized, and neatly tagged. ( Well, if you didn’t – now you do ). I’d posted quite sometime ago on how to keep your music well tagged and organized, so there’s pretty much no way that my files wouldn’t be tagged.

Of course, there exceptions here and there but majority are tagged. So I was rather surpised today when Amarok , during playback wasn’t showing any metadata. To verify – I installed id3v2, a CLI tool to view/edit ID3 tags for mp3 files using zypper and – guess what- it showed the meta data correctly.
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I was catching up on some feeds yesterday, and this piece of news caught my eye -Amarok 2.1 released. Being a long time Amarok fan ( heck Amarok itself was catalyst to make me use my SUSE 10.0 use full) time – I read the article with great interest.

Amarok 2 users would know that Amarok 2 series is a shadow of its old Amarok 1.4(“Amarok Classic” self) – and quite a few people still prefer Amarok classic to Amarok 2 – primararily because of Amarok’s missing support for visualizations, equalizer amongst others. I don’t use equalizers – and as for visualization – well don’t use that either.

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Here’s a short tip: If Amarok 2.0 doesn’t add any songs to your playlist or collection, or the collection scan is getting hung at up 47% or 79% try installing mysql. Since Amarok 2 now makes use of mysql as its backend, it expects mysql to be installed(nope, mysql-client won’t do either). As a result, after scanning, it cannot add the songs to the collection database and the process just stops.
Just install mysql, and you should be rocking to music on Amarok again

Couple of days ago, the second beta to the second version of the immensely popular and fantastic audio player Amarok was released by the Amarok team.

The second beta brings in some drastic changes, the main one being SQLite no longer being the default backend, and PostgreSQL support being dropped, in favour of a single backend, that being MySQL-Embedded platform. Other notable changes include improved scripting support, the return of lyric fetching and incremental scanner support.

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Amarok is probably amongst the best audio player and jukebox software, bar none. This feature rich software is  also very flexible and extensible. By making use of third party scripts (and writing your own, if you know, say Python or Ruby) you can enrich your experience your Amarok experience. Here’s a list of some must have Amarok scripts

• weekalarm

weekalarm is one heck of a alarm script – you can set multiple alarms for the day, different times for different days, support for snooze and nap, make use of fading, and even use a separate playlist for your alarm tunes. Can’t imagine waking up without this one!

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Project Neon is the codename for a nightly build service for Amarok 2.

Neon is intended to be used by everyone who wants to help us find bugs, keep track of development, join development or just wants to live on the bleeding edge. It is not intended to be used instead of a stable and full featured Amarok.

Packages for Amarok 2 for Kubuntu are available, and packages for openSUSE should be coming up soon.

To install it on Kubuntu Hardy add the following line to your /etc/apt/sources.list file:

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/project-neon/ubuntu hardy main

check for updates, install amarok-nightly

KDE 4.1 Alpha 1 was just released, and it looks very promising indeed! Here’s what bastion of PolishLinux had to say:

Desktop

First thing worth noticing is the new looks of KRunner. Unfortunately, on the current stage, it behaves in an unpredictable manner. In some cases after typing one letter I had to wait a few seconds for KRunner to catch it and prompt me with a list of available choices. What is more, it randomly hung up completely, exceeding the maximum response time, forcing KWin to kindly ask me to kill it.

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For all those people who miss Amarok badly while on Windows, well fear not, your dream has come true….almost.

With the release of KDE4.0 which uses Qt4 framework, which has been GPL’d and available for Windows and MacOSX, a lot of effort has been put in to port KDE4 for Windows, which allows Amarok to be run under Windows as well.

At the moment, just a tech preview has been released, and you can get the steps required to install Amarok under Windows over at KDE techbase.  Being a tech preview release, it’s rather buggy. In fact the developers have asked users not to submit any bug reports, because they’re busy working on the obvious ones. So don’t expect miracles. In fact, don’t expect Amarok not to crash.