amaroK, two years on

It’s over two years since I posted my experiences with amaroK. At the time I was impressed by the meta information like album grouping and album art lookups on Amazon.

Two years later, and I’m still using it. So obviously it’s stood the test of time. I’m using the Xine engine in amaroK, and have the multimedia keys on my M$ keyboard mapped using xbindkeys (config below) I am still on version 1.3.9, on Fedora Core 4, so some of the dcop stuff might now be redundant.

Some things I would recommend for listening to music on Linux

Use the Xine engine in amaroK

I think the sound quality is better than gStreamer, and file support is broader.

Rip to FLAC

amaroK/xine sounds great, so make sure you’re using a good source file. Disk is cheap these days.

Use replaygain to losslessly “normalise” your track volumes

replay gain uses tags to tell your player what volume to play your files at. There is a replay gain script for amaroK, which reads the replay gain comments out of the file, and adjusts your volume for you.

Rip with ABCDE

Add the following to your /etc/abcde.conf to tell flacenc to use add the replay gain comments to encoded music. FLACOPTS="--replay-gain"

As mentioned above, I use xbindkeys to bind commands to certain key presses. This is especially useful for making use off the multimedia keys on keyboards. My keys just call the DCOP commands in KDE to tell amaroK to stop/start/pause,adjust volume. I’m not sure if newer versions of amaroK still use DCOP, but for now, it works for me

from ~/.xbindkeys when using Microsoft multimedia split/ergo keyboard.

    "dcop amarok player stop"
    m:0x10 + c:164

    "dcop amarok player playPause"
    m:0x0 + c:162

    "dcop amarok player prev"
    m:0x0 + c:144

    "dcop amarok player next"
    m:0x0 + c:153

    "dcop amarok player volumeUp"
    m:0x10 + c:176

    "dcop amarok player volumeDown"
    m:0x10 + c:174