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
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 and click . 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
browser in the sidebar. Click the 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
tab to start a search and display the results.
To configure the use of another engine (or various other amaroK
features), select .
