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Music

Back From the Dead: Amarok 3.0 Music Player Released (kde.org) 56

"Aamrok 3.0, ported to Qt5/KDE Frameworks 5, has been released," writes Slashdot reader serafean. "With the heavy lifting being done, the Qt6/KF6 version is expected later in the year." Originally developed for Linux as part of the KDE desktop environment, Amarok is a free, cross-platform music player that supports various audio formats and a user interface that can be tailored to individual preferences. These are the main features/changes, as highlighted in a KDE blog post: FEATURES:
- Added a visual hint that context view applets can be resized in edit mode.
- Display missing metadata errors in Wikipedia applet UI.
- Add a button to stop automatic Wikipedia page updating. (BR 485813)

CHANGES:
- Replace defunct lyricwiki with lyrics.ovh as lyrics provider for now. (BR 455937)
- Show only relevant items in wikipedia applet right click menu (BR 323941), use monobook skin for opened links and silently ignore non-wikipedia links.
- Don't show non-functional play mode controls in dynamic mode (BR 287055)
The changelog is available here. You can find the package on download.kde.org.
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Back From the Dead: Amarok 3.0 Music Player Released

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  • Nostalgia (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Wonko the Sane ( 25252 ) * on Friday May 03, 2024 @05:11AM (#64444250) Journal
    Amarok was really great when it first came out, but I was always annoyed by the limitation of its database schema to recognize that two different files might be the same logical song just in different file formats. Also the podcast support was so rudimentary to be nearly useless.
    • It really whips the llama’s *ss?

    • Which one do you like best now? Clementine was petty good when I went looking last.

      Integration and sync with KDEConnect would be the bee's knees.

      • Pretty much any media player integrates with KDEConnect: the requirement is for the player to support MPRIS, which even firefox does (with the plasma-integration addon)

      • Re:Nostalgia (Score:4, Informative)

        by Menelkir ( 899602 ) on Friday May 03, 2024 @07:36AM (#64444446) Journal
        Try the fork, Strawberry. It's the best music organizer to date.
        • Unfortunately, Strawberry doesn't carry over Clementine's best feature, the Android app. KDE Connect can stop/start any desktop music player, but Clementine's Android app gave you full library/playlist control. It was absolutely wonderful at the cafe I run.

          Customer: Gee, I was wondering if you could play --blank--
          Me: Sure thing...

          **pulls out phone ,--blank-- starts playing**

          Now I have to run foobar on a tablet at the counter that people keep spilling things all over
          • Did you tried to use the clementine app with strawberry? Also, the developer of strawberry is friendly enough on that matter, it seems he doesn't anyone to implement what the remote does. FYI: https://github.com/strawberrym... [github.com]
            • The previous Strawberry FAQ had an item about that (it since been removed along with all mentions of Clementine). Basically, the dev stated the app was Clementine's deal, and they don't feel like messing with it (and no, it doesn't work with Strawberry)
    • Re:Nostalgia (Score:4, Interesting)

      by AvitarX ( 172628 ) <me&brandywinehundred,org> on Friday May 03, 2024 @06:03AM (#64444290) Journal

      I really liked amarok.

      Of all the music players, it was the only one that seemed to properly support various artists.

      Specifically I could have a soundtrack album that was under various artists, but the individual tracks would still have an artist.

      Every other player I tried on Windows and Linux did not handle this the way I expected.

      They also basically created what became plasma which I thought was pretty cool.

      • iTunes was bad at this for a long time. ID3v2 supports tags for "Artist" and "Album Artist." Any songs with the same Album Artist and Album Title should be grouped as an album. For a long time, even with Album Artist set as "Various Artists" iTunes would not combine every track into the same album unless you flagged the "part of a collection" checkmark. Which was not stored in an ID3 tag, I don't think. Just in the library file.

        • by AvitarX ( 172628 )

          I'm pretty sure the amarok that introduced plasma did it wrong too (that was 14ish ?! Years ago though, so I'm not sure).

          The gnome2 music player handled it wrong too, but I did like it's 3 column filter interface that I think was modelled on iTunes.

          I really liked amarok of that era though (forget if it was 1 or 2). In general I think it was the only KDE app I preferred over gnome (I was/am a huge gnome2 fan).

          Those were the days, I'm still convinced Ubuntu 7.10 was peak Linux desktop. Everyone got cocky afte

  • by thesjaakspoiler ( 4782965 ) on Friday May 03, 2024 @05:57AM (#64444284)

    Nah, didn't think so.

  • by Saffaya ( 702234 ) on Friday May 03, 2024 @06:39AM (#64444350)

    Honest question.

    Why move a perfectly functional program that uses Qt5 to Qt6?
    What does Qt6 that is so essential that you would release another version just for it, and also cut it from working on any Windows 7 or below?

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by cen1 ( 2915315 )
      The better question is, why not port it? It is not a problem now, but in 5, 10 years Qt5 will most probably stop working or start have issues on modern operating systems. Depending on the modules you use, there might be CVEs, networking code not supporting modern TLS etc.. world moves on and you have to keep up or you are left behind.
      • Re:Why Qt6? (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Junta ( 36770 ) on Friday May 03, 2024 @07:15AM (#64444412)

        His comment answered the 'why not port it?' by mentioning Windows 7. Going to Qt6 prevents it from going with Windows 7.

        On one hand, I get it, Windows 7 was the last edition before the platform agenda shifted to be all about cloud accounts, telemetry, and being an ad platform. So if you are a Windows die-hard but can't get on board with that BS, then Windows 7 is it.

        On the other hand, Windows 7 is being left behind by Microsoft and a bunch of applications. Chrome has left it behind. Firefox has mostly left it behind, and ESR will finally leave it behind by end of this year. Many games left Windows 7 behind (Vulkan and DirectX 12 are generally non-starters in Windows 7). One music player won't balance out the fact you will not be able to run most new games and can't run new versions of browsers.

        So ultimately, it's time to leave Windows 7 behind. If you can't get behind the new Windows, then buy a Mac or run Linux. At this point, Wine on Linux might be able to run a broader number of Windows applications than Windows 7, since it does support DirectX 12 and implements other Windows APIs up through Windows 11.

        • Vulkan works fine on Windows 7 with Nvidia, up to a certain version anyway when they stopped support. There is no technological reason why it couldn't continue working, only logistical.

          • by Junta ( 36770 )

            when they stopped support

            So it doesn't work fine.

            here is no technological reason why it couldn't continue working, only logistical.

            The reason doesn't matter, what matters is that applications that use DX12 and Vulkan generally can't work in Windows 7 (with some select exceptions). From a technology standpoint, they could have given Windows 7 all the features, but logistically, they didn't.

    • Re:Why Qt6? (Score:5, Informative)

      by DrWho42 ( 558107 ) on Friday May 03, 2024 @09:30AM (#64444662) Homepage
      The Qt6 binaries are built with support for "Apple Silicon" ARM CPUs; Qt5 are not.
    • by aergern ( 127031 )

      Because Windows 7 and below are unsupported and folks should not use them because they are a security risk. Also, this is a. KDE program and if you didn't know it, we're on Qt6 with KDE 6.0.4 (currently) so yeah, let's come to 2024 and stop screaming at clouds.

    • Why move a perfectly functional program that uses Qt5 to Qt6?

      Amarok is a KDE software project. Since inception, KDE syncs to the current Qt version. Major KDE release numbers refer to the Qt release number it compiles with (KDE3 used Qt3... currently it's KDE Plasma 6 and it uses Qt6). KDE e.V. even has a special deal with Qt Group that guarantees an open source Qt version every 6 months just for KDE to not be blocked even if Qt changes its licensing model.

      It's also possible they have not considered much the question of Windows (7). KDE is primarily intended to Linux

  • by pitch2cv ( 1473939 ) on Friday May 03, 2024 @06:54AM (#64444380)

    Those are really unique to Amarok:
    * play me songs that have at least 4 stars AND are from [genre x OR y] AND haven't been played the last 6 months
    * play me songs that were added the last 3 months and haven't been rated yet
    * play me albums that I haven't played for 3 years but whose play count is over 10
    * ...

    As an alternative, I've used mpd https://musicpd.org/ [musicpd.org] since Amarok got neglected, but I'm really looking forward to apt install amarok again, already digging up my old dB's :D
    Cantata, one of mpd's frontends that I give to visitors, looks a lot like Amarok ;) though personally I use either a mobile or console frontend for mpd.

    Yes, I still have all my music stored locally.

    • by mccalli ( 323026 )
      Music app on the Mac can do all this with Smart Playlists. Not that I'm recommended that app - it's far from my favourite interface. More noting that it's welcome functionality, but not unique.
    • You should try strawberry, it does that.
    • Hah! Someone else who's moved from Amarok to mpd! A joyous salute to you!

      I've also set up MALP on the family's Android devices, so they don't have to connect to the server VNC session with Cantata to change the music. BTW I recently got bitten by an mpd update that doesn't allow spaces in playlist URLs anymore - "losing" most of my music stations since the descriptions typically had spaces...

      My big beef with most players (including many alternatives on Linux) is that gapless playback is (nowadays? Used

  • I remember using Clementine years ago when I was on Windows, then switching to Foobar2000 with its simple tagging features and ReplayGain plugin.

    After switching to the Unix-like world, I was lost due to the number of audio players available. I tried a lot of them before staying with deadbeef - it seems to be inspired by Foobar2000.

    This comment seems to be a bit off-topic but I'm confounded by the number of music players in the Unix-like world. Anyway, it's great that an old project still gets some love from

  • Yet another music player.
    Unless it adds cowbell...

  • I just want an updated build of x11amp. Yes I know it became xmms but that's a bit dead too. Then someone wrote xmms2 which turned into some convoluted client/server model that no one uses or understands.

  • ... was the new kid on the block and people were still debating wether to ditch XMMS for that newfangled hipster compliant Songbird thing. ... Holy cow, I'm getting old.

  • >"Back From the Dead: Amarok 3.0 Music Player Released "

    It should stay dead. All of us moved over to Clementine when Amarok design went "stupid."

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

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