Quick Start

On start-up, amaroK scans the folders that are part of your collection for music files. Although you can use amaroK without building a collection, it is recommended to do so, because most of the powerful, advanced features are only available with an existing collection.

The amaroK main window is divided into two parts. The sidebar browsers on the left contain different views of your music collection and your playlists, a file browser, and an interface to an iPod. Change the browser by clicking a tab on the far left. The right part contains the playlist window and, below it, the player (if you have not configured it to be shown in a separate window).

To play music, first create a playlist. Just drag and drop items from any of the sidebar browsers to the playlist window. Use or to select multiple items. Double-click an item in the playlist to play it. You can add or delete items from the list during playback. Use the icons in the bottom right corner to Undo and Redo changes or to Clear the entire list.

The Sidebar Browsers

Context

With this tab, view information and statistics about your collection and the current artist. Switch to different views using the tabs on top of the Context browser. The Home view provides statistics on your listening habits, listing your favorite, newest, and least-played tracks or albums. Current provides data related to the track currently being played, such as the album cover (see The Cover Manager) and the listening statistics related to this track. If available, Lyrics displays the lyrics of the track currently played. You need to be connected to the Internet to use this feature. Artist shows information about the artist. This information is fetched from Wikipedia, so an Internet connection is needed as well.

Collection

Use this view to manage and display your personal collection of titles. The toolbar on top of the browser allows you to configure the way your collection is displayed and to rescan or reorganize the collection. Define the order your titles are displayed in the browser with Group By. You can choose between predefined criteria or create your own sort criteria using Primary, Secondary, and Tertiary. The next two icons let you toggle between tree and flat view. Use the update icon to rescan your entire collection for changes and add or delete folders to scan by clicking the wrench icon.

If you are searching for a particular album, title, genre, or year, use Filter here. The selection in the browser is adjusted as you type. You can only search in criteria used to group the collection. If you have grouped your collection by Artist / Album, it is not possible to search for titles belonging to a certain genre.

Playlists

You can access different playlists with the playlist browser. Playlists holds your personal playlists found in your collection folders. Every time you create and save a new playlist from the playlist window, it appears here. Right-click to open a menu where you can manually add a new playlist or a subfolder. To add new items from the playlist window to an existing playlist, just drag and drop them on the playlist in the browser window.

IMPORTANT: Sharing Playlists with Other Players

Save playlists in m3u or pls format, so you can share them with any other players using these formats.

Smart Playlists offer various views of your collection, such as tracks never played, newest tracks, or tracks by genre. Right-click to add subfolders or to create your own smart playlists.

Radio Streams lets you listen to live radio streams from the Internet. An extensive list is already shipped with amaroK. Right-click to add more or create subfolders.

Podcasts imports podcasts to amaroK. Right-clicking opens a menu where you can add podcasts and subfolders, refresh all podcasts, or set the scan interval.

At the bottom of the playlist browser window, you can Enable dynamic mode and configure it with Show Options. Dynamic mode is a feature that allows you the flexibility of picking music from your entire collection while keeping a relatively small playlist that is easy to maintain. Refer to the online documentation (open it with F1) for details.

Media Device

If you own an iPod, you can use this browser to play music from it or to add music from your collection to the iPod. It must be mounted at /mnt/ipod before starting amaroK. To listen to tracks from the iPod, drag and drop them from the list view to the playlist window. To add tracks from the collection to the iPod, drag tracks from the playlist window to the list view.

File Browser

This tab opens a file browser. It corresponds to the standard KDE file selector dialog with the usual controls for navigating the file system. Enter a URL or a path directly into the text input field. From the contents displayed, drag elements to the playlist to include them. You can also perform a recursive search for a file in a given directory. To do so, enter a text string for the title and the location at which to start the search. Then select Search and wait for the results to appear in the lower section of the window.

The Cover Manager

With amaroK, you can assign a cover to each album of your collection. With the Cover Manager, easily add, delete, and retrieve album covers.

Start the cover manager with Tools Cover Manager . A tree view in the left part of the window lists all artists in your collection. The main part of the window lists the covers of all albums. To filter the covers displayed, click an individual artist in the tree view or enter a term in the input field at the top of the window. Use View to toggle between displaying all albums, albums with covers, or albums without covers.

There are three different methods for assigning covers to the albums:

Automatically Assign Covers

amaroK can automatically fetch all missing covers displayed in the main windows from Amazon. Use Amazon Locale to determine from which Amazon Web server the covers should be fetched then click Fetch Missing Covers.

IMPORTANT: Proper Tagging Needed

amaroK fetches the covers from Amazon using the query string Artist - Album. This information is extracted from the tags of your music files. The better they are tagged, the better the hit rate is when automatically fetching covers.

Manually Choose a Cover Fetched from Amazon

If you want more control over what image to use and what query string to use to retrieve a cover, right-click an album in the main window and choose Fetch from amazon. Next Cover lets you cycle through all images available. Save selects the actual cover and assigns it to the album selected. If you are not satisfied with the covers displayed, use New Search to refine the search. Use Amazon Locale from the toolbar of the main window to determine from which Amazon Web server the covers should be fetched.

Manually Assign Covers

If you already have your own cover images, you can assign them by right-clicking an album and choosing Set Custom Image.

Visualizations

amaroK comes with a number of visualizations that display a graphical effect for the music played. Native amaroK visualizations are displayed in the player window. Cycle through the various available display modes by clicking the animation.

In addition to the above, amaroK also supports the visualization plug-ins of the XMMS media player. To use these, first install the xmms-plugins package then select Tools Visualizations from the amaroK menu. This opens a window listing the available plug-ins. XMMS plug-ins are always displayed in separate windows. In some cases, there is an option to display them in full-screen mode. For some plug-ins, you may not get a smooth visual effect unless you use a 3D-accelerated graphics card.

The amaroK Tray Icon

Like other KDE applications, amaroK adds an icon to the KDE system tray. You can use this icon to control a large number of amaroK's features. Hovering the mouse over the icon displays information about the track currently played. A single left-click closes the application window without affecting playback. Click again to reopen the window. Clicking with the middle mouse button pauses playback—middle-click again to resume playback. Right-clicking opens a context menu where you have access to the player controls and can exit amaroK. Scrolling the mouse wheel changes the playback volume.

Using the and keys together with the mouse gives you access to more advanced features. Holding while scrolling the mouse wheel seeks through the current track. Holding while scrolling the mouse wheel skips through tracks in the playlist.

You may also drag items and drop them on the tray icon to add them to the current playlist. A pop-up menu opens, asking whether to append the track to the playlist, append and play it, or queue it after the current track.