Amarok comes back to GNU/Linux! After six years of hiatus, it is surely a happy news to us all especially who had experiences with this legendary audio player on the classic Kubuntu and Mandriva before it was discontinued. This article will reintroduce Amarok to newer generations today as well as offer a guide to install it on Kubuntu Jammy up to Noble. Lastly, we want to say thank you very much The Developers for reviving Amarok. Here we go!
(Amarok running on Kubuntu Jammy showing its legendary on-screen display at the top and notification what is playing at bottom playing a playlist of English lesson tracks)
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About Amarok
Amarok (first released 2003) is an audio player with a blue wolf logo developed by KDE with its slogan "rediscover your music" and in the past, was the official player on Kubuntu and Mandriva, two famous user-friendly desktop operating systems from GNU/Linux world, and, was part of KDE 4, the previous technology generation before KDE 5 and 6 we use today. It has a feature no other audio players have, that is, the audio bookmark, which allows you to give visual marks (blue triangles) to what minute and what second within a track timeline and search them back by text e.g. for studying and researching. It is featured on Wikipedia.
Official Website
Visit amarok.kde.org to get all information about Amarok directly from the developers. You can also send a feature request or even join the development to help improve The Amarok Project together.
Availability
At the moment, Amarok is not available yet in the Ubuntu and Debian official repositories so we should wait to install it from there until they made Amarok available. However, some PPAs already existed and we can install it from one of them. They are Pedro Gomes' and Joseph Yasi's. Thank you very much for those two for providing us PPAs.
Pedro Gomes' PPA (click here)
Joseph Yasi's PPA (click here)
How To Install Amarok
We picked Pedro's PPA for example here.
1. Visit one of two PPAs above with your browser.
2. Find at the web page an instruction that looks like below:
$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:pgomes/amarok3. Run Terminal.
4. Copy and paste command line above followed by Enter and let it finish the process.
5. A new PPA from Pedro Gomes is added to your Kubuntu.
6. Do a command line below:
$ sudo apt-get install amarok7. Amarok installed and is ready to use. Happy listening!
How To Run Amarok
Open up your application menu, search for Amarok and click to run it. Alternatively, an even easier way to play an audio is right-click an MP3 or OGG file -> open with -> Amarok -> it plays. Like in the past, you can also drag and drop audio files from file manager to Amarok.
Notes
Because it is still in a refreshing development stage, we know for some issues while installing Amarok from those two PPAs above on Kubuntu 22.04 "Jammy Jellyfish". For Pedro's, we only get version 2.9.7 at best although Amarok already works very well to play audio. For Joseph's, we can get version 3 already but we encounter an error related to database when starting the app, it plays normally but bookmarks we saved for tracks will not be saved.
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References
Amarok Public Code Development
This article is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.