2 Amarok - the audio player for KDE
3 ===================================
5 There are many media players around these days, true. What's missing from most
6 players is a user interface that doesn't get in the way of the user. How many
7 buttons do you have to press for simply adding some new tracks to the playlist?
8 Amarok tries to be a little different, providing a simple drag and drop
9 interface that really makes playlist handling easy.
15 * Quick and simple drag and drop playlist creation
16 * Music library (built-in SQLite, MySQL, or PostgreSQL)
17 * Multiple backends supported (xine, GStreamer, Helix, and NMM)
18 * Plays all audio formats known to man
20 * Automatic cover art download using Amazon services
21 * The unique and powerful stylable context browser
22 * Automatic play-statistics generation (iRate style)
23 * Full lyrics download
24 * Learn about your music with integrated Wikipedia
25 * Full last.fm support
26 * Visualisations with libvisual
27 * Crossfading and gapless playback
28 * Fully configurable OSD for track changes
29 * K3B (CD-burning) integration
31 * Access to iPod, iRiver IFP, USB Mass Storage and many other devices
32 * Powerful scripting interface
33 * Complete DCOP Access
35 * Preview and buy albums from the Magnatune.com music store
36 --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
43 * KDE-Libs 4.0 (or newer)
46 * TagLib 1.4 (or newer)
47 (metadata tagging library)
48 http://freshmeat.net/projects/taglib
51 (programming language, used for scoring, lyrics, last.fm streams)
52 http://www.ruby-lang.org
54 * One of the multimedia frameworks listed below:
57 * xine-lib 1.0.2 (or newer)
58 Note: xine-lib 1.1.1 is required for gapless playback.
59 (multimedia framework)
63 * RealPlayer 10 or HelixPlayer 1.0
64 (multimedia framework)
66 (Note: only HelixPlayer is exactly RealPlayer without MP3 support)
68 * KDE-Base 3.3 (or newer)
69 (needed for Konqueror Sidebar)
73 (faster database support)
77 (faster database support)
78 http://www.postgresql.org
80 * OpenGL accelerated X-Server
81 (visualization rendering)
83 * Libvisual 0.4.0 + SDL 1.2
84 (visualization framework)
85 http://localhost.nl/~synap/libvisual/
88 * ProjectM 0.96 (or newer)
89 (visualization plugins for Libvisual or XMMS)
90 http://xmms-projectm.sourceforge.net/
92 * libtunepimp 0.3 (or newer)
93 (automatic tagging support)
94 http://www.musicbrainz.org/
100 * libgpod 0.4.2 (or newer)
102 http://www.gtkpod.org/libgpod.html
106 http://ifp-driver.sourceforge.net/libifp/
108 * libmp4v2 (mpeg4ip 1.5 is recommended, faad2 is less reliable)
109 (MP4/AAC tag reading & writing)
110 http://www.sf.net/projects/mpeg4ip
111 http://www.audiocoding.com
113 * libnjb 2.2.4 (older versions may work)
114 (NJB mediadevice (Creative Nomad/Zen family, Dell DJ devices)
115 http://www.sf.net/projects/libnjb
117 * libmtp 0.1.1 (or newer)
118 (MTP media device support AKA PlaysForSure)
119 http://libmtp.sourceforge.net/
121 * libkarma 0.0.5 && OMFS 0.6.1
122 (Rio Karma support via USB)
123 http://freakysoft.de/html/libkarma/ && http://linux-karma.sf.net/
125 Please note, if compiling from source you must also install the devel versions
127 --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
130 IMPORTANT INSTALL INSTRUCTIONS
131 ================================
133 In order to compile and install Amarok on your system, type the following in the
134 base directory of the Amarok distribution:
137 % ./configure --prefix=`kde-config --prefix`
142 Note: --enable-final is not guaranteed to work
145 Packages for popular distributions are available at http://amarok.kde.org
146 --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
152 Q: I have the required version of GStreamer installed but configure doesn't
154 Q: I have pkg-config problems.
155 A: Here's an extract from the PKG-CONFIG man page:
157 pkg-config retrieves information about packages from special metadata
158 files. These files are named after the package, with the extension
159 .pc. By default, pkg-config looks in the directory prefix/lib/pkgconfig
160 for these files; it will also look in the colon-separated list of
161 directories specified by the PKG_CONFIG_PATH environment variable.
163 So, do export PKG_CONFIG_PATH="/path/to/gstreamer-0.x.y.pc" and reconfigure.
165 Q: Can I improve Amarok's startup time?
166 A: Prelinking Amarok has spectacular results; however if you have binary openGL
167 drivers (eg Nvidia drivers), you will need to compile Amarok --without-opengl
168 in order to get the amarokapp binary to prelink (the amarok binary is not
170 --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
176 For answers to problems like "Amarok won't play any MP3s!" and "My MP3s skip
177 and stutter!" please visit:
179 http://amarok.kde.org/
180 --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
183 INFORMATION FOR PACKAGERS
184 ===========================
186 For Amarok packages we suggest you build:
188 % ./configure --disable-debug
190 It is possible to build Amarok to use MySQL as the database backend. Using
191 MySQL makes the Amarok collection faster.
193 We suggest compiling Os, there is no particular part of Amarok that would
194 benefit from optimisation, so the smallest binary is probably the best route.
196 In order to limit the dependencies the Amarok package demands we suggest
197 splitting Amarok into the following packages:
199 1. Amarok + one backend
207 9. rio karma media device
209 Amarok is modular and will be fully functional as long as one of 2 or 3 is
210 also installed. Hence we suggest Amarok + one backend. Feel free to include the
211 helix, MAS and NMM engines if you can satisfy their dependencies.
213 Amarok ships with two binaries: amarok and amarokapp. The amarok binary is a
214 wrapper designed to speed up command line argument passing. amarokapp is the
217 If you make packages for Amarok please let us know and we'll link to you on the
218 homepage (as long as you don't object).
219 --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
225 If you wish to contribute to Amarok, you should build it from SVN and subscribe
226 to the amarok-devel mailing list. The IRC channel is also a place where
227 it's nice to be, since you can talk to other developers much easier, and
228 get instant notification of commits to the SVN. For instant email notification
229 of commits, visit http://commitfilter.kde.org/.
230 --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
233 WWW : http://amarok.kde.org
235 IRC : irc.freenode.net - #amarok, #amarok.de, #amarok.es