Like KDE’s Plasma desktop, Amarok has the ability to display widgets. It is divided into the three columns. The left column is the music browser, which displays the user’s local collection or the Internet music library of his or her choice. The right column shows the current playlist, and the center column can hold a number of widgets. Users must click the wrench icon at the bottom to add, remove, or reorder widgets.

1. Albums

The Albums widget provides users with the most recently added albums when nothing is playing, and when a song is playing, the widget displays the current artists albums. You can navigate through the list of songs for quick access to any other songs by the artist currently in your collection.

2. Current Track

Current Track shows the Album cover, title, artist’s name, Last.fm love button, position marker, play count, score, last played, and track rating.

Right click on the album cover and click “Display Cover” to see the largest available version of the image. Click “Fetch Cover” to download cover art from Amazon. Most of the time this works just fine for big industry artists, but there are some instances where it will display the wrong art or find none at all. In those cases, you can click “Set Custom Cover” to add your own. In addition, click “Tools” and “Cover Manager” at any time to download covers for all of your albums or edit any current ones.

The rating system has a 5-star scale, and each star has a 1/2 setting. You can change your rating of a song at any time, and when no song is playing, the Current Track widget will display top-rated tracks.

3. Lyrics

Rather than having to search the Web for song lyrics, Amarok has a built-in Lyrics widget. Whenever a song starts to play, just click on the Lyrics button to display the widget. Click the configure button in the top right corner to change font style and size. If no lyrics are found, you may have to search the Web, but you will only need to do it once. Simply copy the lyrics you find, click the Edit Lyrics icon, and paste them right into the widget.

4. Photos

One of the features that I just recently discovered is the Photos Widget. While a track is playing, it will run a slideshow of photos from Flickr. In most cases, it will accurately display pictures of the currently playing artist. In some cases, particularly with rappers or singers who have improper nouns as their stage names, you will have to do some configuring.

Click the configure button and add additional keywords that will help Amrok search Flickr for the right photos. You can also set the slideshow animation type and the number of photos to display.

5. Videoclip

The Videoclip widget harnesses the power of YouTube to offer quick links to videos of the song you are currently playing. Because almost every song is on YouTube, you are certain to find something, although it may not always be an official music video.

Once you select a video, it will play within the widget window. To play fullscreen, double click on the video or right click, and then click “fullscreen”. If you click on the link rather than the video thumbnail, it will open the video in your web browser.

6. Wikipedia

Want to know more about your musician? The Wikipedia widget does just what the name implies: displays the Wikipedia entry for the currently playing band or artist. Like the other Internet-based widgets, it assumes that a Wikipedia article actually exists for the person or band you are playing.

Final Thoughts

Amarok is a powerful music player with most of the standard features, such as playlists, album art, and collection/library management. What sets it apart is its extensibility. The widgets that come installed are impressive, and the ability to add more makes Amarok an application worth giving a try. Amarok is free and open source software, released under the GPL and is part of the KDE software compilation.

If you have previously installed Amarok 1.4, remove it.

sudo apt-get autoremove amarok

Open your sources.list

gksu gedit /etc/apt/soources.list

Add the following line to the end of the file.

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/kubuntu-members-kde4/ubuntu intrepid main

Update the repository and install Amarok 2

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install amarok-kde4

Amarok 2.0 brings a lot of fresh changes. The most noticeable difference is the user interface. The UI has been completely redesigned and have a totally different look from Amarok1.4. The play control buttons are bigger and are position at the top instead of the usual bottom. The main screen is now split into 3 columns instead of the usual 2. The centre column is now make up of an information pane where you can add widgets to it .There is also different workspaces where you can organize your widgets nicely.

There are several useful and interesting widgets that you can use. Albums, Current Track Info, Lyrics, Wikipedia are a few examples.

Things that have improved in Amarok 2 include the addition and a tighter integration with the various online music services. You can now access Ampache, Last.fm, MP3Tunes, Jamendo, Librivox, Magnatune, OPML directory and shoutcast.

The new improved dynamic playlist in Amarok 2.0 added a biased factor to the songs that you played. You can easily configure it to match the title, artists, album etc or loosely match with the song’s meta data. I really love this feature. It’s just like the Genius feature in iTunes, but with more controllability and predictability.

Another feature that I found useful in Amarok 2.0 is the Advanced search that allows you to filter and mirco search your music collection. There are times when I have craving to listen to a particular song. With over 1000 songs in my database, it is a really difficult task to locate the song I want. This advanced search feature has enabled me to find that song quickly and easily.

Scripts Manager

The script manager in Amarok 2.0 is of a completely different architecture from Amarok 1.4. This means that all the version 1.4 scripts cannot be used in Amarok 2. Currently, the script database only have a limited few scripts that are of little use. Hopefully, as  Amarok 2 becomes more mature, there will be a lot more scripts available.

Cross Platform

Other than Linux, Amarok 2 is also compatible with Mac and Windows. However, the current Mac and Windows versions are still in testing stage and they do not work as well as the Linux version. If you are the adventurous type, you still can download and install it in your system. Note that you will experience frequent crashes and some unknow side effects, so do it at your own risk.

Overall, majority of the changes in Amarok 2 are refreshing. The interface has become more elegant, much simpler and more user-friendly without losing any of its functionality. Some of the newly addons feature such as search filtering and widgets are interesting and useful. I would hope to see better integration and connectivity with my iPhone so that I can stream/transfer music easily.

What do you hope to see in the new release of Amarok 2.0?