AmaroK 1.4 - Music Player
7 June 2006I love to listen to music when I run, but haven’t been a big fan of listening to music on my computer. With AmaroK that has started to change. AmaroK is a music player that is styled much like Windows Media Player, but I find it easier to use. I really like its interface, which is able to retrieve a lot of info about the song that is playing.
I first started by using the version (1.2) that came loaded on my Debian distribution. But, I quickly discovered that it wouldn’t play MP4 files. Fortunately, version 1.4 is available. You can get it at http://amarok.kde.org/.
I downloaded the latest AmaroK Deb package and used Kpackage in start the install. It didn’t install at first because there were six or seven dependencies that needed to be resolved. I wasn’t sure how to do this automatically. In fact, I thought that was what packaging was all about - the package would install all of the dependencies, if I said OK. I couldn’t figure out how to do an automatic update of all of the required dependent packages so I did it manually. I either checked my distribution DVD for the correct package or downloaded the updated package from the AmaroK site. I just kept trying to install AmaroK until all of the dependency problems went away.
That was working fine until the last three dependencies. Then it became apparent that the last three were interdependent. One wouldn’t install without the other being present. I finally did an apt-get install package1 package2 package3 and that solved the problem. All three packages installed at once and AmaroK worked! I was really surprised that this technique was successful, fully expecting to have some dependency problems.
The lesson from this exercise is that I need to become more familiar and comfortable with apt. Kpackage works well, but sometimes, you have to dig a little deeper and be able to execute the commends from the command line with specific options.
Now that AmaroK is working I find that I’ve been using it quite a bit. It has a clean interface and I love the capability to search for and display info about the current song that is playing. I highly recommend that you give it a try!
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