Amarok is a

free and open-source Free and open-source software (FOSS) is software available under a Software license, license that grants users the right to use, modify, and distribute the software modified or not to everyone free of charge. FOSS is an inclusive umbrella term ...

music player for

Linux Linux ( ) is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an kernel (operating system), operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically package manager, pac ...

macOS macOS, previously OS X and originally Mac OS X, is a Unix, Unix-based operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc., Apple since 2001. It is the current operating system for Apple's Mac (computer), Mac computers. With ...

Windows Windows is a Product lining, product line of Proprietary software, proprietary graphical user interface, graphical operating systems developed and marketed by Microsoft. It is grouped into families and subfamilies that cater to particular sec ...

, and other

Unix-like A Unix-like (sometimes referred to as UN*X, *nix or *NIX) operating system is one that behaves in a manner similar to a Unix system, although not necessarily conforming to or being certified to any version of the Single UNIX Specification. A Uni ...

operating systems. Amarok is part of the KDE project, but it is released independently of the central

KDE Software Compilation The KDE Software Compilation (KDE SC) was an umbrella term for the desktop environment plus a range of included applications produced by KDE. From its 1.0 release in July 1998 until the release of version 4.4 in February 2010, the Software Compi ...

release cycle. Amarok is released under the terms of the GPL-2.0-or-later.

History

Amarok is one of the oldest Linux music players in active development, being started in 2003. The program was originally stylized as amaroK, after a

Mike Oldfield Michael Gordon Oldfield (born 15 May 1953) is an English retired musician, songwriter and producer best known for his debut studio album ''Tubular Bells'' (1973), which became an unexpected critical and commercial success. Though primarily a gu ...

album of the same name. The artwork references Amarok, a wolf in

Inuit mythology Inuit religion is the shared spiritual beliefs and practices of the Inuit, an Indigenous peoples of the Americas, indigenous people from Alaska, northern Canada, Greenland, and parts of Siberia. Their religion shares many similarities with some A ...

. The app's capitalization was changed to Amarok in June 2006. A new major version of Amarok, version 2.0, was released on December 12, 2008. On June 3, 2009, version 2.1 was released, which reintroduced some of the 1.4 features which had been missing from the initial 2.0 release, and introduced some features such as native

ReplayGain ReplayGain is a proposed technical standard published by David Robinson in 2001 to measure and normalize the perceived loudness of audio in computer audio formats such as MP3 and Ogg Vorbis. It allows media players to normalize loudness for in ...

support. Version 3.0 of Amarok was released in April 2024, after a six year hiatus of major updates. It ported the application to Qt5 and added support for

FFmpeg FFmpeg is a free and open-source software project consisting of a suite of libraries and programs for handling video, audio, and other multimedia files and streams. At its core is the command-line ffmpeg tool itself, designed for processing vide ...

5, along with other smaller changes. A port to Qt6, the newest version of the Qt library, is scheduled for later in the year.

Features

Amarok supports a wide variety of music formats due to the use of audio engines. It can retrieve cover art information and lyrics from the internet It includes a sidebar that displays the user's music collection, saved playlists, and internet radio stations on the left and the active playlist on the right. Amarok can also display the Wikipedia entry for the band or album in the sidebar. Other features include dynamic playlists, bookmarking, file tracking, and smooth fade-out settings. Amarok includes integration with online music services such as Last.fm, OPML Podcast, Jamendo, Magnatune, and

Ampache Ampache is a free software web-based audio file manager and media server. The name is a blend of the words "amplifier" and "Apache". Originally written to take advantage of Apache's mod_mp3 module, it has since been adapted to use its own stream ...

. Amarok can be used to manage music on iPods and other

MP3 players A portable media player (PMP) or digital audio player (DAP) is a portable consumer electronics device capable of storing and playing digital media such as audio, images, and video files. Normally they refer to small, Electric battery, batter ...

Notable forks

Clementine A clementine (''Citrus × clementina'') is a tangor, a citrus fruit hybrid between a willowleaf mandarin orange ( ''C.'' × ''deliciosa'') and a sweet orange (''C. × sinensis''), named in honor of Clément Rodier, a French missionary who f ...

is a fork of Amarok 1.4 that ported it to the Qt 4 framework. *

Strawberry The garden strawberry (or simply strawberry; ''Fragaria × ananassa'') is a widely grown Hybrid (biology), hybrid plant cultivated worldwide for its fruit. The genus ''Fragaria'', the strawberries, is in the rose family, Rosaceae. The fruit ...

is a fork of Clementine with additional improvements and fixes, first appeared during a period when Clementine development had paused. * Exaile is a

GTK+ GTK (formerly GIMP ToolKit and GTK+) is a free software cross-platform widget toolkit for creating graphical user interfaces (GUIs). It is licensed under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License, allowing both free and proprietary s ...

fork of Amarok 1.4.

References

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Amarok (Software) 2003 software Applications using D-Bus Audio player software that uses Qt Extragear Free audio software Free media players Free multilingual software Free software programmed in C++ Jukebox-style media players KDE Applications Linux media players MacOS media players Online music database clients Windows multimedia software Free and open-source software Software using the GNU General Public License no:Liste over KDE-programmer#Amarok