Amarok is a great and feature-packed audio player for GNU/Linux. It integrates well with KDE, offers a nice and intiitive interface which helps to manage even large music collections easily. You can create a playlist with just one mouse click, discover the rarely listened tracks in our collection (thanks to its integration with the last.fm service), burn an audio CD or edit the ID3 tags (very convenient group edit option).

For audio playback, Amarok can use a couple of engines. The default is usually Gstreamer, but Xine backend still offers a few more plugins for the popular non-free audio codecs so the latter is recommended for now.

Pic 1. Amarok - the main window

Here are some other interesting functions of Amarok (which is the default KDE player since 3.4 version):

• Automatic download of the record covers from the hard drive or from amazon.com
• Transparent OSD messages during audio playback (presenting the cover and info on currently playing track)
• Animated icon in the system tray, it illustrates the current position in the currently played track (whether it’s just starting of coming to the end)
• Easy management of external shortcuts which make it possible to execute Amarok commands without showing the program’s interface
• Configurable layout, skins and templates
• Very easy and convenient ID3 tag editor - offers even automatic filling of the tags using the MusicBrainz service.
• A dynamic mode of listening music in Amarok which takes advantage of the intelligent playlists feature - basically it chooses the tracks to play for you basing on your mood
• Integration with Wikipedia for showing information about the band and the lyrics of currently played track.
• Good integration with iPod (can be an iTunes substitute)
• The scripting interface which can extend the functionality of the application

The only drawback of Amarok seems to be the interrior speed of the program when compared to the similar apps like juK. Still, on a quite modern machine (1Ghz processor or higher, at least 256MB RAM) this is not an issue. Amarok also tends to provide a lot of functionality and it’s a quite desktop-room hungry program. If you prefer simple solutions, XMMS or BMP can be an option.