Amarok Replaces My Other Internet Music Players
Sep 18th, 2007 by Don Ray
Recently I had another Internet music provider (Slacker) stop providing music in Panama. It followed suit with my previous provider (Pandora). If you live in the US, both of these services are still available.
With this latest defection, I decided to find out what was available to me using a UBUNTU music player. I installed Amarok, which from my readings, had the best reviews. I told UBUNTU to install it and it was immediately downloaded and installed.
I had about 10 CDs lying around, which it read into my PC and made available for playback. With that completed, I did a little exploration of other features contained in Amarok. Under “Playlists” it listed two Radio Streams (Cool Streams and Shoutcast Streams). For the last hour, I have been playing stations under the Shoutcast Streams.
It has about every imaginable category you can want. I can honestly say after making this find, I will no longer feel a void for losing Slacker and Pandora.
Welcome to AmaroK! I’ve been using it as my music player for some time now. I used to use xmms, but AmaroK has nice cover art features, playlists, etc. There is a Gnome media player that is trying to be like AmaroK, but it still doesn’t measure up.
Isn’t Linux a joy when it comes to adding applications? In Debian and its offspring (like Ubuntu), “sudo apt-get install xxxx” from the command line or any of the package managers make it simple.
I do want to warn you about an issue I had with Adept (package manager). Make sure you double-check what it will install and uninstall; I had it uninstalling critical programs (like HAL, the hardware abstraction layer daemon). It took me while, but I think I’ve recovered from the accidental damage.
I had tried the Gnome player and didn’t like it. Amarok is much better.
Most of the time if I add programs I just use the Synaptic utility.
If you’re looking for a video player, VLC is just about the least hassle-free of them all. “sudo apt-get install vlc” does the trick. If you want to watch DVDs, you’ll also need libdvdcss. It’s a bit hard to find, so if anyone needs it, just email me.
henry@panamaretire.net
Thanks Henry.
I agree with Henry about vlc, but I also have mplayer and xine on my boxes. You might want to try them all to see which one you like better. Mplayer has access to a lot of codecs that can be downloaded from their site (http://www.mplayerhq.hu) if they’re not included in the Ubuntu repository.
I am not now quite sure, is this a same type player, but I have used Winamp as my default player of music ( all kind ), pictures and videos.
I can find hundreds of radio stations, every kind of music, what you ever want …
And you are right about baby`s red ( or golden ) glimpse in her hair
Thank you for coming by!
Hi Leena. Yes, it is similiar to winamp. Wonder where the red coms from.
thanks don ray…been trying to find a npr station and now got one.
bob
Thanks for dropping in Bob. In those two Internet radio sources, you can pretty well find what ever strikes your fancy as far as radio stations go.