Amarok 1.1 Review (KDE Audio Player)

I have been a faithful KDE user for a long time now. I started back in the 1.x days on Redhat 7 (I think...can't remember if I used KDE with Redhat 6). Having gone from Redhat 7, to 9, to Mandrake to now Gentoo I have seen KDE through all its evolutions. One of the software arena's that KDE has seen a lot of growth (and this is by no means the only area) is in the audio player/manager area. In the early days I used xmms and freeamp. These were mearly audio players though and weren't truly meant to manage my digital audio collection (playlists just don't cut it!). The first draw back here was that they were not native KDE applictions, so they felt out of place with all my other KDE applictions. After a while KDE brought a Noatun to the table. Noatun falls into much the same category as xmms, but this time it was a true KDE app and "fit" with the rest of my stuff. There was a problem though, my digital audio collection was growing and I needed something to actually help me manage this growing collection. In answer to this need KDE brought us JuK. It was a step in the right direction as it could keep track of your whole collection, but it still relied heavily on the idea of a playlist for seperating your audio out. While this might not have been a big problem a few years ago, other major software houses have started to offer really strong applications to manage our audio collections. Apple came out with iTunes and it basically rewrote the rules for how we deal with our digital audio collectoin. It made it very quick and easy to find your music based on artist, album, genre or any number of other criteria. Microsoft continued to update Media Player and with version 9 (and now 10) brought us a tool to manage our whole media collection (video's included now). WinAMP continued to advance and with version 5 brought a new media viewer that allowed for iTunes like sorting and seperating quickly on certain criteria. It was time for KDE to bring a real player/manager to the table...enter Amarok.

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