Amarok 2 Beta on Mac OS X – Awesomeness Unlimited
In my last post, I was whining about how iTunes makes me want to pull my hair out, and that listening to music is one thing that I have almost stopped doing since I got a Mac. Well, not anymore, because when I fired up my PC after 2 whole weeks today, and saw my updated feeds in aKregator. The Amarok blog had an entry by Orville Bennett about the immediate availability of an installable package for Mac OS X. Its almost like the rare times in your life you truly wish for something to happen, and it happens – just for you.
Firstly, I downloaded the huge package (301.4 MB) from here. The installation was really simple, just like installing any other application on Mac OS X (except that this wasn’t a drag and drop of a *.app file, it was a installation package *.pkg). First you double click on the dmg file, which gets verified and mounted, and opens a Finder window with the Amarok install package in it.
Double click the package, and it pops up the installer. The steps to be followed are easy and self-explanatory, I guess.
After the install is completed, the folder containing the Amarok app is auto-opened. I dragged the Amarok app to my dock so as to create a shortcut for running it.
That was the end if the installation, and the time to party. A new and refreshing splash screen –
The default Amarok 2 interface is beautiful and simple. I started off by adding my music to the collection, in the Preferences. A lot of things are done in the classic Amarok way.
If you have ever used Amarok before, then you immediately notice the difference here. For starters, the media control buttons are bigger and are on the top-left instead of bottom-right. The big playlist region on the right has been split into two – the middle column shows the “Now Playing” track info and also integrates the ‘Context’ section (that was earlier in the left pane) in the form of Applets, while the right side is dedicated to the playlist.
The Applets at the bottom also include the Last.fm applet, and the all new Video applet.
The OSD (On Screen Display) is now smaller and non-intrusive. We also have the good old script manager, which I think is compatible with all the old Amarok scripts as well.
The thousands of podcasts and shoutcasts have been combined with the Magnatune panel of Amarok 1.x, and together been placed along with the Jamendo section in the ‘Internet’ panel. A great improvement here is that these podcasts and shoutcasts are now searchable, just like music in your local hard drive collection.
Amarok 2 integrates very well into the Mac OS X Desktop Environment. I do not feel that it is a non-native application running on a foreign platform. Overall, the interface looks sleeker and cleaner. More things packed into the same space, but neatly, and without looking overcrowded.
Although the devs have packed a ton of new features and improvements into the already perfect Amarok, the package for Amarok 2 is a development build and is really very buggy. It crashes a lot, sometimes even fails to play music, hangs while loading applets, keeps on playing videos even after pressing the stop button, and so on. So I would recommend other novice users out there to use this package at their own risk. If you want to contribute to the development, you can do so by testing Amarok on Mac OS X and after using it, filing bug reports on KDE Bug Tracking System. I would like to say here, that despite it is really unstable right now, I am falling in love with Amarok all over again.
If you liked this post, or found it useful, don't forget to subscribe to my RSS feeds. Or you can get my posts delivered to your inbox directly, by subscribing to my feeds by email. Or maybe you'd like to know what I'm doing right now, by following me at Twitter.
ravi kumar on 
sandeep on 
raj on 
lavkush on 
September 12th, 2008 at 6:03 pm
Though it is the best music player around, It doesn’t really justify those 300 Mb of packagespace (not to mention its installed space. Even iTunes comes lighter. I think all kind of KDE4 libraries are included, but couldn’t Amarok be built using Mac OSX widgets?
September 12th, 2008 at 9:48 pm
The 300 MB package contains a lot more than you think it does. See http://i34.tinypic.com/11ujodi.png
September 12th, 2008 at 9:50 pm
I agree, that’s a problem that’s common to KDE on other platforms (happens on Windows too). The problem is that qt4 isn’t just a set of widgets – it’s a whole application framework and includes libraries like Phonon for media playing (which Amarok uses). I’ve dug through the Amarok source and can say for a fact that QT’s signal/slots framework is embedded throughout. So no, it can’t “just” be built using OSX widgets replacing the QT ones.
Hopefully soon they’ll replicate the package manager they have for Windows so that you only have to install the KDE/QT libraries once, then applications like Amarok or Okular or whatever take very little space. 300 MB seems like a lot here, but it’s similar to what happens on Windows with e.g. the .net framework.
September 13th, 2008 at 11:42 am
I don’t mind installing 300MB of libraries if I can get access to all the cool KDE apps. I hate KDE the desktop environment, but on my PC I use AmaroK, KOffice and KTorrent even when I’m using GNOME. Now I can get all these on my Mac, too. Turtle power, indeed.
One thing I don’t get : why did they install Konqueror? I know AmaroK uses it for rendering a lot of HTML, but why use KHTML when we already have WebKit on the Mac? Why install Nepomuk? Dolphin? Kwrite? KWallet?
The tight coupling between KDE apps is an advantage if you’re using KDE, but it can pose a problem when you try to go cross platform. I, for one, would like to see the size of the apps being brought down a bit.
PS: It’s not that iTunes is a small download. The download is 85MB, and takes 150MB on installation.
TURTLE POWER!
September 13th, 2008 at 11:53 am
Hi,
Since you have put in so much effort to download and install this huge 300 MB of this crashing, hanging, buggy application for listening music,
Can you precisely specify what you dont like in iTunes ?
September 13th, 2008 at 9:01 pm
Well, it’s a matter of choice, isn’t it?
I could have got a 15″ Dell Vostro with 4GB RAM, a 2.4GHZ Core2 Duo and a 250GB hard drive for 50K. Yet I spent 54K on a MacBook. It was a matter of choice.
BTW, to see what AmaroK can do, you have to use it first. It’s got *the* best music library management features I’ve ever seen in a media player. Plus, it has an open API you can use to write scripts in your favorite scripting language. This last feature alone makes it the default choice for techies like me and Apoorv.
iTunes is a nice piece of software. But I just can’t get used to it.
October 8th, 2008 at 9:46 am
[...] can’t wait to get home to download this. An installable package of Amarok for my mac! Joy of joys! I kept telling myself that when I [...]
December 8th, 2008 at 10:07 pm
I’m quite estatic that I am able to use Amarok on my aging G4 but I do have a tiny question: is there a way to get the shoutcast streams to actually work? The streams simply refuse to play. I just kind of assumed that amarok would just the codecs that are on my machine already. If anyone can help it would be gratefully appreciated.
December 11th, 2008 at 3:53 am
FYI,
There are much newer packages that strip out as much of Qt/KDE as humanly possible to get the size down to about 75MB. Lots of bug fixes too.
Ideally, there will eventually be both a standalone installer, and one that can be used if KDE4 libraries have already been installed (making the Amarok install much, much smaller than 75MB even).
July 14th, 2009 at 1:54 pm
Can’t get used to iTunes? What is there to get used to? Import CD, play tunes.
And if it took a laptop to stop you listening to music, then your music listening can’t be that important.
July 14th, 2009 at 2:49 pm
I’m used to iTunes now, but sure as hell miss Amarok a lot. Music management in iTunes sucks. You have to introduce a workaround for simple tasks such as syncing music with an external device which is not manufactured by Apple.