iTunes on Linux?
I love iTunes! I wish Apple would make a version to run on my Linux box. I love the fact that I can add the album cover, quickly build playlists, convert the songs encoding on the fly, easily search for songs and albums, and everything else it does for my vast collection of music. Would you believe there might be something better?
I never thought I would find something I liked better than iTunes; that is, until I started looking for something at least comparable for Linux. That is when I discovered Amarok. The iTunes killer would be a better name for it. I am so impressed with the capabilities. I will spend time on a few.
The cover manager is amazing! I cannot tell you how many hours I spent trying to search Amazon, Google Images, and other sites trying to find album covers for my now over 70 gigs of music. I loaded the cover manager and founf an amazing button right at the top called “Fetch Missing Covers.” Could it be? Yes! In less than 10 minutes, all of the missing covers we loaded and ready to roll. Of all of the music I have, there were only 32 songs without covers.
The interface works as I would expect iTunes to but doesn’t. I could DJ a party with this Amarok. You can play songs the way you can with iTunes ( shuffle, repeat, by albums, by search, etc.) But Amarok does it better. As I find the songs (or Albums) I simply double click them from the list and they append to the bottom of my playlist automatically. What a fabulous feature! This means as songs are requested by firends, family, or myself, I find the song, double click on it, and my playlist continues to play the music I have already cued up without interuption and will play the selected song when it get’s to it in the play list.
iTunes is fairly clever with the way they store song information. An XML file with all of the songs and information about them. Amarok took it a step further. You use your favorite open-source database to store the information about your collection. You don’t have a favorite or you don’t know how to use MySQL or PostgreSQL… no problem, it will default to SQL-Lite so you don’t have to do anything to get it working.
iTunes is easy to install and works instantly with your music collection. Amarok is in my opinion even easier.
yum install amarok
You will need to setup a “launcher” (the Linux version of a shortcut) on the desktop. The icon I assigned to the application was found in /usr/share/apps/amarok/icons/hicolor/32×32/actions/amarok_settings_view.png.
That’s it! If you need additional support for MP3 or other file format, they have the answer right on their website. They took a backend independent approach so it will support pretty much any type of audio format you can think of. If you are using Gstreamer, it will even decode text and png files.
So, if you are like me and you are looking to run iTunes in Linux, look no more. Amarok is available now and in my opion, outshines iTunes by a long way.
Association Road payroll on August 20th, 2006
Association Road payroll…
I am Karin, very interesting article that contained the information I was searching for in Google, thanks….