Comments | rfunk: Amarok: Upgrading has its benefits

rfunk

Amarok: Upgrading has its benefits

Mar 01, 2007 17:00

I spent most of the first half of this week upgrading my desktop computers at home and work from a two-year-old Debian installation to a seven-month-old Kubuntu installation.

( Most of you don't care about the upgrade itself... )

debian, ubuntu, kubuntu, amarok, music

Comments 15

dachte March 1 2007, 22:09:03 UTC

I'll have to give it another try then - I remember AmaroK being really unstable and haven't given it any attention since then (although I always dutifully installed it). Pandora integration would be pretty neat.. I found a neat set of hacks sometime back that can easily capture/categorise the MP3s that Pandora gets from their servers and that can, to a certain extent, control Pandora. I wonder how hard it'd be to find them again and glue them into AmaroK.

Amarokrash rfunk March 1 2007, 22:34:52 UTC

Yeah, up until now Amarok was completely unusable for me. It would either crash quickly or go into livelock trying to catalog my music. This is Amarok 1.4.3 in KDE 3.5.5, and it works great.

I'd be interested in those Pandora hacks you found. I'm sure they could be combined with Amarok scripting, though I'd be a bit concerned about Pandora banning people doing that.

Re: Amarokrash dachte March 2 2007, 01:06:25 UTC

psst

anivair March 1 2007, 22:22:23 UTC

I love konqueror to pieces. I use gnome at home, but only because I don't want to reinstall. konqueror is the best file browser out there, for my money (none).

I'm surprised that amarok doesn't play well with pandora, though. Apparently it's because pandora is a closed source webapp (though doesn't it seem like it should be open source? it has that feel). I'm sure someone will create a plugin soon enough, though it'll probably just be a front end for tiny web browsing.

Get KDE! rfunk March 1 2007, 22:30:58 UTC

"I use gnome at home, but only because I don't want to reinstall."

apt-get install kubuntu-desktop

If I could get from Debian sarge to Kubuntu dapper with a change of sources.list plus:
apt-get update
apt-get dist-upgrade
apt-get install ubuntu-minimal ubuntu-base kubuntu-desktop
and one reboot, it should be much easier for you to go from Ubuntu (Gnome) to Kubuntu (KDE).

Pandora's player is all Flash, though it's rumored that it's streaming 128kbps MP3. I think their TOS may prohibit usage outside their Flash or other authorized player (like my Squeezebox).

dachte's mention of finding a "neat set of hacks" has me intrigued, however.

Re: Get KDE! anivair March 2 2007, 02:28:32 UTC

last time I did a kde install it broke my laptop, but I'll give it a shot. What's the worst thing that could happen?

Re: Get KDE! anivair March 2 2007, 03:01:34 UTC

Bah! broken package. I can't even start the download.

Thread 9

Amarok duriyah March 2 2007, 04:08:29 UTC

You know where I'm going with this, right?

Amarok is a giant wolf in Inuit mythology.

Smilla would be happy.

Re: Amarok rfunk March 2 2007, 05:41:07 UTC

According to the FAQ, they got the name from a 1990 Mike Oldfield album, which the record company wanted him to call "Tubular Bells II". Where Oldfield got the title seems to be a matter of some debate.

(Hmm, I wonder if Smilla would enjoy Mike Oldfield music? Or maybe she'd prefer Sigur Rós.)

Re: Amarok duriyah March 2 2007, 13:53:13 UTC

It would make sense that they pulled the name from Mike Oldfield. That still doesn't diminish my self-satisfaction of recognizing amarok as an Inuit word, and being right!

Smilla likes modern classical music, the kind with awful dissonance that makes you feel the end of society as we know it.

She might like throat singing, though.