Amarok is one of the oldest Linux music players in active development, being started in 2003.[4] The program was originally stylized as amaroK, after a Mike Oldfield album of the same name.[5] The artwork references Amarok, a wolf in Inuit mythology. The app's capitalization was changed to Amarok in June 2006.
A new major version of Amarok, version 2.0, was released on December 12, 2008. On June 3, 2009, version 2.1 was released, which reintroduced some of the 1.4 features which had been missing from the initial 2.0 release, and introduced some features such as native ReplayGain support.[6][7]
Version 3.0 of Amarok was released in April 2024, after a six year hiatus of major updates. It ported the application to Qt5 and added support for FFmpeg 5, along with other smaller changes. A port to Qt6, the newest version of the Qt library, is scheduled for later in the year.[8][9][10]
Features
Amarok supports a wide variety of music formats due to the use of audio engines. It can retrieve cover art information and lyrics from the internet[11] It includes a sidebar that displays the user's music collection, saved playlists, and internet radio stations on the left and the active playlist on the right.[6] Amarok can also display the Wikipedia entry for the band or album in the sidebar.[12] Other features include dynamic playlists, bookmarking, file tracking, and smooth fade-out settings.[13]
