I found myself complaining about the slow speed of Amarok. Everything would lag, from playing a song to adding a song to the playlist. Then i remembered when I was setting up Amarok that it let me chose a database...

Okay, so I have two machines running Amarok, the kick-ass audio player for linux. These machines are in separate locations, connected by a VPN link (the excellent and free Hamachi zero-conf VPN). I want to keep the back-end database and music in sync without expending a lot of effort. Scripts ahoy!

I was catching up on some feeds yesterday, and this piece of news caught my eye - Amarok 2.1 released. Being a long time Amarok fan ( heck Amarok itself was catalyst to make me use my SUSE 10.0 use full time) - I read the article with great interest.

Amarok was my favorite for a long time. But when the new Amarok 2.0 series started coming in, I was left with no option but to leave my beloved music player in Ubuntu. Amarok 1.4 was by far the best music player I ever had in Linux. After a long time I gave a try at the latest Amarok 2.3.1 in Ubuntu, and I have to say, this is impressive work.

Amarok is a great music player for linux. In the current release of Kubuntu 9.10 Karmic also the current stable version of Amarok was introduced into the repositories. However Amarok is under heavy development and updates won't be included in the official repos. If you want to be up-to-date and have the latest Amarok version available, you'll need to compile it yourself.

At the end of May, Mark Kretschmann, the lead developer of Amarok, gave us a little surprise by adding integrated support for playing music videos within the Amarok window. The video looks perfectly integrated thanks to Plasma, and now you can manage you music videos along with your music collection, and not as a separate tab/section.

"In This Issue

* What's New in Amarok
* Google and Amarok
* Roktober Success
* Interview with a Developer: Bart Cerneels
* Automated Playlist Generator: How to Use it
* Queue Manager in Amarok
* Installing and using a script in Amarok
* Amarok on Windows
* Transcode your media files
* Amarok Live CD"

Linux has no shortage of music players, and even KDE has at least two: JuK and Amarok. Amarok is my music player of choice. Once I started exploring the latest version, I noticed that Amarok has several extraordinary widgets.

Amarok is a wonderful application for managing and playing your music collection, but the default settings aren't optimized for speed when it comes to large collections of music. The problems are especially noticeable while trying to use the search box.