Amarok

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[edit] Minimalist Install without KDE

Although Amarok has dependency on QT and kdelibs, it does not require a full KDE install to get running. This section assumes:

  • You do not have a base KDE installation or have removed all KDE components ( from kde-base and kde-misc)
  • You are not going to install a full KDE system in the future or application that are dependent on KDE (e.g. KOffice)
  • You want to install the most recent version of Amarok (but not the bleeding edge hard masked one)
  • You do not want to use aRTs output, just plain ALSA (You must have a soundcard with some hardware mixing capability)
  • You already have QT installed


First add appropriate flags to get the latest version of Amarok with AAC, FLAC

Code: /etc/portage/package.use 
media-libs/xine-lib -oss a52 aac flac modplug win32codecs
kde-base/kdelibs kdeenablefinal -arts fam -cups
media-sound/amarok -mysql aac fam -arts -kde

WARNING: If you do not have atleast 512MB of RAM, remove kdeenablefinal flag You can start emerging Amarok with emerge -v xine-lib kdelibs amarok.

[edit] MySQL backend support

For those with very large music libraries, Amarok can get somewhat sluggish when using its internal SQLite collection backend. An alternative is using MySQL for your collection backend. This can also be efficient if you are already running the MySQL daemon for another reason (such as MythTV). First, you must emerge amarok with the "mysql" USE flag enabled. This will pull in and install the mysql package as well. For a basic guide for setting up MySQL, try MySQL/Install.

In particular, you'll want to make sure you've created a root password. Once this is done, start mysql: 

# /etc/init.d/mysql start

And you'll likely want to have the mysql daemon start on boot, otherwise you'll have to manually start it before using amarok: 

# rc-update add mysql default

Once you have mysql up and running, login as root and set up the database for amarok. 

$ mysql -p -u root
create database amarok;
use amarok;
grant all on amarok.* to amarok@localhost identified by '<your_password_here>';
flush privileges;

Above, <your_password_here> can be any password of your choice, you'll have to provide it to Amarok later. This creates a database called "amarok", and allows access to it by a mysql user named "amarok" with your selected password from this computer only.

Now, open Amarok, and go to Settings->Configure Amarok->Collection. Under "Collection Database", change the drop-down from SQLite to MySQL. In the boxes shown, you'll want to have 

Hostname: localhost       Port: 3306
Database: amarok
Username: amarok          Password: <your_password_here>

Where <your_password_here> is the amarok password you set in the previous step.

Now the setup is complete. If you're migrating from a previous non-MySQL amarok install, you can either reload all the songs into your collection (you'll lose your playcounts and related statistics), or try one of the unsupported methods described at the Amarok wiki.

[edit] Post Install

First try to run Amarok from the command line: amarok. If you get a warning about Sound-engine not found and kbuildsycoca command not found, try to add /usr/kde/3.5/bin to your PATH environment variable and rerun Amarok. If that doesn't work try running amarokapp --engine xine --wizard instead of amarok).

[edit] Plugins

Now that you've installed Amarok, you can extend its features with plugins via the script manager (Tools>Script Manager) Such Plugins Include:

Retrieved from "http://gentoo-wiki.com/Amarok"
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