Amarok 1.4.4 on Ubuntu Dapper

A new version of Amarok, my favorite music player for Linux, has been released.

This version boasts numerous bug fixes, and an nice interface to the Magnatune music store. Magnatune is cool since the full length tracks are under a Creative Commons license and are free to listen to. If you decide to support an artist you enjoy, you can buy downloads and choose how much you wish to pay. The artist splits the profits 50:50 with Magnatune, and you get uncrippled MP3/FLAC/Ogg files, which can be re-downloaded at any time if you loose them somehow. Since Magnatune operates like an enlightened version of a traditional record label, meaning they only select "high quality" artists ... they don't push loads of dross from self promoting artists that suck like the old mp3.com (RIP) did. "Brad Sucks" is (non-exclusively) on the Magnatune label, but his music doesn't suck.

Hopefully in the future Amarok will include some generic API to interface with other enlightened music stores and repositories of Creative Commons music, so that Magnatune doesn't get accused of monopolising :). For instance, I'd like to be able to add say, ccMixter and maybe IUMA in addition to Magnatune. An open web services API for music stores would make this possible, and while I haven't looked "under the hood" of the new Amarok-Magnatune browsing feature yet, I suspect this is what they have already created.

Anyway, there doesn't seem to be a backported version of Amarok 1.4.4 in the Ubuntu / Kubuntu Dapper in the repositories (yet). There are some Edgy Eft packages, but I don't want to upgrade to Edgy at the moment.

Instead, I've compiled my own and have made some deb packages, using the official deb source packages. I haven't tested this version heavily yet, but it seems to work. I had to override one dependency, since it complained that the Dapper "Common Debian Build System" (cdbs package) was not recent enough .... hopefully this was a safe thing to do.

You can download my packaged versions here:

amarok_1.4.4-0ubuntu1_i386.deb (link fixed .. Thanks victor !!)

amarok-xine_1.4.4-0ubuntu1_i386.deb

amarok-engines_1.4.4-0ubuntu1_i386.deb

Install them by typing:

$ sudo dpkg -i amarok_1.4.4-0ubuntu1_i386.deb amarok-xine_1.4.4-0ubuntu1_i386.deb amarok-engines_1.4.4-0ubuntu1_i386.deb

Yah, I should probably GPG sign these and try to get them included in Dapper backports or something .... but no time to do the job properly at the moment.

Update - if you have trouble with some missing dependencies, this may help:

$ sudo apt-get install ruby python-qt3 kdelibs4c2a libifp4 libnjb5 libpq4 libqt3-mt libtunepimp3 libvisual-0.4-0 libxine-main1

Hopefully that catches most of the dependencies that are likely to be missing, particularly for those running Ubuntu Dapper and not Kubuntu Dapper.