Amarok 2.5.0
KDE 4.8.5

First off, a big thanks to everyone who works to Amarok and makes this app better.
I love it, and am learning to use it even more than before.

I'd like to help as well, and would offer to help out in the area of documentation,
to make the app more easily understood by newbees like me... but first I have to understand it myself.

I found the "Help" button on the top of the application, and the Amarok Handbook Revision 2.4.1 (2011-09-21)
but I find that there are alot of topics missing from the handbook.

First off, is this Forum the right place to discuss "how to operate Amarok", and if not, please tell me where to go <smile> and ignor the following questions:

1. Enable context applets collapse animations Check to enable animations when context applets collapse.
when should this be enabled? I could not see anything different if it was enabled or not.

2. Importing Music: Transcode tracks Whether Amarok should transcode tracks when they are copied or moved to Local Collection. Do you know what this means? The option does not show up in my version on Amorak. Either the Handbook is too olfd, or my version of the app. Does anyone know what version of the app is refferenced in the Handbook?

3. The Amarok plugins are not described. Does anyone know where this information can be found? How to configure them? When to use them? What they do? Here in the Configuration, they are grouped under (1) Collections (2) Devices (3) Internet Services

4. The Appelets (if you click the gear in the lower part of the middle window) you get to the Appelet Explorer.
This seems to be a very important section to control the view of the viddle window. It seems to define what appears in this information window, and in what order.

The Wikipedia Appelet seems to be key to viewing information about what Amarok is currently playing. It seems to be driven by the ID3 tags you place in the track you are playing. Does anyone know how this actually works? Sometimes I get the Performers, sometimes the Composer, sometimes the wrong Composer. I have not found any way to edit the ID3 info to get the correct information. There must be a mapping between the ID3 information and the request made to Wikipedia.

that's enough for now.

Donald

Hi Donald,

Thank you for the kind words.

You are aware that you are using a completely outdated Amarok version, do you? Current is Amarok 2.7, which you can install through the Kubuntu backports PPA: http://kubuntu.org/news/amarok-27. It comes with the updated handbook for 2.7.

The handbook is also available online at http://userbase.kde.org/Amarok/Manual, complete with a QuickStartGuide at the very beginning, so you might want to upgrade first and see if that answers the questions you have

Now to your questions:

1. Collapse Animation: That will only be visible if you have several Context Applets enabled and if one of them collapses because it has no information. This will most likely only show for the Lyrics and Guitar Tabs.

2. Importing Music -> Transcode Tracks: Your version is simply too old, as Amarok 2.5.0 only had transcoding for mp3 tracks, no other format. And "transcoding" simply means that you can ask Amarok to change the file format so you can for example use non-compressed music in a compressed format. This is only really needed if you use external Music Players that can't use any format. The very basic ones only support mp3, more advanced models also support ogg and flac formats. You can find more information about music encoding here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audio_file_format

3. Plugins: the plugins are now (in version 2.7) all grouped in the Settings Menu -> Configure Amarok -> Plugins

4. The Wikipedia Applet: if you check the top right of the applet, you can select if you want to display information by artist (searches for id3 tag "artist"), track (id3 tag "title") or composer (id3 tag "composer"). This of course only works as far as Wikipedia has the information, which is not always guaranteed. You should not change the id3 tags of a track just to change the applet display, an id3 tag identifies the track and should not be changed once set.

Hope this helps.