4 ms·

In reality it was only used by very technical people who didn’t want to pay for windows or support Microsoft

pxc 6y ago
It was the first Linux distro I ever used, back when I was a kid and had never used a Unix command line before. :) Eventually my dad replaced it with a similar distro called Xandros, and that got me hooked on Amarok 1.3, which Xandros had rebranded on their distro. Amarok was then a killer app for me, and got me into Linux as a hobby when I was a teenager.
- bqmjjx0kac 6y ago
  Amarok was awesome! I really liked the "moodbar" addon that converted each audio track into a colorful 1D strip, underneath the progress indicator. Ah, looks like it's a project in its own right, but the Wikipedia page has an Amarok screenshot. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moodbar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moodbar
  - pxc 6y ago
    I loved Amarok for years, including after the 2.0 rewrite. It was my favorite as long as the main way I listened to music was a collection of local files, despite flirtations with other cool projects like MPD, Subsonic, Ampache, etc. Documentation from the Exaile project (another music player inspired by Amarok!) indicates that while the Amarok developers did not invent the moodbar, their implementation is the one we know and love (which was packaged as the standalone `moodbar` CLI program that could be used to generate moodbars that other players would also read): https://github.com/exaile/moodbar https://github.com/exaile/moodbar For me, Amarok was so good that it gave 13-year-old me enough reason to switch operating systems for daily use. The moodbar was definitely cool, and I remember being impressed that I could actually identify different sections of songs I knew with it. The feature that really got me was the automatic lyrics fetching and other contextual information. I listened to music kinda obsessively, and I loved being able to instantly see the lyrics and really learn a song right away.
  - KozmoNau7 6y ago
    Amarok really lost me with the 2.0 redesign. I switched to Clementine instead, which carries on the Amarok 1.x design. Lately development on Clementine has been lagging a bit, so I'm using a fork called Strawberry. The Amarok 1.x interface is closely tied with Quod Libet as my favorite audio library/player, but QL is significantly less user-friendly, thanks to its extensive flexibility.
- jaggs 6y ago
  Oh wow, I loved Xandros. Ran it on my PCs for a good period before the next new thing appeared. Is it dead?
  - pxc 6y ago
    Xandros has changed hands as several times over the years, but it looks like it's still around! It's based on Ubuntu instead of directly on Debian these days
- hnlmorg 6y ago
  Ironically (or maybe not?) Xandros was the company that bought Lindows/Linspire back in 2007(ish).

pxc 6y ago

It was the first Linux distro I ever used, back when I was a kid and had never used a Unix command line before. :) Eventually my dad replaced it with a similar distro called Xandros, and that got me hooked on Amarok 1.3, which Xandros had rebranded on their distro. Amarok was then a killer app for me, and got me into Linux as a hobby when I was a teenager.

bqmjjx0kac 6y ago
Amarok was awesome! I really liked the "moodbar" addon that converted each audio track into a colorful 1D strip, underneath the progress indicator. Ah, looks like it's a project in its own right, but the Wikipedia page has an Amarok screenshot. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moodbar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moodbar
- pxc 6y ago
  I loved Amarok for years, including after the 2.0 rewrite. It was my favorite as long as the main way I listened to music was a collection of local files, despite flirtations with other cool projects like MPD, Subsonic, Ampache, etc. Documentation from the Exaile project (another music player inspired by Amarok!) indicates that while the Amarok developers did not invent the moodbar, their implementation is the one we know and love (which was packaged as the standalone `moodbar` CLI program that could be used to generate moodbars that other players would also read): https://github.com/exaile/moodbar https://github.com/exaile/moodbar For me, Amarok was so good that it gave 13-year-old me enough reason to switch operating systems for daily use. The moodbar was definitely cool, and I remember being impressed that I could actually identify different sections of songs I knew with it. The feature that really got me was the automatic lyrics fetching and other contextual information. I listened to music kinda obsessively, and I loved being able to instantly see the lyrics and really learn a song right away.
- KozmoNau7 6y ago
  Amarok really lost me with the 2.0 redesign. I switched to Clementine instead, which carries on the Amarok 1.x design. Lately development on Clementine has been lagging a bit, so I'm using a fork called Strawberry. The Amarok 1.x interface is closely tied with Quod Libet as my favorite audio library/player, but QL is significantly less user-friendly, thanks to its extensive flexibility.
jaggs 6y ago
Oh wow, I loved Xandros. Ran it on my PCs for a good period before the next new thing appeared. Is it dead?
- pxc 6y ago
  Xandros has changed hands as several times over the years, but it looks like it's still around! It's based on Ubuntu instead of directly on Debian these days
hnlmorg 6y ago
Ironically (or maybe not?) Xandros was the company that bought Lindows/Linspire back in 2007(ish).