Amarok - the audio player for KDE

===================================

There are many media players around these days, true. What's missing from most

players is a user interface that doesn't get in the way of the user. How many

buttons do you have to press for simply adding some new tracks to the playlist?

Amarok tries to be a little different, providing a simple drag and drop

interface that really makes playlist handling easy.

 FEATURES

==========

    * Quick and simple drag and drop playlist creation

    * Music library

    * Cross platform. Support for Unix, MacOS X and Windows.

    * Plays all audio formats known to man

    * Cover art download using Amazon services

    * Automatic play-statistics generation (iRate style)

    * Full lyrics download

    * Learn about your music with integrated Wikipedia

    * Full Last.fm support

    * Fully configurable on screen display for track changes

    * Podcast support

    * iPod support

    * Powerful scripting interface

    * KDE integration

    * Integration with multiple web sources, Magnatune, Jamendo, Ampache and Mp3tunes 

      among others.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 DEPENDENCIES

==============

Required

    * KDE-Libs 4.2 + KDE-Base-runtime 4.2 (or newer)

      http://www.kde.org

    * TagLib 1.6 (or newer)

      (Metadata tagging library)

      http://developer.kde.org/~wheeler/taglib.html

      svn://anonsvn.kde.org/home/kde/trunk/kdesupport/taglib

    * TagLib Extras 1.0.1 (or newer)

      (Support for metadata reading of additional file types)

      http://www.kollide.net/~jefferai/taglib-extras-1.0.1.tar.gz

      svn://anonsvn.kde.org/home/kde/trunk/kdesupport/taglib-extras

    * MySQL 5.0 (or newer) Embedded: libmysqld compiled with fPIC

      (In-process database support)

    * QtScript Generator, Qt Bindings 0.1.0

      (Qt Bindings for QtScript for Amarok's scripting system)

      http://code.google.com/p/qtscriptgenerator/

      git://labs.trolltech.com/qtscriptgenerator

Optional

    * libgpod 0.4.2 (or newer)

      (iPod support)

      http://www.gtkpod.org/libgpod.html

    * Mp3tunes.com integration (including syncronization) requires:

      * OpenSSL http://www.openssl.org

      * libxml2 http://xmlsoft.org

      * libcurl http://curl.haxx.se

      * Glib2 http://www.gtk.org

      * Loudmouth, the Jabber library, http://www.loudmouth-project.org/

      * Qt must be compiled with Glib enabled

    * Liblastfm 0.3

      (For scrobbling, internet radio, and artist info)

      http://cdn.last.fm/src/liblastfm-0.3.0.tar.bz2

      http://github.com/mxcl/liblastfm/tree/master

    * MySQL 5.0 (or newer) Server (external database support)

Please note, if compiling from source you must also install the devel versions

of these packages.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 IMPORTANT INSTALL INSTRUCTIONS

================================

To compile from source, please refer to the INSTALL file.

Packages for popular distributions are available at http://amarok.kde.org

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 FURTHER RESOURCES

===================

For answers to problems like "Amarok won't play any MP3s!" and "My MP3s skip

and stutter!" please visit:

   http://amarok.kde.org/

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 INFORMATION FOR PACKAGERS

===========================

It is possible to build Amarok to use MySQL as the database backend. Using

MySQL makes the Amarok collection faster.

In order to limit the dependencies the Amarok package demands we suggest

splitting Amarok into the following packages:

   1. Amarok + Phonon Engine

   2. iPod media device

   3. MTP media device

Amarok is modular and will be fully functional as long as one of 2 or 3 is

also installed. Hence we suggest Amarok + one backend.

If you make packages for Amarok please let us know and we'll link to you on the

homepage (as long as you don't object).

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 CONTRIBUTING

==============

If you wish to contribute to Amarok, you should build it from Git and subscribe

to the amarok AT kde.org mailing list. The IRC channel is also a place where

it's  nice  to  be, since you can talk to other developers much easier, and

get instant notification of commits to the master git repo. For instant email notification

of commits, visit http://commitfilter.kde.org/ and http://amarok.be/fisheye

provides a slightly-less-instant overview.

More info at:

http://amarok.kde.org/wiki/Development/Join

See you in IRC!

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

WWW:  http://amarok.kde.org

MAIL: amarok@kde.org

IRC:  irc.freenode.net - #amarok, #amarok.de, #amarok.es, #amarok.fr