Congratulations on installing Amarok, the most advanced music discovery software available. Amarok will help you explore your music, and enjoy it as never before. Also, you can tour different sources of music, radio stations and audio books online. In this guide, we'll show you how to let Amarok find your collection, play it for you, and also how to use Amarok to find things online. We'll assume that you know nothing about Amarok, but do know how to use menus, a mouse, and your keyboard.

Starting Amarok

To start Amarok, either:

In the KDE menu -> Multimedia section, click on the Amarok entry
Using Krunner: type Alt+F2 and type amarok

The first time you use Amarok, a First Start User interface will come up asking you to specify where your Music is located. The default location is $HOME/Music.

If you select "No" in this dialog, you will be presented with another one which allows you to select your music folder:

See #Telling_Amarok_where_your_music_files_are_located

Once you have selected the folder where your music is, Amarok will scan the folder and sub-folders, creating the collection. Depending on the number of tracks and the speed of the location this can take some time.

Closing Amarok

If you want to close Amarok:

Type Ctrl+Q when you are in the Amarok window, or
Select the "Quit" option in the "Amarok menu, or
Right-click on the blue wolf icon in the System Tray at the bottom of your screen. You will be presented with the following:

If you close the Amarok window by clicking on the window, Amarok will continue to run in the background and only show the blue wolf icon in the System Tray:

If you log out of your session or shut down your computer without quitting Amarok, some of your settings will not be saved.

The Amarok window

The Amarok window is the default User interface designed to let you rediscover your music. In addition, it is also designed to give you as much visual information about your music as possible. While many users will find the default layout suitable for their needs, the layout is fully customizable if you prefer another layout.

Default layout of the Amarok window

Upon installation, Amarok will look like this

The Amarok window has four main components:

right under the top-level menus is the Toolbar that lies above three panes:
your Media Sources (music collection and other media) in the left pane,
the Context pane in the center, and
the Playlist in the right-hand pane

Using the Amarok window to manage and play your music

Playing music using Amarok usually takes two steps:

Create a playlist by selecting some of the music in your collection you want to listen to in the Playlist pane.
Play the music in your playlist, using the Playlist pane and/or the Toolbar.

Additionally, you may wish to transfer some of your music to a mobile music player, such as an iPod. The following sections will help you with these tasks.