Amarok Ratings and Labels - Linux Music Manager

One of my projects now that I have a hard drive for it is to scan my CD music collection.  I’ve made it through about 40 so far and have been using Amarok to manage that music collection.

I’ve used iTunes quite a bit over the last few years and one of the first things I noticed with Amarok is that it uses some funky made up score system to determine how popular it thought the songs were based on my listening habits.  I’m not ready to give all of my soul over to the borgs quite yet so that was not going to cut it.

Fortunately, a normal 5 start rating system is available but it just isn’t turned on by default and I’m going to show you how to do it.

First, let’s see what the window starts off looking like:

To turn off the score and turn on the ratings, go to Tools - Configure Amarok.  In the middle of the screen, in the Components section, uncheck Use scores (or keep it checked if you want) and check the Use ratings.  Once the window looks like this click apply:

Now the main Amarok window should look more like this:

If you do not see a Rating column yet, right click on one of the other column headers, select Show Column and then select Rating.  Then start rating your music.  Take control.  Don’t give in to the machines.

Another feature of Amarok is the ability to assign labels to songs.  For the life of me, I could not figure out what kind of labels I would need.  Then I was listening to the songs I had ripped and noticed some skipping.  Wouldn’t it be nice to assign a “skips” label to those songs and come back to fix them someday.

Here’s how you would do that.

Right click a song and select Edit Track Information, click the Labels tab on the new window.  Any labels you have already created show up in the blue area.  The labels you want to assign to this song need to be in the bottom, white section.  So type your label (or select it from the blue area if it already exists).  It should look something like this:

You can type more than one label if you like.  Just separate them with commas.  Click Save & Close and then go create a smart playlist.  Your playlist should look for labels containing your label.  So try something along these lines:

Then you can right click on that new playlist and tell it to load and your Amarok music manager should show you all songs with that label.  In my case, I have three songs so far that I need to try to re-rip so far.

One last parting note.  If you are using Amarok and dig a little bit of classical guitar, check out Radio Stream -> Shoutcast Streams -> Classical -> 181.fm - Classical Guitar

For those not using Amarok, you can try this URL in iTunes or something that plays these sorts of things.  I’m not sure it works outside of Amarok, so if you try it, please let me know what happens:

Great Classical Guitar Streaming Channel

Someday, I’ll get around to plugging in my iTune Shuffle and see how well it handles reading/writing music with that.