Amarok - the audio player for KDE
===================================

There are many media players around these days, it's 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 Last.fm services
    * Automatic play-statistics generation (iRate style)
    * Full lyrics download
    * Learn about your music with integrated Wikipedia
    * Full Last.fm support
    * gpodder.net support
    * Configurable on screen display for track changes
    * Podcast support
    * iPod support, as well as other media players
    * Powerful scripting interface
    * KDE integration
    * Integration with multiple web sources including Magnatune, Jamendo,
      Ampache, MP3tunes, and others.
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 DEPENDENCIES
==============

Required
    * KDE-Libs 4.8.4 (or newer) + KDE-Base-runtime 4.8 (oxygen-icons) (or newer)
      http://www.kde.org

    * Phonon backend, one of the following is strongly recommended
      * phonon-vlc 0.6.1 (or newer)
      * phonon-gstreamer 4.6.2 (or newer)

    * Qt 4.8 (or newer)
      http://qt.nokia.com/

    * TagLib 1.7 (or newer)
      (Metadata tagging library)
      When compiling against 1.8 more file types are supported (MOD, IT, S3M, XM).
      http://developer.kde.org/~wheeler/taglib.html
      https://github.com/taglib/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/
      http://qt.gitorious.org/qt-labs/qtscriptgenerator

    * LibQCA 2.0.2 (or newer)
      (Qt Cryptographic Architecture)
      http://delta.affinix.com/qca/

Optional
    * iPod support requires:
      * libgpod 0.8.2 (or newer)
        http://www.gtkpod.org/libgpod/
      * optional iPod album artwork support requires:
        * libgpod built with GDKPixBuf support enabled
        * GDKPixBuf 2.0 (or newer) itself

    * libmtp 1.0.0 (or newer)
      (MTP device support)
      http://libmtp.sourceforge.net/

    * 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 1.0.3 (or newer)
      (For scrobbling, internet radio, and artist info)
      http://cdn.last.fm/client/liblastfm-1.0.3.tar.gz
      https://github.com/eartle/liblastfm

    * QJson 0.7 (or newer)
      (Qt JSON Parser for the Playdar Collection)
      http://qjson.sourceforge.net/

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

    * MusicBrainz-based audio fingerprint tag lookup requires:
      * FFmpeg 0.7.0 (or newer) - http://ffmpeg.org/
        * libavcodec & libavformat specifically
      * LibOFA - http://code.google.com/p/musicip-libofa/

    * gpodder.net Podcast Provider & Service
      * libmygpo-qt 1.0.6 (or newer)

    * Transcoding requires (at runtime):
      * FFmpeg 0.7.0 (or newer) - http://ffmpeg.org/
      * For all supported encoders to be available in Amarok, FFmpeg needs to
        support the following codecs:
        * libfaac (NOT just "aac")
        * alac
        * flac
        * libmp3lame (NOT just "mp3")
        * libvorbis (NOT just "vorbis")
        * wmav2

    * CD support requires:
      * audiocd-kio - http://www.kde.org/ (part of KDE multimedia)

    * Downloading songs from Amazon works best on non Windows systems using
      * clamz - https://code.google.com/p/clamz/
      * The official downloader should work fine on Windows, too. But it's broken on many Linux systems.

    * Building tests require:
      * gmock 1.4 (or newer) - http://code.google.com/p/googlemock/

Please note that if compiling from source you also need to install -dev/-devel
versions of these packages, depending on your distribution.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


 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. There you can talk to other developers easily, and you can see
instant notifications of commits to the Git master repository. For instant email 
notification of commits, visit http://commitfilter.kde.org/ , and http://amarok.be/fisheye
provides a slightly-less-instant overview.

More information at:
http://amarok.kde.org/wiki/Development/Join

See you on IRC!

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

WWW:  http://amarok.kde.org
MAIL: amarok@kde.org
IRC:  irc.freenode.net - #amarok, #amarok.de, #amarok.es, #amarok.fr

