This is a tutorial for a complete newbie to Linux with a bit of PC hardware knowledge to set up a nice new dedicated Amarok Mp3 jukebox. A computer jukebox is a program that lets you play your music recording files on your computer or connected audio equipment. In it you can organise your recordings by, for example, album, artist, style or your lists or groupings - 'Playlists'.

Linux is an alternative operating system to Windows and, for the most part, is free. Many free programs or applications are available. One, the subject of this wiki topic, Amarok, is a free jukebox music player.

AMD Athlon or Intel P3 system 500mhz or greater at least 256MB of RAM sound card or on board sound sufficient storage (allow at least 2 gig + room for your intended Music)

First you will need a Linux distro and the one I will suggest is Linux Mint celena. The reasons for this are that the basic install will be very close to what we want with Amarok and the mp3 codecs installed by default.

Linux Mint is a Linux live disk based on Ubuntu Feisty 7.04 and you can run it straight from the CD after downloading the image and burning it. If you have an internet connection you can also browse this wiki online while the OS is installing. Another plus with the live cd is we can see if out audio hardware is compatible BEFORE installing the system. There is also a walk through Here to give you a preview of what it looks like.

After booting the operating system from the disk we need to install it to the hard drive to make it a permanent install. this is done simply by double clicking the Install icon on the desktop and following the intuitive installer, The default settings along the way will be fine. Just one point, Make sure you WRITE DOWN the user name and password you create in this process as they are very important and we will definitely need these later. For the guide we will use the user name “jukebox”. Also worth noting here is user names and passwords on Linux ARE CASE SENSITIVE so we will use lower case.

After installation Restart the computer into Linux and if all went well you should be greeted by the Gnome login screen. Here all that's needed is to type your user name and password and the Gnome session should begin. Gnome is the name of the desktop manager of this distribution of Linux.

Once Gnome has loaded Proceed to the places menu on the top panel and select “Home Folder”. This is where we will create the “music” directory to store your songs in. To do this simply select “File » Create Folder” from the Gnome file browsers pull down windows and name the folder “music”.

Now with the hard work done its time to fire up out mp3 jukebox software. For this we use “Amarok” which is accessible from the programs menu on the upper panel under the “sound and video” tab. After we run Amarok it will take you through a little start up wizard where you need to tell the applications a few things, these are pretty well self explanatory with the only advice I will give being to select SQLlite as the database type (unless you have a massive collection then mysql may be more suitable) and obviously to set the path to your music to /home/jukebox/music.

Once Amarok fires up all you need to do is scan your music directory we created earlier AFTER placing your music in it(see below).

above is an image from the amarok wikipedia entry showing amarok in full flight.

We can test the setup immediately using the default audio track that's on amarok, this is simply a narration of one of the developers of amarok, but is fine for checking the audio hardware on your new jukebox. to do this simply plug in your speakers or amplifier to the line out audio port on the jukebox (green 3.5mm socket)and play the file. if all is well you should hear the narration coming through your speakers, if not there are a few checks you can do to see why this isn't the case. It as also advantageous to have your tags organised and the music normalised so the library is in good condition as amarok (and itunes and various other software) rely on the tags being accurate to compile the music database precisely.

now we come to adding your music to the collection. This can be done a number of ways depending on your hardware, and what format your music is stored in already.

Probably the easiest way is to use a usb device to carry over your existing mp3 music. to do this simply place the music on a usb memory drive, portable hard drive or ipod. thhen connect this to the jukebox machine. the jukebox machine should recognise this device when being plugged in and mount the drive my placing a little shortcut(or launcher) on the desktop to the device. after this open the device by clicking on the desktop launcher and use the copy and paste commands in Nautilus (Nautilus is ubuntus file manager)to place the music in the music directory.

another methood would be to use an ethernet connection to copy your existing files. this would involve creating a share on a drive on one of the machines on your home network , and then simply copying the files across the network.

if you havnt created your mp3 library yet you can use soundjuicer to rip your mp3s directly from the cd.

Yes you can control amarok from your mobile using the bluetooth function.

you will need the ubuntu bluetooth utilities installed. the following code will do that

sudo apt-get install bluetooth bluez-gnome gnome-bluetooth

to check that bluetooth is installed correctly run

dmesg

and you should get an output like this,

[  105.536700] Bluetooth: L2CAP ver 2.8
[  105.536705] Bluetooth: L2CAP socket layer initialized
[  105.706880] Bluetooth: RFCOMM socket layer initialized
[  105.706898] Bluetooth: RFCOMM TTY layer initialized
[  105.706900] Bluetooth: RFCOMM ver 1.8

you can get the ubuntu feisty package here. anyremote_3.1_i386.deb

further instructions can be found here. anyremote on ubuntu

Due to the fact that there is no standard for volumes levels on audio CDs (and therefore mp3s that are derived from these) it is necessary to normalize all your mp3 tracks, otherwise when being played back in random from a a large playlist you will be forever reaching for the volume knob to change the level as some songs will be very quiet and others will blow you out of your listening room. Also songs encoded at a very high level also may have “clipping” (where the level saturates the maximum level resulting in an annoying clicking sound). For normalizing the tracks i use “mp3gain” and use the default 89 db setting, I find this gives a reasonable level with minimal clipping. mp3gain can be used in linux or windows. Also note that doing a few thousand songs is definitely an overnight affair. see here: normalising_mp3

One of the advantages of mp3 is the metadata contained within the file called a tag. These tags have information such as the song title, album, and artist. But it can be a real nightmare and very time consuming to get this right them maintain it. For this task in windows i used to use a utility called “mp3tagstudio” this is a very powerful mp3 renaming and tagging utility. I have since switched to a linux applicatiopn called easytag which is even more powerful. When gotten the hang of these programs are quite efficient. Its a good idea to be fussy from the start so as that your collection is always in a state of good organization.

Guide to mp3 tag management

There are a couple of tweaks available to make the system a little more user friendly,

* Booting directly into the GUI- Go to the system/admin/login options and select the security tab. from there it is available to select a user account to log in automatically without prompting for a password. this is fine for a home mp3 setup however be careful that this will make the system insecure (like 95% of current windows installations) for some other uses.

* Networking, system/admin/shared folders will enable you to share your music with other machines on your home network, you can even share your music directory with write access to allow music to be administered for another PC.