chip the glasses

I’ve been a longtime fan of ampache. As a way to centralize and broadcast your music library, it’s fantastic–easy setup, hardly any configuration, friendly web interface. My one annoyance was that, as long as I had my music in Ampache, I couldn’t really use it with my preferred media player Amarok. I could export playlists into Amarok (this is back in 1.4.x) but that was it; I manually had to go to Ampache, craft a playlist, export it, listen, repeat. Very tiresome.

Amarok 2 has finally filled the gap with its built-in Ampache plugin. Now, once configured, your Ampache collection can look and behave just like your local collection (sans tag editing features, but c’est la vie). Even album art is pulled.

There’s not much to it; one pitfall is that in my haste to make this work I installed Ampache from the Ubuntu repos; don’t do this. The version you get is 3.4.x which doesn’t work with Amarok 2’s plugin. Download 3.5.x from Ampache’s website and you’ll be good to go.

I just followed the directions here and was going in no time.

Now, I keep my music on an external hard drive attached to my eee server, Lovecraft, and access it from my work thinkpad / home thinkpad / on the go eee901 / where ever.

Also: it works with Amarok 2’s built-in last.fm support.

Hooray.