The latest edition of the popular Linux distribution; Ubuntu was released on Thursday. Unfortunately if one wishes to use Amarok as their preferred music player the discovery that installing through Synaptic provides version 2 may come as a disappointment.

For me, I will not upgrade Amarok until the new edition supports an external MySQL database. I access my collection not only from my desktop computer, but also from a laptop in the living room (for playing music through the hi-fi). Having the collection stored within Amarok itself means that I would in effect have two different databases each maintaining their own statistics. Not good.

In addition to that, at present my website has a link to view my music library. This is compiled by accessing the external MySQL database that Amarok 1.4 is using. Therefore if I play a track, and the statistics are updated in Amarok; my website will show those exact same statistics. If I upgrade to Amarok 2 then this feature disappears.

I'm sure there are many that are in a similar situation to me for the reasons above and probably many others. So is the solution to just not upgrade Ubuntu from 8.10 to 9.04? No. There is another way.

A quick search on Google ('Amarok 1.4 Jaunty') reveals a blog which has detailed some very easy instructions for how replace Amarok 2 for Amarok 1.4. I've linked to the blog below, but for ease of reference I have expanded on those instructions here:

(Remember: to make life easy; you can highlight code, move to the terminal window, and then press the middle mouse button to paste and execute it.)

1. Open a terminal window (Gnome: Applications > Accessories > Terminal)

2. Enter the following code:

   sudo nano /etc/apt/sources.list.d/amarok.list

3. Add the following text to the newly created text file:

   deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/bogdanb/ppa/ubuntu jaunty main
   deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/bogdanb/ppa/ubuntu jaunty main

4. Press CTRL+X to close the text file (DO NOT close the terminal window). When asked to save changes, press Y.

5. Enter this code into the terminal (as one line):

   sudo apt-key adv --recv-keys --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com / 
   0x1d7e9dd033e89ba781e32a24b9f1c432ae74ae63

6. Update the repository with the new sources, remove the existing copy of Amarok (if it's installed) and install 1.4:

   sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get remove amarok && sudo apt-get install amarok14

That's all there is to it. I've tested it and it works without fault! Huzzah!

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Tags: ubuntu, linux, amarok, music