Amarok is not a simple media player and I don’t think it’s intended to be. I’ve said all along that KDE isn’t the ‘simple’ choice, but it is packed with powerful functionality. Amarok goes right along with that. I have some gripes with it, but I’ll wait to post about those after I’ve resolved them.
One thing I’ve started doing is rating my music within Amarok so that I can build a dynamic playlist that plays all my favorites. This presents a problem since like everyone it seems, I have a lot of music and no time to rate it. This is what I’ve done and maybe it will work for you.
Ratings
The most important thing when setting the ratings for your music is what you want it to mean. I think when it started I was hung up on putting how good I thought the music was. But really, I don’t care about that. My rating criteria was simple: how often do I want to hear it?
It makes it a lot easier to ‘decide’ what rating to give it. You can also rate in half stars but I don’t want that much granularity.
New Sounds
Next set up a dynamic playlist. Go to Playlists > Dynamic Playlists and add a Proportional Bias. I will say that the ‘Bias’ label is confusing but just don’t think about it. Set the Proportion to 100%, and Match ‘Rating’ With ‘equal to’ 0 stars. Now add more Proportional Biases for any genres you want to exclude- I excluded Audiobooks and a couple others. When you’re finished, save the new dynamic playlist. If you make changes, save them as a new playlist- saving over the old one didn’t actually save on my system.
Now while your music plays, use the global hotkeys to save the new rating as you listen. Like what you hear? Set the rating with Super (which is usually the Windows key) and 1/2/3/4/5 depending on the rating you want to give it. And don’t stress about it. If you miss rating because you were busy and didn’t think about it- don’t panic! It’ll come up again.