Minirok 2.0 - Minimalist Audio Player for KDE4

Introduction
Written in Python, Minirok is a minimalist audio player which ships with a simple and intuitive interface, which kind of resembles the Amarok 1.4 interface, except all the major features were removed.

The latest version was released on June 1st, and it is the first release for KDE4. If you want the KDE3 version (although it is rather poor when it comes to features), you can download and install release 0.9.2 from the official homepage.

What does it do?
First of all, it plays music. Minirok is very lightweight when it comes to resources and if you need a simple player with basic features for KDE4 you're tired of Amarok or JuK, then probably it's time to give Minirok a try.

Minirok can't compete with a player like Amarok in terms of features, but it definitely is a good player for its category of small, fast and non resource-hungry applications.

Minirok 2.0 - clean and simple

The playlist is simple, resembling the one from Amarok 1.4, and you can choose which fields are to be shown and which not. Available fields are Track, Artist, Album, Title and Length. At the moment Minirok does not provide a way of sorting or saving the playlist, but the last playlist used is loaded automatically when Minirok is restarted.

It even supports Last.fm song submission, but you will need to install and configure lastfmsubmitd, a daemon which runs in the background and can be used by other players too (like MOC for example, which I reviewed here).

Minirok supports global keybindings, it allows songs queuing, random mode, repeat track or playlist, stop playing after a certain track. This release is still the first one in the 2.x series, so several features are still missing. For example the Configure Toolbars dialogue is empty, while adding music is done only via keyboard, by typing the path to the music directory in the drop-down text box on the left.

Update: There was a problem with the play/pause and stop buttons, which were not visible in the environment in which I tried Minirok, Kubuntu 9.04 with KDE 4.2 and all the updates to date. I'll come back with more info on this as soon as I get to try it again. (Thanks go to Adeodato Simó, the Minirok author, for pointing this out for me)

Configuring Minirok

Installation
You should be able to run Minirok easily. After downloading the minirok-2.0.tar.gz package from the homepage, uncompress it and run the minirok.py script, which is already executable. On Ubuntu for example, you may need to install two packages, python-mutagen and python-gst0.10:

sudo apt-get install python-mutagen python-gst0.10

With your user password. Then run python.py by either double-clicking on it or in a Konsole using:

./python.py

Conclusion
If you only want to listen to music and you don't care about advanced features, then give Minirok a try. It's definitely not bloated, it ships with a clean interface integrated into KDE4 and provides the minimum options needed to manipulate the playlist.