Looking back at my blog, I find lots of mention of Amarok, the KDE audio player, in 2008, 2009, some KDE4-on-OpenSolaris stuff mentions it, and then a long silence until 2021. About a year ago, early 2023, the audio/amarok port was removed from FreeBSD ports. So naturally I was intrigued – maybe even excited – to see Amarok return from vacation with a 3.0 release. And I needed to try it on FreeBSD.

Many of the dependencies are (still) packaged on FreeBSD, so I installed a handful and tried building it on my still-KF5-based X11-based so last-gen Plasma Desktop workstation.

Somewhat to my surprise – I don’t imagine there is FreeBSD CI for Amarok – everything built, ninja install did the right things, and it starts! And toots and parples, clangs, bangs, blips and bloops are reproduced with excellent fidelity.

So, congratulations Amarok folk. It might even return to the FreeBSD ports collection, although – I’m gonna be honest here – I’m not sure it offers me anything in the way of music appreciation that command-line gst-play doesn’t give me. I am just that much more previous-last-gen.