Due to considerable visual changes in the main toolbar, and many other improvements, we have decided to release the next version of Amarok as 2.3, instead of 2.2.3. From the developer's perspective only little changes with a version number bump; our policy is to still put quality first. With that note, many of these exciting new changes are still works in progress. During the next two weeks we will be focusing on polish, overall stability, and bug fixing, so that you can enjoy a great Amarok 2.3!

We encourage every brave user out there to try the beta and report back any issues spotted. Although it runs very smoothly on our computers it can in fact cause some problems and things unspoken ;-) Please report problems you might find at bugs.kde.org.








Join us and rediscover music!

A Happy New Year to all of you! We hope you all had a nice holiday season, ate yummy meals and enjoyed some quality time with your family and friends. While doing exactly the same as everybody, the Amarok developers did also sneak out in the middle of the night to sit at their computers and add a bugfix here, a usability improvement there, and polish all around to make sure you will truly enjoy our new release: Amarok 2.2.2!

As already announced for the beta release, we focused on improvements and bugfixes, but let us remind you of the new features in this release first: The Custom Labels are back and allow you to add your personal touch to your music. Another new addition that will add quite some color to your music experience: the moodbar makes his entry in the 2.2 series so you can change the progress bar to fit with your current mood, be this normal, angry, frozen or just happy :) To help you setting this up we prepared a wiki page with the necessary instructions. Editing the lyrics is made much easier now since you can just click on the lyrics applet, press F2 and you can correct the misspelled words and occasional mis-hearings :) A little tweak in the settings page of the applet allows you to also change the font settings. You always wanted to see the Beats Per Minute of a track? You can now edit, filter and sort your music by that criteria.

The podcasts section has seen many new features and improvements, since you can now show the HTML information for podcasts supporting it, import podcast subscriptions from OPML and gain some considerable memory usage by limiting the simultaneous download to a maximum of four as well as modify the update interval in the configuration file. The grouping of podcasts has improved and you now also have automatically downloaded logos for each subscription. Already existing files are not downloaded again and you can remove downloaded episodes when removing a subscription..

We also made some small changes to streamline some functionality: The Playlist Layout Editor is now part of the Tools menu in the menu bar, while the playlist actions are at the bottom of the playlist panel. This has the big advantage to see immediately if you did activate a random, repeat and/or favor mode by a visual indicator.

There are many more features to discover, many changes and an impressive list of bugfixes in this release. Below are the changes since the release of 2.2.2 Beta 1. Let us just mention one other important change: Amarok now depends on KDE 4.3.x and Qt 4.5. Expect a few very nice new things in the month to come, while we will be making use of the many new features provided by those KDE and Qt versions.





Join us and rediscover music!