The Amarok team is pleased to release the second beta version of Amarok 2.2. For a list of the most important changes and fixes see the changelog below.
As always please help us by testing, reporting bugs, sending patches and most importantly by enjoying discovering music. Thanks to everyone who already helped us this way. We are especially looking for help with podcasting support.

Another summer has passed - a summer which has been quite busy for the whole Amarok team, implementing new features, fixing bugs and making Amarok better every single day. The team never stopped developing, be this on the beach, in a train station, waiting at the airport, in a cabin in the woods.
So we are now able to present you with a first glimpse of Amarok 2.2 in it's beta 1 flavor, codenamed Crystal Clear.

All elements of your preferred music player have been worked on. The changelog is indeed quite huge and impressive. Amarok is now available with its new and improved browser layout on the left and the brand new videoclip applet providing you with music videos for your favorite songs from various websites. A new photo applet shows pictures related to the current artist to get you in the right mood. Many of the other context applets have also received huge updates.

Left, right, middle... how boring. Well, you can now change the layout of the different elements and place those where *you* want to have them! You can even place elements on top of each other and switch between them using tabs. Is the toolbar too big for your taste? Then just try out the brand new toolbarNG. Of course we didn't stop at the visual enhancements. We also improved the collection scanner and eliminated some errors there. You can now rate your music in the collection view, the current track applet and also in the playlist. Do you have a media device? Plug it in and it will show up in the collection browser. Want to play a CD? Just put it in your drive and it will appear in the collection browser, allowing you to either play it directly or copy the tracks to your harddrive.

The playlist also has a ton of new features to offer. It now offers advanced multi level sorting with an intuitive interface, full or partial shuffling and the option to change the way tracks are grouped together. All these different playlist settings can be stored together as a bookmark and easily applied again later, so for instance if grouping tracks by composer, you can also apply a playlist layout that shows composer and not album related information in the group header. Speaking of bookmarks, both the content browser and the playlist now have a very simple interface to store and recall bookmarks; and for editing, grouping and deleting bookmarks, the bookmark manager has been greatly improved and is now accessible from the tools menu.

In the "Saved Playlists" category you will find imported playlist files discovered in the collection folders during scanning. When you change these in Amarok 2.2 the files on disk will now also change.

You can find the full changelog below.

Please download, test, enjoy and make sure to report all bugs you find at bugs.kde.org so we can release a rocking Amarok 2.2 in about a month.

Amarok's development team never sleeps! We are ready to deliver Amarok 2.1.1, the first maintenance release for Amarok 2.1.

While waiting for the next major release, which will be Amarok 2.2, you can now enjoy a more polished program. This is mainly a bugfix release with some improvements that didn't make it into the main release in time. But we also have some nice new features: For those who like flexibility we added the possibility to hide the Context View. The applets layout has been improved to make them fill the remaining space where appropriate. It is also possible now to load a local playlist directly from the command line. In the meantime we have been working on a lot of features and improvements for Amarok 2.2. Some of the things being worked on: CD support, a video applet, the possibility to customize the look of Amarok, biased playlists based on Last.fm recommendations and improved navigation and handling of the browsers (collection, Internet, files, playlists). Stay tuned, we are cooking up some really nice things for you!

As in past years we will be at Linuxtag in Berlin, taking place from the 24th to 27th of June. Our booth will be located in hall 7.2b and is shared with the rest of KDE and Kubuntu. Sven Krohlas will be giving a talk about Amarok on the 26th, room 'Saal 7' at 10:00 am. Also planned is a workshop 'Amarok Scripting: How to enhance your favorite music player' (further details expected after Sunday). And of course you can meet us at our booth :D
We have received free tickets to spread in our community, which is you. 15 tickets will be given out to people who leave their email address (human readable) in the comments before Sunday. We will then (semi-)randomly select the 15 winners among the entries. Of course adding a good reason why you should get a ticket will increase your chances ;-)

The changes for this version include:

Features

• Compilations with more than 60 artists are supported.
• Option to hide the context view.
• Applets are now laid out according to two criteria: either fixed height or flowing to fill the CV. No more slivers of applets visible at the bottom.
• Load contents of an m3u file if specified when running amarok from the command line. File must be local.
• Added large source emblem in current track applet.

Changes

• Removed option to purchase Magnatune.com albums using a Credit Card as this is unfortunately no longer supported by Magnatune.com. It is still possible to purchase albums using pre paid gift card codes, and all membership features still work.
• Make it possible to delete multiple selected playlists at once from the "My Playlists" category in the playlist browser.
• Show info box in CV if no applets are visible.

Bugfixes

• Don't hide the "On/Off" button for Dynamic Playlists if the window is not tall enough. (BR 195886)
• Make it possible to change the width of a playlist layout element if the combined width of items in the row exceeds 100% (BR 195846)
• Keep width slider and width display from overlapping when setting attributes on a playlist layout element.
• Don't overwrite cached lyrics when lyrics script returns a "Not found" result. (BR 195213)
• Fixed the layout of the "Edit Track Details" dialog, which came up broken under some circumstances. (BR 195081)
• Reset total playlist time when the playlist is cleared. (BR 153160)
• Don't crash when starting a collection scan after another scan had been aborted. (BR 195242)
• Fixed non-UTF8 MPEG tag wrongly shown.
• Fix problem with supported filetypes not being copied over to MTP device (BR 186835)
• Fix problem with playlist names containing '/' not being saved (BR 975995)
• Allow cancelling of rename input box in playlist layout dialog (BR 976409)
• Loading playlists from the command line works again. (BR 191347)
• Fixed formatting of the debug output when using the -d option.
• Detection of compilation cover during the scan works again. (BR 172953)