After 5 months of hard work, the Amarok team is proud to present the next major version of Amarok, 2.1.
When Amarok 2.0 was released, we celebrated the first of many steps along what will be a long series of Amarok 2.x releases. The 2.0 release brought with it an entirely new foundation to build on, and a developer team more motivated than ever to make Amarok 2 the best music player possible. While Amarok 2.0 contained many new features and ideas, it was also lacking many features that users of the previous, very successful, versions of Amarok had come to expect. With the release of Amarok 2.1 we are not only starting to close this gap, but we are also introducing a number of new and unique features that will make your music listening experience even better.

The highlights of this release are:

Playlist Improvements

The playlist in Amarok 2.1 has undergone many improvements since the last release. You can now search and filter its content and queue tracks as well as tell Amarok to stop playing after a certain track. The biggest change however is the new playlist layout editor. It lets you make the playlist look the way you like it. Covers, ratings, genres or just a simple track name? It's up to you! It comes with a few layouts predefined and leaves the rest for your creativity!

Context View

The improved Context View comes with a new layout and makes better use of free space. Applet management has been improved and applets follow your KDE color scheme. Instead of using multiple pages with applets, new Context View displays them in one vertical column which can be reorganized with a handy widget at the bottom.

Bookmarking

Bookmarking is finally here! Bookmarking comes in two types, automatic and manual. When you are listening to a long podcast, audiobook (or any other track longer than 10 minutes) Amarok will automatically mark the last listened to position and auto resume playback when you return to the track. You can also manually bookmark a position in any track to save for later.

Amarok URLs

Amarok URLs allow you to create a link to a certain place in Amarok. For example, you could make an URL to a great song you found on Jamendo and send it to your friend. Her Amarok will open the Jamendo service and the song you found. Stumbled upon an exceptional audio book on LibriVox? Create a link and send it to your family. In this release we are just starting to explore what is possible using these URLs, so expect to see many interesting features based on this in the future.

Last.fm

The Last.fm service received an interface update and now allows you to play any tag, user, or artist radio. We have also added an option to mark songs in your local collection as loved. Now you can show how much love you have, even for local tracks. ;-)

ReplayGain Support

Amarok now supports ReplayGain natively. When it is enabled Amarok equalizes the volume of songs with ReplayGain tags to avoid big unexpected volume changes between songs. It currently requires the GStreamer Phonon backend.

Collection Headers

Headers in the collection browser now have a much cleaner, more distinctive look.

Media Devices

Album cover support for iPods has been added and many bugs have been fixed.

Compilation support

Thanks to the sleepless nights of many Amarok developers, identifying albums as compilations (aka "Various Artists") now works more reliably :)

Phonon Configuration

There's no need to leave Amarok in order to change the system-wide sound settings anymore. The Phonon configuration can now be opened from Amarok's preference dialog. This is especially handy when using Amarok in other desktop environments and operating systems.

and more!

Grab your copy of Amarok 2.1 today and rediscover music!

You can find videos of some of the above mentioned features in our YouTube account. If you want to find out what we are working on for Amarok 2.2 and beyond, check our blog posts on our Planet.

The Amarok team is proud to release the second beta of Amarok 2.1. In the last month, the Amarok development squad has been focusing on bug fixing, usability improvements and optimizations to enhance your experience. Our recently held developer sprint in Berlin, Germany has allowed us to improve Amarok with feedback from usability studies as well as discuss the road map for Amarok once 2.1 is released.

We are also very excited to be bringing on wonderful new students to work with us with the Google Summer of Code, Season of KDE and Season of Usability programs, which will usher in a number of great features and improvements in the upcoming months. Although Amarok 2.1 is still in beta status, we encourage you to upgrade and provide feedback - the more we hear from you, the more improvements you'll get back!

Join us in Amarok'ing in a Free World!
Some of the changes since 2.1 Beta 1:

After the bug fixing goodness of Amarok 2.0.2, it is time to crank up the coolness factor by a few orders of magnitude. Deep in our hidden lair we have been hard at work plotting world domination - and occasionally working on the next major version of Amarok - and we are now ready to let the rest of the world have a taste with the release of Amarok 2.1 beta1.

Amarok 2.1 will come with many new features and some old favorites will make a re-appearance. Beta 1 gives you a sneak preview of all these improvements. While not quite ready for general use yet, the stability is quite good and overall the beta should be quite usable in most cases (standard "may eat your cat, spouse, favorite cupcake or pet iguana" warnings do apply however).

Major new features include a new, completely user configurable playlist with an easy to use drag-and-drop editor, cue sheet support, a new take on managing applets in the Context View, bookmarks - allowing you, among other things, to save and share favorite finds in the services, support for showing radio stations with many alternate streams as one track in the playlist, much faster startup when reloading large playlists containing non local tracks, as well as many other improvements, UI tweaks and bug fixes across the board. So download, test drive and cuddle this beta a little, provide feedback and bug reports and help us make Amarok 2.1 the best Amarok release ever.

Join us in Amarok'ing in a Free World!
The full ChangeLog since 2.0.2 is about a mile long and follows below: