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!

Only 4 weeks after the 2.2.1 release the Amarok Team is proud to present you with a beta release of the upcoming Amarok 2.2.2. We are especially delighted by the many patches and contributions from new contributors that found their way into it.

So what is new in this beta release? Well, let us surprise you: custom Labels for tracks are back in Amarok! Yes, it took some time, but we are glad to be able to allow you to add your very personal labels to your music again. Another well known feature from the 1.4 series making a comeback is the often requested moodbar. Just be warned, you will need the gstreamer backend and quite a few other additional packages to have this working, but we already prepared a wiki page with the necessary instructions. Of course, all 4 moodbar styles known from Amarok 1.4 are supported in this version.

Many changes found their way also into the podcasts section, with a much improved handling of the grouping and downloads. It is now possible to modify the update interval in the configuration file, the downloads are less memory hungry and already existing files are not downloaded again.

We also made some small changes for better usability: The Playlist Layout Editor is now part of the Playlist 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. All buttons and items now have tooltips that allow you to identify the various elements with great ease.

There are many more features to discover, many changes and an impressive list of bugfixes in this preview, as the changelog below shows. Let us just mention one other important change that allows us to take full advantage of the development framework in use: Amarok now depends on KDE 4.3.x and Qt 4.5. Expect some very nice new stuff for the month to come :)

As usual with Beta releases, we would love to have as much feedback as possible from testers who are not afraid to use a preview on their system. While we will not add new features until the final release of Amarok 2.2.2, we will fully concentrate on improving the existing features and options. This of course means that we rely on you, dear testers and music lovers, to really push this version to its limits and report as many problems as you can find. and, as usual, this is a beta release, so don't use it if you are not comfortable when Amarok causes some strange happenings on your machine, dries your laundry instead of sorting music or even eats the occasional cat ;)





Join us and rediscover music!