Only 6 weeks after the launch of Amarok 2.2.0, the Amarok team is proud to present the next release in the 2.2 series: Amarok 2.2.1. While the developers have focused on fixing bugs and polishing existing features, a few new features make their appearance as well.

A large amount of work went into the Podcast section, where you can now manually mark podcasts as New. Also, it is now possible to group podcasts. When a network connection is detected, podcasts will now automatically update themselves, and they show emblems to indicate their status.

The playlist received attention as well. The inline editor in the playlist can now be used for resizing elements as well as for editing metadata. Track bookmarks can now can be deleted directly without having to go through the bookmark manager. Also, there is a new keyboard shortcut (Ctrl-J) for jumping to the playlist search box, in addition to many more shortcut possibilities.

Under the hood, the collection scanner has been improved. It will no longer process subdirectories of changed folders when those subdirectories themselves are unchanged, which leads to a very significant speed increase for those with relatively flat collections. It will also filter out directories that have been passed in multiple times, instead of scanning them twice. In addition, the process for parsing the output of the collection scanner has been highly optimized: speed increases in the range of 30 to 300% have been reported!

Amarok 2.2.1 also introduces the Script Updater. This updater checks for updates to first-party scripts (those the developers include with Amarok itself), allowing us to quickly release updates in case of changes to the sites they connect to. It uses cryptographic signing to ensure that only updates released by the Amarok team are ever used.

As usual, a significant amount of bugs have been fixed and stability has been improved, as you can see in the changelog below.

Please remember that our yearly fund-raiser is currently in progress and these donations help us keep up the steam of the project. Your contributions are much appreciated.

Join us and rediscover music!

The Amarok Team has never fully rested during the winter, nor did we rest during this hot working summer, and we still won't rest now! It's this time of the year again: The time where a lot of people are keen on sitting in warm houses rather then going out to chase after falling leaves and stormy winds. The time when lots of code is committed and Amarok sees again a lot of changes and improvements. If you are in the warm part of the globe maybe cold weather, snow and ice won't affect you, but you will for sure see effects of this season reflected in Amarok development. It's Roktober!

Oh, wait, it's already November! Rokvember! We really have been incredibly busy and totally missed that month apparently...

At this point we are usually summing up our efforts as well as our spendings. Another year has passed since last October, and we have been working throughout it. All in all a very busy year, where we have released so many new and improved versions: 2.0 beta 2 aka "Nujalik", 2.0 beta 3 "Ataksak", 2.0 RC1 "Narwhal", which culminated in Amarok 2.0 "In the Beginning" in early December, The work continued with the Amarok Team attending FOSDEM in Brussels, CeBit in Hannover, OpenExpo in Bern and still working on the code: we released 2.0.1.1 "Magellan" and security fixes, 2.0.2 "Only Time will tell", 2.1. beta 1 "Nuliajuk", shortly followed by 2.1 beta 2 and Amarok 2.1 "Let There Be Light" in June.

We focused our efforts during the development sprint in Berlin, changed our version control system from SVN to Git, and geared up to another level of speed in development. More than one hundred commits in the first 24 hours when we opened trunk for the next series is self-explaining! And we never rested, represented Amarok at LinuxTag in Berlin, gathered most of the developers in Gran Canaria for the Desktop Summit in July, brainstormed on more improvements and features and the results were there: Amarok 2.1.1 "Oceania", 2.2 beta 1 "Crystal Clear", 2.2 beta 2 "Red Dawn", 2.2 RC1 "Sunset Door" and, finally, Amarok 2.2 "Sunjammer" on October 1st. In between that we represented Amarok at FrosCon in Bonn/Sankt-Augustin and another OpenExpo in Winterthur, Switzerland, allowing people to check out developer previews at our booths.

Attending conferences, representing the development team at booths and giving talks at various events involves some real money in traveling and accommodation, which we are gathering from our donors and sponsors. Also thanks to that money we were able to organize our first Amarok development sprint this year, which was a huge success. Our server costs are needed to resist the download pressure when we release and write to inform you about the work in progress.

So again a productive year comes to its end, and we also need to restock our funds. We did our very best delivering new versions of your favorite music player, now it is your turn to show some love to the Amarok Team, and make it possible to continue to rock greatly also next year! With your support we are sure we will make Amarok even better than it is now :) We are aiming to raise 10.000$ for the coming year.

The Amarok Team is also proud to announce that it has joined the Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC). As a legally registered 501(c)(3) charity in the United States, working together with the SFC will allow donors to give tax-deductible donations, and increase the transparency in the spending of Amarok's funds. By entering into a fiscal sponsorship with the SFC, the Amarok project will be able to provide firm support for its US-based developers, showcasing the increasingly global nature of the project.

The partnership with the SFC is mutually complementary with the Amarok project's relationship to the KDE e.V., as it continues to support the Amarok team's activities in Europe and elsewhere in the world. Amarok has always been, and always will be, a part of the KDE community.

Head over to the donate button on your left to support Amarok and help us make it an even better music player!

Few things in life can influence us quite the way music can. Music can set a mood, make us relax or feel energized, and for many people there is that special song that is forever connected with a significant moment in their life. And great music needs a great player! With Amarok 2.2, codenamed "Sunjammer", the Amarok team is very proud to present the next step towards the ultimate music player!

Many weeks have passed since our last version, and so many changes and improvements have found their way into version 2.2. Over all, the team is quite proud of all the improvements and was lucky to be able to plan and coordinate those in two developer sprints, one in Berlin and one during the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit, made possible by your support for Amarok and KDE. To put this into perspective: In the last three and a half months we closed 654 bugs, made close to 2200 commits to the code, of which more than a hundred were made in the first 24 hours after the release of version 2.1.1. The code statistics show that we changed a total of 1935 files, wrote 101693 new lines, and removed 73774 obsolete lines of code.

Amarok 2.2 comes with an almost completely new look and feel. It now has a new layout for the Browser Pane on the left and an easier navigation using "bread crumbs" on top. All elements, the Browser Pane, Context View and the Playlist are dockable widgets, which you can place how and where you like. It is even possible to stack or remove them. Of course it's up to you to change the position, width and height to your liking.

The Playlist has seen a complete overhaul and comes with many new features, allowing you to sort and shuffle the content. A layout editor comes with three different pre-configured layouts and allows you to build your own preferred layout you can save. This way you can have the playlist only contain the information that is important to you. Clicking on a track twice allows you to edit the content in-line in the playlist for quick tag corrections and song ratings.

Playing an opera where you would like to find a particular passage easily? Do you have tracks with a lot of silence before a hidden song that you would like hear with a simple click? Just add bookmarks. Listening to audiobooks and podcasts is made so much easier with bookmarks too, since you can group and edit them with the bookmark manager!

The Context View has seen layout improvements as well. It comes with automatic resizing for the applets and you can place them where you would like to have them. A new photo applet shows you pictures of the artist and a video applet finds contextual videos for the now playing artist. The Wikipedia applet has been extended to allow you to change the language of the content, based on the system languages installed, and you can show information either for the artist, the album or the track you are listening to.

The collection has seen a lot of changes and bug fixes: Scanning has improved and is now much faster and more accurate, the import of the Amarok 1.4 database has been improved and you can use an external MySQL database now, too. Insert an Audio CD and it will show up in the Collection Browser, allowing you to play directly from the CD or to copy the CD content to your collection. The same applies to media devices: UMS devices show up in the Collection browser, as do various other media players.

Dynamic Playlists have the new possibility to use Biases based on Last.fm and Echonest. Don't know what to listen to? Let Amarok decide with the help of Last.fm and Echo Nest.

Amarok 2.2 marks the start of a series of 2.2.x releases that will focus on improving what is there rather than adding major new features. A new release will follow approximately every 6 weeks and bring with it bugfixes and improvements, as well as a few new features. So look forward to more regular Amarok updates in the near future.

Join us and rediscover music!