Amarok Blog

A little while ago I wrote a small post explaining why Amarok was not going to be ported to windows for the time being.

At the Amarok HQ, we like to increase publicity by submitting our stories to digg and other news sites. Keeping track of the comments shows that there is plenty of discussion as to why we should or should not release a Windows port of the application.

Since writing that post over 12 months ago, the situation has become a little clearer and we understand the direction which will be taken. It has been discussed at length, both at our meeting and on IRC, that there should be a windows release at some point in the future. Amarok 2.0 will be based on Trolltech’s Qt4 framework, which provides the required GPL license under windows (which was previously unavailable). If a working kde-libs port exists, the release should nearly write itself.

In the case that kde-libs is not available under windows, it is also feasible to produce a Qt only version of the application, but would require a lot of work and risk our currently excellent status within the KDE community.

The only remaining factor would be a developer to do the job. Although the transition should be rather transparent, since Qt4 is platform independant, everybody knows that this is hardly ever the case. We don’t see this as too large a hurdle because there is plenty of support in the community and a high demand to get the job completed.

Estimated time of arrival? This is a question we cannot answer just yet, because 2.0 development has not yet started in full swing. We all hope that it can be released concurrently with Amarok for linux.

The reality of life is, that some of us do need to use Windows, and it would be great to be able to rock out with Amarok on that exotic, unknown platform.