I've had the killer combination of being both sick and busy lately, so I haven't got much done on Amarok recently.
However I do have one announcement that might make a few people happy: the windows installer of KDE now has packages of the Amarok 2 tech preview available.
You can download it by grabbing the installer and following the instructions
over at the KDE techbase. It should be pretty self explainatory, just run the installer, select a mirror, and download the amarok package: all the dependencies should be automatically downloaded and installed for you.
A few notes:
- It'll be a large download, since all the associated KDE libs will be installed. Once KDE on Windows is more stable (hopefully for the 4.1 KDE release) you'll only have to download the core libraries once, but at the moment the packages change semi-regularly.
- When asked for compiler selection, either MSVC or mingw work fine for Amarok. Unless you're a developer, there's really no reason to care which compiler you select at this point, other than the fact the MSVC packages are somewhat smaller (the mingw ones have debugging information embedded in the binaries).
- Amarok should be able to play the same file formats you're used to being able to use on Linux, provided you have the appropriate Direct Show filter. As a guide, if WMP can play the file, Amarok should be able to. For file format support, installing ffdshow can help.
- This is a tech preview, we know there are problems, don't file bugs. Any bugs filed will be closed anyway, so you're just wasting someone's time.
- As it's in a pre-alpha state, don't use it on any files you don't mind being corrupted/deleted/otherwise mangled. Although I don't think there are any such problems with it, it pays to be careful since it hasn't been extensively tested yet.
- If the installer doesn't work for you, the installer guys do want to know about that: please post on the KDE windows mailing list and someone will try to figure out the problem.
- The binaries packages will be updated as development on Amarok 2 progresses. It's not entirely in my hands though, since I'm not the one making the packages. I'll try to make a blog post to let people know whenever there's a new package with some major addition in it, so watch this space.
Hope you enjoy this taste of what is to come with Amarok 2 on Windows!
