You may have already noticed, that we have released Amarok 2, beta 2. This is a very exciting release for us as we have put an incredible amount of effort into features and bug fixes. This release pushes most of the significant work which was discussed or achieved during Akademy, such as changes to the Amarok core which will bring significant stability improvements and improved user experience.
We’ve made a rather large change with the removal of SQLite as our database backend, opting instead for the MySQL-embedded platform. As I know that many users might not be able to rationalise this change, allow me to explain. MySQL-embedded provides users with the performance boost of a standalone server without actually needing to run the server and without needing to bother with the rather complex procedures of intialising a database, users and permissions. It was also important for us to only support one database backend as we were constantly plagued with problems across different databases. Using MySQL-embedded will thus make it very easy for us to support standalone MySQL servers (in the future) for those that already have these services running, or may want to share databases over a network.
Notable mentions include improved scripting support, the return of lyric fetching and incremental scanner support. It’s important to remember that Amarok 2.0 will not be at feature parity with 1.4 as most of the code base has been rewritten. Many of the features that are not present have simply not been reimplemented due to lack of developer time, or we are unable to complete due to current technical limitations (such as equalisers, visualisations, replay gain).
We hope you enjoy this release.
