Spring is over and summer in full swing for most of the Amarok team, and we’re excited to give you Amarok 2.4.3. We’ve tweaked the visual design a bit, removing the status bar at the bottom, and replacing it with more focused notifications up top, or where they make most sense. You’ll also see some nice new visual effects in the layout as well.
Along with the work at the sprint in Randa, we’ve worked on the Dynamic Playlists, and some of the Internet Services. The new Dynamic Playlist should be easier to understand. Some of the functionality changes are: New AlbumPlay example playlist, a Quiz-play bias that will pick a song that starts with the same character the last one ended with, and preventing duplicate tracks.
In the meantime our Google Summer of Code and Season of KDE students have been hard at work in git branches bringing Amarok Mobile to fruition, and new podcast integration with Gpodder.net.
You will notice that you can now drag and drop on Collections, to copy or move within Local Music, and also directly from the Playlist. We also got patches for various bugs and wishes: you can now configure the names of Podcast episodes, thanks to Sandeep Raghuraman, and automatic scrolling in the Lyrics applet is possible, thanks to Jan Gerrit Marker. Classical music listeners, you now have the option to scrobble the composer as artist to Last.fm, thanks to Nicholas Wilson.
Many other bugs have been fixed. One of note had a bounty attached to it, which has been paid to Amarok. Thanks to Damiön la Bagh for your community-minded donation, which will benefit all Amarok iPod users, and contribute to the support of our developers.
The changelog below gives a fairly complete overview of the changes in this and the previous beta release.
PS: You might wonder why this is 2.4.3 and not 2.4.2 instead. There were technical problems with what we wanted to release as 2.4.2 and we had to skip that version number. Doh!
Join us and rediscover your music!