As the release of Amarok 2.2 draws closer, the Amarok team is pleased to present Amarok 2.2 RC 1, the first and hopefully last release candidate before the final release. This release contains a few new and improved features, mainly concerning podcasts, and fixes a number of crashes and other bugs. For a list of the most important changes and fixes see the changelog below.
As always please help us by testing, reporting bugs, sending patches and most importantly by enjoying discovering music.

The Amarok team is pleased to release the second beta version of Amarok 2.2. For a list of the most important changes and fixes see the changelog below.
As always please help us by testing, reporting bugs, sending patches and most importantly by enjoying discovering music. Thanks to everyone who already helped us this way. We are especially looking for help with podcasting support.

Another summer has passed - a summer which has been quite busy for the whole Amarok team, implementing new features, fixing bugs and making Amarok better every single day. The team never stopped developing, be this on the beach, in a train station, waiting at the airport, in a cabin in the woods.
So we are now able to present you with a first glimpse of Amarok 2.2 in it's beta 1 flavor, codenamed Crystal Clear.

All elements of your preferred music player have been worked on. The changelog is indeed quite huge and impressive. Amarok is now available with its new and improved browser layout on the left and the brand new videoclip applet providing you with music videos for your favorite songs from various websites. A new photo applet shows pictures related to the current artist to get you in the right mood. Many of the other context applets have also received huge updates.

Left, right, middle... how boring. Well, you can now change the layout of the different elements and place those where *you* want to have them! You can even place elements on top of each other and switch between them using tabs. Is the toolbar too big for your taste? Then just try out the brand new toolbarNG. Of course we didn't stop at the visual enhancements. We also improved the collection scanner and eliminated some errors there. You can now rate your music in the collection view, the current track applet and also in the playlist. Do you have a media device? Plug it in and it will show up in the collection browser. Want to play a CD? Just put it in your drive and it will appear in the collection browser, allowing you to either play it directly or copy the tracks to your harddrive.

The playlist also has a ton of new features to offer. It now offers advanced multi level sorting with an intuitive interface, full or partial shuffling and the option to change the way tracks are grouped together. All these different playlist settings can be stored together as a bookmark and easily applied again later, so for instance if grouping tracks by composer, you can also apply a playlist layout that shows composer and not album related information in the group header. Speaking of bookmarks, both the content browser and the playlist now have a very simple interface to store and recall bookmarks; and for editing, grouping and deleting bookmarks, the bookmark manager has been greatly improved and is now accessible from the tools menu.

In the "Saved Playlists" category you will find imported playlist files discovered in the collection folders during scanning. When you change these in Amarok 2.2 the files on disk will now also change.

You can find the full changelog below.

Please download, test, enjoy and make sure to report all bugs you find at bugs.kde.org so we can release a rocking Amarok 2.2 in about a month.