It's Roktober again here at the Amarok Project and we are giving away an iAudio7 mobile player to celebrate. Roktober is the time we review the events of the past 12 months, start planning, and do the fundraising for the next year. The funds this year were spent mainly on our webserver. We also funded the development meeting at aKademy. The money also helped to pay travel expenses for our booth workers.

To keep up with our plans, especially regarding the upcoming release of Amarok 2.0 and our current server costs, we are looking at expenses of € 5,000 for the coming year. We will keep the same procedure as last year. For every € 10 you donate you will receive one entry in the drawing which will considerably raise your chances to win the very cool device we chose this time: the Cowon iAudio7 player, capable of playing MP3, OGG-Vorbis, WMA, ASF, FLAC, WAV, MPEG4, FM Radio listening and  Line-In recording. It comes with a flash memory of 8 GB!

PayPal is the easiest way to donate, just click the link in the left banner. You do not need a Paypal account; a credit card works as well. If you prefer to send a check or a European bank transfer, send a mail to donations@getamarok.com and we can provide a mailing address or SWIFT.

Thank You for helping us to keep Amarok the Best Music Player Ever!

Update: Thanks to everyone for making this the most successful Roktoberfest ever. We will announce the winner shortly - just watch this spot.

Read more for the year in review.

The last 12 months have been spent with a tremendous amount of work in development which led to the release of 1.4.5 on February 4th. The last release to integrate new features came up with some interesting novelties, like the integrated Shoutcast stream directory, the ability to tag your music as well as much improved sound quality when using the equalizer with Xine. The following release of 1.4.6 on June 21st included the much awaited iconset with Oxygen colors, a new SQLite version for a much faster database backend as well as a load of bug fixes which were the main focus of the 1.4.6. release. Only 2 months later we came up with the 1.4.7 bug fix release introducing an Oxygen colored application icon and queries improvements.

But the main developer focus already was on the upcoming Amarok 2.0, and this year's Summer of Code came in handy for some stunning work on the Plasmification of the Context Browser by Leo Franchi and an awesome Playlist Redesign by Ian Monroe.

The year would be somewhat boring if we didn't get in touch with our users in Real Life too, so this year's appearances were FOSDEM in Brussels in February, LinuxTag in Berlin in May with a booth, talk and workshop and the much awaited aKademy in Glasgow in June. For our last appearance at FrOSCon in Bonn-St.Augustin in August we were even awarded the coveted "Party animals of Open Source '07" award!

All of this would not have been possible without your support, so, once again, Thank You!