Amarok 'Fast Forward' 1.4.2-beta1

The Wolf 1.4.2-beta1 - 'Fast Forward'

Today the Amarok project released 1.4.2-beta1 of the 'Fast Forward' series. 1.4.2-beta1 includes two major new features. One is Advanced Tag Features (ATF). Turn it on in Amarok's configuration and take advantage of some great features that make sure you can move your music without losing your music. Once your files have been rescanned with ATF writes enabled, as you move files within your collection folders, the Playlist and all of your statistics and song ratings will track your files, no matter where in your collection you move them -- or how you rename them! The other new feature is Dynamic Collection. In the past, users who kept their music on a server or on a removeable storage device would find that the tracks contained in these folders would be dropped when an incremental scan was performed -- and that they would then have to wait while all of these tracks were rescanned when the folders on these devices were available again. Now, when reconnecting devices or network shares, Amarok will immediately remember the files that were contained on that storage device, eliminating the need for a long rescan!

Although we have spent a lot of time testing these and other new features, there are always things we didn't catch -- and we do know that in this beta there may be issues with podcasts and podcast fetching. So, to be on the safe side, we suggest that you make backups of your amarokrc and your amarok directory (ask in #amarok if you don't know how to do this) so that if something is broken for you, your configuration can be recovered. If something is not behaving properly please report the issue in the KDE bugtracking system Bugs.KDE.Org so that we can fix it for 1.4.2.

FEATURES

• Lyrics can be edited directly on Context Browser's Lyrics tab.
• BPM field. Patch by Alf B LervÃ¥g and Aaron VonderHaar. (BR 123142)
• Advanced Tag Features (ATF) goes public: Turn it on in the Collection options and organize your files freely without losing your statistics or needing to re-add tracks to the Playlist. We'll keep track of where you put your files or what you renamed them to and update it all for you!
• Improved crossfading for xine-engine: Honours the 'Crossfade Length' setting precisely, and uses a better mixing style profile. Patch by Enrico Ros.
• A new media device implements a DAAP client. So Amarok can connect to iTunes, Firefly Media Server etc. (BR 100513)

CHANGES

• Quite a lot bugfixes including some bugs found by the Klocwork tools
• Podcatching partly broken

As usually details can be found in the ChangeLog.