We have been waiting a long, long time and now we finally did it: Amarok 2.0 is really soon to be released!

To celebrate this really major event in Amarok history with our fans all around the world we would like to invite you to join us to party really hard. Could there ever be a better reason to do so?

As our fellowers are -more or less- randomly spread all around the world one release party won't be enough, no, we need a lot of them. This is where YOU can help: check out the list on our Wiki, if there is a party close to you location join it by adding yourself and contacting the organizer. If there is no party close enough for you to take part: start one! Simply add it to the list and spread the word.

How should a release party look like? Any way you like it! You could simply get some drinks and loud music. You could set up some ancient game consoles. Just do whatever you think might make that event special and is fun for you and your guests. Take fotos, write blog entries and let us know how you (Ama)rok. Let's get the preparations started.

The timeframe for parties starts this Friday and ends two weekends later.

Today the Amarok project releases Narwhal, the release candidate of the upcoming Amarok 2.0.

The changes since Beta 3 focus mostly on fixing bugs, as we are in a fairly hard feature-freeze to give us time to polish the final product. However, this didn't stop us from adding a few nice new things:

• Users' Recommended radio is now shown in the Last.Fm Service.
• Playlist browser items can be deleted and renamed using the keyboard.
• Basic and Advanced view when editing a filename scheme are synchronized.
• Added delete button to Advanced view for defining a filename scheme.
• Importer for iTunes libraries now allows you to import your statistics from iTunes.
• The settings dialog now remembers the page that was last used.
• Track information can be edited from the file browser.

In addition, there are the following changes:

• User playlists added from files are now updated on collection rescans, so any changes in the file are reflected in the SQL playlist.
• Layout refactoring in the Organize Collection dialog.
• Enabled Last.fm scrobbling by default when Last.fm login is supplied.
• "Show active track" has been moved from the playlist context menu to the playlist toolbar
• The video and Last.fm applet have been removed for now as they are not ready for final release. They will be readded in later releases.

There are, of course, a ton of bugfixes. See the full ChangeLog further below for all the goodies.


A lot of great new scripts have shown up on kde-apps.org. Give them a try and enjoy.

Packages are available through your distributions package manager, the KDE-on-Windows installer (beta release only) and from the Mac download page (beta release only). Additionally the tarball can be downloaded here:

Has your favourite Amarok 1.4 feature not been added to 2.0 yet, or perhaps something you read about on someone's blog has not yet shown up? Not to worry -- we've got a large number of things on our plate waiting to go once 2.0 is out the door. So expect to see lots of new, great things being added in short order, plus the return of some old favourites. Have a look at the Amarok 2 FAQ to find answers to the most common questions about Amarok 2.

After some discussion, we have decided to extend Roktober since we are so far away from our goal and we think that maybe part of the problem is not enough promotion, so if we extend a few weeks maybe we can get this going. Not everyone follows the developer blogs, so if anybody missed the blog entry put up by our treasurer regarding Roktober, here are some highlights (or read the full entry):

• we have seen a huge fall-off in donations from outside the EU and we're wondering why this is;
• we are planning on giving two prizes this year so we are giving entries in the drawing based local currency;
• towards the end of last year we spent over €2000 to send 12 people to aKademy;
• the project spent about €1500 on technical and administrative items like server hosting, domain administration, develop resources (books) and hardware;
• in addition to aKademy, we spent over €3500 attending free software conferences around the world
• each developer/contributor team member was given two t-shirts. A small thank you for the large amounts of time put into the project by volunteers who are doing this for fun, not profit.