Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you - the Neon!

Neon is our shiny new nightly builds service for Amarok. Neon makes it easy to follow development of Amarok by regularly providing packages for you to install.
It is set up to be usable alongside your stable version. Even though we try to keep your data secure, you should be aware that Neon is providing mostly unreleased and untested software, which might as well eat your system. Neon is intended to be used by everyone who wants to help us find bugs, keep track of development, join development or just wants to live on the bleeding edge. It is not intended to be used instead of a stable and full featured Amarok.

We started this service with packages for Amarok 2 for Kubuntu but packages for openSUSE will follow soon and we hope more distributions will join.

To install it on Kubuntu Hardy add the following line to your /etc/apt/sources.list file:

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/project-neon/ubuntu hardy main

check for updates, install amarok-nightly and enjoy.

Please be aware that Amarok 2 is still in heavy development and therefore it is very likely that you will encounter bugs, things that are not finished and features that will change before we release Amarok 2.0. We welcome everyone to send patches and help us get Amarok 2 ready soon.

If you want to stay up to date on all things Neon please subscribe to the dedicated mailinglist. Availability of packages for other distributions will be announced there and on the Project Neon wiki page.

When reporting bugs please consider that for now we only accept bug reports for bugs that are not obvious and are easy to reproduce or have a useful backtrace. Of course we like bugs with attached patches the most ;-)

Photo copyright 2008 by Maximilian Fellner, licensed under by-nc-nd 2.0

We, the Amarok team, are busy developing the upcoming Amarok 2 series. Our 1.4 users are anything but forgotten: we have another bugfix release of the Fast Forward 1.4 series. Amazon informed us about changes in their system that affected cover fetching in Amarok. We changed the necessary bits and pieces in Amarok to ensure that you can download covers for your favourite albums again. Also all of our translations have been improved and various small bugs have been squashed. After some initial problems with 1.4.9, Amarok Developer Jeff Mitchell says about the extra .1 : "We're really sure now, that we've fixed all the bugs in 1.4.9". Have fun with Amarok 1.4.9.1 Fast Forward.

The Amarok Team is happy to announce that Amarok 2 will come with native support for the itunes music store. Utilizing the new Scriptable Service framework, Amarok developers have utilized a development model known as creative backwards engineering to develop a C# script and obtain full compatability with the itunes music store. This support is already availible in our subversion sources, and will be released in the next version of Amarok. As a warning, there appears to be a small bug currently where users are not charged for the music they purchase and download. We are working dillegently to fix this problem, and will commit a fix as soon as possible. Thank you for flying Amarok!