The Amarok team presents the first beta for the 2.5 release. Please test as much as possible so the final release, scheduled 2 weeks from now, will be as bug-free as possible.

Amarok 2.5 brings you the following major features:

• Re-written USB Mass Storage support.
• Many bugfixes to the iPod plugin, thanks to Matěj Laitl.
• An integrated Amazon MP3 store. This major feature is the work of our very own web-entrepreneurs Sven and Justus. If you have any icon/artwork skills: we need your help.
• Much more.

A full changelog will be published with the final release.

Spring is over and summer in full swing for most of the Amarok team, and we’re excited to give you Amarok 2.4.3. We’ve tweaked the visual design a bit, removing the status bar at the bottom, and replacing it with more focused notifications up top, or where they make most sense. You’ll also see some nice new visual effects in the layout as well.

Along with the work at the sprint in Randa, we’ve worked on the Dynamic Playlists, and some of the Internet Services. The new Dynamic Playlist should be easier to understand. Some of the functionality changes are: New AlbumPlay example playlist, a Quiz-play bias that will pick a song that starts with the same character the last one ended with, and preventing duplicate tracks. In the meantime our Google Summer of Code and Season of KDE students have been hard at work in git branches bringing Amarok Mobile to fruition, and new podcast integration with Gpodder.net.

You will notice that you can now drag and drop on Collections, to copy or move within Local Music, and also directly from the Playlist. We also got patches for various bugs and wishes: you can now configure the names of Podcast episodes, thanks to Sandeep Raghuraman, and automatic scrolling in the Lyrics applet is possible, thanks to Jan Gerrit Marker. Classical music listeners, you now have the option to scrobble the composer as artist to Last.fm, thanks to Nicholas Wilson.

Many other bugs have been fixed. One of note had a bounty attached to it, which has been paid to Amarok. Thanks to Damiön la Bagh for your community-minded donation, which will benefit all Amarok iPod users, and contribute to the support of our developers.

The changelog below gives a fairly complete overview of the changes in this and the previous beta release.

PS: You might wonder why this is 2.4.3 and not 2.4.2 instead. There were technical problems with what we wanted to release as 2.4.2 and we had to skip that version number. Doh!

Join us and rediscover your music!

This has been a busy spring and early summer in Amarok-land. Developers met up in Randa, Switzerland and sprinted with a lot of other KDE teams, including KDE Multimedia. Besides lots of good times, much coding progress and bugfixing was done too. You will immediately notice a new streamlined look, and some nice background graphics. The other big change is in dynamic playlists.

One we have been waiting for: drag and drop on Collections, to copy or move within Local Music, and also directly from the Playlist. We also got patches for various bugs and wishes: one can now configure the names of Podcast episodes, thanks to Sandeep Raghuraman, and automatic scrolling in the Lyrics applet is possible, thanks to Jan Gerrit Marker. Good news for classical music listeners, you now have the option to scrobble the composer as artist in Last.fm, thanks to Nicholas Wilson.
We also have an updated dynamic playlist which should be easier to understand. Some of the functionality changes are: New AlbumPlay example playlist, a Quiz-play bias that will pick a song that starts with the same character the last one ended with, preventing duplicate tracks.
And of course we have quite a few bug-fixes, and changes under the skin. The changelog below gives a fairly complete overview of the changes in this beta release. Please help us test it and get it ready for prime-time.

Join us and rediscover your music!