It was just a beginning

This is the first time I've actually gotten around to posting anything on the internet. I've been working on Amarok since we started on the 2.0 adventure, and have stuck my nose in most of Amarok since then. I'm hoping to write a series of posts about some of the cool things in Amarok 2, and some of the cooler things to come. Today I'm going to preview 2.0.1, because as we said earlier, 2.0 was just a beginning, and the evolution is already going full speed.

Amarok's code was in a feature freeze for a while before 2.0 was released. There were all sorts of changes in the code, and all sorts of annoying bugs that needed to be fixed. Fixing bugs is no where near as fun as adding new features, and we needed to stop adding features to let the code settle down. This left Amarok 2 missing some very useful features that Amarok 1.4 had. The good news is, many of these features have returned in 2.0.1

2.0.1 brings back searching in the playlist, as Nikolaj wrote here. Since then, Nikolaj has taken it a step further and added filtering as well as searching, which provides the opportunity to use it much as it was used in 1.4. Seb has also merged his support for queueing, another big feature that was missing in 2.0. In addition, "Stop after Current track" functionality is slowing making it's way back into svn. This is one of those features that is much more useful that it sounds and I've been missing it since it disappeared during 2.0 development.

In addition, media device support is improving. Alejandro has been making all sorts of improvements to ipod and mtp device support. We have plans to add support for generic media devices, and probably others as well. This is a great opportunity for new contributers, as this code is fairly self-contained and requires a device to use (and test) it. If anyone is interested in contributing to Amarok, this would be a great place to start.

I've re-added custom sorting to the collection browser as well. This is something that I don't use all that much, but it's nice to be able to change the sorting order in the collection. In addition, we've fixed somewhere between fifteen and twenty-five bugs already, and will probably fix more before 2.0.1 is officially released in a few weeks.

The other place my focus has been recently is on the windows version of Amarok. It's definitely usable now. I've fixed most of the annoying issues, and I can use it as my primary music player for local and remote music. I'll end this post with a screenshot of Amarok 2.0.1 on windows, and encourage you to try it!