Roktober 2011 - The Future of Amarok is Near

Here it is again: October in all of its glory! Beautiful Autumn for some, and Spring flowers Down Under. As we wind down 2011, the team continues to develop and Rok the World!

In the last twelve months, we have made more than 1900 commits, closed over 2120 bugs, released 3 new versions of Amarok, wrote a Amarok Handbook, attended conferences and had a big developer sprint in Switzerland along with much of the KDE Multimedia team. We mentored 2 successful Summer of Code projects and contributed to the Code-in Google organized to get high-schoolers introduced to Open Source projects.
For those using Windows we now offer a fully supported Windows version that can be downloaded from our wiki.

Some of the highlights we worked on in Amarok itself:

• New streamlined look, and some nice background graphics
• Complete re-write of the Dynamic Playlists
• Collection Scanner re-write
• Integration with the MusicBrainz music library to update your songs with accurate information
• OPML export for Podcast subscriptions
• Support for UPnP (Universal Plug and Play) collections; listen to music from UPnP servers on the local network
• New transcoding feature which converts one or more tracks with a chosen encoder when copying to the local collection
• New "Playdar Collection" allows searching for and listening to music provided by a running local Playdar service
• Drag and drop on Collections, to copy or move within Local Music, and also directly from the Playlist
• Classical music listeners have the option to scrobble the composer as artist to Last.fm
• a huge number of improvements to existing features!

For Amarok 2.5 (planned for November) and upcoming releases we have lined up:

• Improved implementation of the USB Mass Storage media device plugin with better performance, stability and code reuse of the tried and true Amarok collectionscanner.
• gpodder.net status synchronization which is the result of the recent Google Summer of Code project by Lucas Lira Gomes
• More bugfixes
• many more exciting features and improvements!

In order to keep Amarok going forward, we need your help. Costs such as server maintenance and travelling expenses are too much for the development team without some backing. Remember, everything we do, we do for free! And this is where you come in!
In the near future we are bringing Amarok to more devices near you. Teo Mrnjavac has prepared a refactor of our codebase to enable porting the core of Amarok to a new User Interface using Qt Quick. The results of this will be found standalone on MeeGo 1.2 Harmattan devices (better known as the Nokia N9) as Amarok Move and on along with Plasma active on a whole spectrum of form-factors, including tablets.
With your support we can deliver these ports faster and more polished, so be generous.

This year’s Roktober, our annual fundraiser, has a goal of 5000 Euros. Reaching this goal will help us handle this next busy year. The funds will help us develop more powerful features in Amarok, pay for our servers, and send team members to conferences; we may even run a developer sprint or two!

As a sign of our appreciation for your support we will add donors agreeing to it to a special section in Amarok’s About Dialog. Your name will then appear in each version of Amarok that gets released in the next 12 months.

If you agree to be listed in Amarok’s About Dialog as a supporter please send an email to roktober@getamarok.com after you donated with your name as it should appear there (and if you have one, your nickname on opendesktop.org). If you are sending this from a different email address than your donation please mention this as well.
Should you have any problems or questions please also email roktober@getamarok.com.

So join us, and throw in your share to Rok the World!
Here’s how to contribute:

In the left sidebar of this page you can see two donate buttons. The upper one is for donations via Paypal and the lower one is for donations via Google Checkout. Choose your preferred one and donate to support Amarok development. Thank you!

Amarok is part of the Software Freedom Conservancy, Inc., which is a 501(c)(3) non-profit based in NY, USA. Donations are often tax-deductible on the donor's USA taxes. If you want to donate via paper check in USD, you can send your check to:
Software Freedom Conservancy, Inc.
137 MONTAGUE ST STE 380
Brooklyn, NY 11201-3548
USA If you'd like to donate by wire transfer or other means, please contact <accounting@sfconservancy.org> for instructions.