Amarok 'Fast Forward' 1.4.5

The Amarok team is proud to announce the sixth release of the successful 'Fast Forward' series.

• An integrated Shoutcast stream directory.
• Support for custom labels. Organize your music how you want.
• Magnatune redownload manager
• Improved sound quality when using the equalizer with xine.

There are also many improvements in the GUI which make Amarok more sexy and usable than ever. See Amarok Weekly News #6 for more details on the 1.4.5 release.

1.4.5 is last release of the 1.4 Fast Forward that will have new features. Amarok 2.0 development, based on Qt4/KDE4, has already started. Exciting times for the Amarok project - the 2.0 release (perhaps as soon as this summer) will run natively on Linux, OS X and Windows!

We are also going to have a Wiki Cleanup Weekend on Feburary 10th and 11th to bring our documentation up to date. Everyone is invited to join the efforts and rediscover our wiki in #rokymotion on irc.freenode.net.

You also have the chance to meet some members of the Amarok team at the KDE booth at FOSDEM from 24th to 25th February in Brussels.

The full technical ChangeLog follows.

Version 1.4.5

Features

• Added support for custom song labels. Labels can be managed through the GUI or using new DCOP functions. (BR 89314)
• New DCOP functions to make it easier for scripts to use Amarok's Dynamic Collection feature.
• Download songs from Shared Music (DAAP) directly into the collection.
• Fadeout for Helix engine when pressing Stop.
• Guided editing of the collection/playlist/devices filters. Patch by Giovanni Venturi. (BR 139292)
• Added GUI options for fadeout and fadeout on exit. Both are now enabled by default.
• Support for Speex (.spx), WavPack (.wv) and TrueAudio (.tta) files in the collection thanks to taglib plugins by Luká? Lalinský .
• Search inside of lyrics, by using "/" on Context Browser. Patch by Carles Pina i Estany. (BR 139210)
• "Automatically show context browser" feature makes a return, as per popular request. It is however disabled by default.
• Improved keyboard navigation: Space key is now a shortcut for Play/Pause, and cursor left/right seeks forward/backward.
• Cover images are shown in collection browser. Patch by Trever Fischer . (BR 91044)
• Send cover art to MTP media devices if they support it.
• Elapsed time can be shown in OSD. Patch by Christian Engels . (BR 120051)
• New redownload manager for the Magnatune.com store. Allows re-download of any previous purchase free of charge (in any format).
• New items in the playlist are colorized, as a visual cue.
• Show rating as stars in flat collection view. Patch by Daniel Faust . (BR 133797)
• Synchronize play count, last played time and date of modification to iPods. Patch by Michael. (BR 136759)
• Propose list of composers in collection when editing the composer tag from the playlist. (BR 137775)
• Greatly improved sound quality for the xine equalizer. Patch by Tobias Knieper. (BR 127307)
• Fancy graphical volume slider for the OSD. Patch by Alexander Bechikov . .
• Support for %composer and %genre when guessing tags from filenames.
• Cached lyrics are now AFT-enabled, and will follow your files around as you move and rename them.

Changes

• Added configure option to build without DAAP support.
• Album covers are now downloaded and added to album directory when purchasing from the Magnatune.com store. (BR 136680)
• Update context browser when a change in the collection has been detected. (BR 140588)
• Ignore leading 'The ' when sorting playlist by artist. (BR 139829)
• Smart Playlists now have 'does not start with' and 'does not end with' options, as well as a dropdown for mount points. (BR 139552)
• Support for cue files not matching audio files' name. Patch by Dawid Wróbel. (BR 128046)
• Script Manager now remembers if categories were open or closed.
• Restart collection scanner as long as not more than 5 % of the files make it crash. (BR 106474)
• Ensure the first selected item in the Collection Browser stays visible when the search field is cleared using the clear button.
• Duplicate filenames are now allowed on MTP media devices if the files are in different folders.
• Save media device transfer queue when adding items or after transfers. (BR 138885)
• Upgraded internal SQLite to 3.3.12.
• MTP media devices are not automatically connected on start-up. This should solve slow loading times for those with large collections on an MTP media device. Contributed by Mikko Seppälä. (BR 138409)
• Internationalize unknown artist/album/genre strings. Contributed by Mikko Seppälä. (BR 138409)
• Don't assume that a device returning 0 tracks is invalid. It could just have no tracks on. Contributed by Mikko Seppälä. (BR 138409)
• Magnatune store look now matches rest of Amarok much better.
• Album art is displayed on the Magnatune purchase dialog.
• Generic media device now has an option to force VFAT-safe filenames even on non-VFAT filesystems.
• Double-clicked items in sidebar and urls passed on the command line are treated equally: append them to playlist if not yet there and start playing the first if nothing is playing.
• "Scan Changes" button was replaced with "Update Collection" menu entry.
• Consistent double-click behavior in sidebar. (BR 138125)
• Propose name of currently loaded playlist when saving current one.
• Remove support for older libmtp versions. We now require 0.0.15 or newer.
• Deleting a playlist item on an MTP media device now results in it being removed from the playlist.
• Magnatune store is lazy loaded to improve startup times.
• Dynamic mode logic has been rethought to provide a faster and better user experience.
• When checking for duplicate files on a Rio Karma media device, use track number in addition to artist, album & title. (BR 137152)
• The XMMS visualization interface has been removed. LibVisual supersedes this feature.
• It is now possible to select the time unit for length-based smart playlists. (BR 136841)
• Show shadowed cover images in the system tray tooltip. (BR 136589)
• Amarok won't crossfade if it was paused, and user started another track. Patch by Tuomas Nurmi. (BR 136428)
• Amarok now saves playlists with relative paths by default.

Bugfixes

• Disable seeking in streams. (BR 140364)
• With the default theme, the playlist browser info pane would not show the horizontal scrollbar if necessary. (BR 134221)
• Some .rm files would make Amarok crash. (BR 137695)
• Remember 'User Cover Art for Folder Icons' when organizing files. (BR 138582)
• "Listening since..." has been changed to the more clear "First Played..." Patch by Andrew Ash. (BR 131727)
• Fixed regression: the DEL key no longer worked in the playlist after opening the File Browser context menu. (BR 140197)
• Smart playlists now work correctly with "is not" filters containing numbers. Patch by Felix Rotthowe.
• Context browser would not display updated covers correctly. (BR 130518)
• The select custom cover dialog no longer starts in the wrong directory for compilations. (BR 131776)
• Amarok's xine engine would cut off approximately the last second of an audio file. (BR 135190)
• Cue sheet would remain enabled when switching to a stream. Patch by Ted Percival. (BR 127683)
• Length of tracks wouldn't be shown correctly for some cue files. Patch by Dawid Wróbel (BR 139707)
• Assume that all dots but the last in script executable files belong to the script name. (BR 139460)
• Don't crash when quitting while initially loading the playlist. (BR 136353)
• The same track could be queued multiple times for transferring to a media device. (BR 129136)
• Migrate statistics for files moved from outside to the collection. (BR 127776)
• Select All/Copy action would not copy from context browser. (BR 138635)
• Xine-engine: When a track was fading out (after pressing Stop), and you started another track, Amarok could become unresponsive.
• Improved seeking with xine-engine. No longer jumps to 0 when you seek too quickly. Patch by Alexander Bechikov. (BR 99808)
• Improved cover images handling for Various Artists. Patch by Tobias Knieper. (BR 136833)
• Don't enable a mount point for devices that can't support them (mtp, njb).
• With SQLite, the search in the collection browser was case-sensitive with UTF-8. Patch by Stanislav Nikolov. (BR 138482)
• (Don't) Show Under Various Artists would not work when multiple albums are selected. Patch by Tobias Knieper. (BR 112422)
• Changed temp download location for Magnatune purchases. (BR 137912)
• Fixed potential double payment issues in the Magnatune store.
• Only synchronize already set values to media devices. (BR 138150)
• Correctly update total playlist play time when removing last.fm streams. Patch by Modestas Vainius. (BR 134333)
• File organization jobs could not be canceled. Patch by Wenli Liu . (BR 136527)
• Sending filenames to MTP media devices as UTF-8 caused problems, use Latin-1 instead.
• It's now possible to delete a file from an MTP media device and re-upload it without having to reconnect the device.
• Wikipedia links to edit sections are no longer shown.
• Metadata is read from Rio Karma media devices as UTF-8.
• Last.fm streams could be paused with DCOP or global shortcuts. (BR 133013)
• Dynamic mode can still be used after a collection rescan. (BR 133269)
• Dynamic mode will repopulate from all available sources. (BR 137212)
• Dynamic mode no longer repeats songs often. (BR 107693)
• When transferring files to a Generic media device, having certain characters (such as '#') in a tag field could cause a directory based on that field to not be created.
• Editing lyrics from within the context browser no longer removes all linebreaks.
• Read metadata from MTP media devices as UTF-8.
• Some shoutcast streams would show an empty title. (BR 127741)
• Pause would act as Play/Pause. (BR 116101)
• The same track would sometimes be shown twice in suggested songs. (BR 129395)
• Detect VFAT partitioned devices on FreeBSD. Patch by Daniel O'Connor.
• Favorite Tracks wouldn't be shown on Context Browser, and Statistics Panel would be empty for SQLite users. (BR 136791)
• Volume slider in the player window would not react correctly to the mouse wheel. (BR 136714)
• When using a proxy set by script, context browser wouldn't work properly, and the application would crash when closing. (BR 112437)
• Proxy settings wouldn't be respected when downloading podcast episodes. (BR 134028)
• Xine engine could hang when skipping through tracks quickly with crossfade on.
• Fix crash when an MTP media device returned a playlist with an invalid track ID. (BR 136552)
• The Install MP3 support script would be run regardless of what the user answered to the shown dialog. (BR 136294)
• OSD wouldn't always show up-to-date ratings. Patch by Tuomas Nurmi . (BR 125612)

Release image (C)2005 by Mickal, used under the Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 license.