Let's rejoice and celebrate: Amarok 2.6 is here! The Amarok Team is proud to present you the result of their work over the last 7 months.
With a reasonable set of new features, we focused this release on bug fixing and improving the overall stability, making this the most stable Amarok release ever. The new features are:
- A complete overhaul of the iPod, iPad and iPhone support including solid support for device playlists (however, underlying library, libgpod, still doesn't support iOS 5 devices completely)
- Transcoding for iPod-like and USB Mass Storage devices that complements transcoding for Local Collection
- The Free Music Chart service is now activated by default
- Embedded Cover support for Ogg and Flac files
- Album Art support for tracks on the filesystem and USB Mass Storage devices
- And of course numerous bug-fixes
It should be noted that unless you upgrade from 2.6 Beta or Release Candidate, a database update will run on first start. This procedure, that shouldn't be interrupted, can run up to a couple minutes on large collections with thousands of tracks.
Amarok now also includes a new Diagnostic Dialog in the Help menu, reporting versions of Amarok, Qt, KDE and Phonon libraries as well as the used Phonon backend and status of plugins and scripts. This is of great help when reporting problems. The Amarok developers have also refined their unit tests and we intensively use a continuous integration server which was of great help during the 12-week testing period.
Amarok 2.6.0 comes translated into 35 languages and more are being worked on for future releases. More than 110 reported bugs were fixed (40 alone were reported and fixed in the testing period) and more than 20 features were implemented in this version. A total of 640 bug reports were closed, of which most were duplicates.
Did you know? -> Amarok releases are usually named for Mike Oldfield (of "Amarok" fame) track names. We chose "In Dulci Jubilo" this time to celebrate Oldfield playing this in the thirtieth Olympiad opening ceremony. It can be found on the official Olympic soundtrack.
For an optimal sound experience we also recommend you use the new Phonon backends, released this weekend as well:
phonon-backend-vlc 0.6 or
phonon-backend-gstreamer 4.6.2.
We have the following download options available:
Update 2012-09-10: Windows installer available
