Roktober 2012

Amarok is ten years old!

Enthusiasm is growing among the Amarok team as we plan the road ahead, and hack away at bugs here at the sprint in Randa, Switzerland. We are so happy to see Roktober arrive, and we connect to our users, show what we have produced in the last year, and look ahead to a bright future.

In the last twelve months, we have made some 1149 commits, closed over 1030 bugs, released 2 new major versions of Amarok, updated the Amarok Handbook, attended conferences and had a big developer sprint in Switzerland along with much of the KDE Multimedia team. We mentored 5 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.

Past year in Amarok

We've participated in the Google Summer of Code program for the 5th time.
5 students worked hard and passed GSoC's final evaluation. The projects were:

• Mat?j Laitl's statistics synchronization.
• Lucas Lira Gomes's integration of Tomahawk social features.
• Zhengliang "Ryan" Feng's integrate Spotify into Amarok
• Riccardo Iaconelli's "Amarok will shine like new", an exploration of QML usage in the context view.
• Phalgun Guduthur's "Semantic desktop collection in Amarok", finally bringing nepomuk and Amarok together.

We've released 2 major versions. Amarok 2.5 "Earth Moving" and 2.6 "In Dulci Jubilo". Both received many comments regarding their excellent quality. We will strive to bring more of such vintage in the next releases of Amarok 2 in the near future

Help us create Amarok 3!

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. And this year, we'd like to do a big, funded push to get Amarok 3 ready to go. Some of our developers are willing to work one day per week at rock-bottom prices, and we would love to make that possible. So this year, we are setting a much larger goal than we have ever in the past, and are also cutting some other expenses such as our server costs. Remember, aside from this sprint to the future, everything we do, we do for free. And this is where you come in!

Amarok 3's focus is on the desktop. The vision text from the Randa 2012 meetings is our guiding principle for the work we'll be doing from now till February 2013.
We will present our results, a preview of Amarok 3, at FOSDEM 2013 in Brussels on February 2 & 3.

This year’s Roktober, our annual fundraiser, has a goal of $15000 US. 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 also are planning an intensive week-long developer sprint in February. Our "one day per week" funding will be used to lay the groundword for making that sprint uber-productive, so you, the user will see the progress no matter where you use Amarok.

The roadmap to Amarok 3 has been made public. The currently active development team has made estimates for how long a specific task will take and have committed some of their free-time to completing them.
You can dramatically increase the development pace by donating because we'll use any funds over $5000 to fund development on Amarok for up to one day a week. Combined with our free-time efforts this would give a 3-fold bang for each 1 buck donated!

Be part of the next Amarok release!

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 about donating please also email roktober@getamarok.com.

So join us, and throw in your share to Rok the World!
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.