





Another year has passed and the Amarok team wants to celebrate with its fans: it's Roktober again! This is the time of the year when we review what we have achieved during the past year and call for your help for the coming year. Your donations of time and money make it possible to create the awesome music player you love so much. Our aim for this Roktober is to raise €10.000. Our budget is aggressive, but as costs go up, and our plans get more complex, we have to raise the goal. As in past years, for every €10 donated, you will receive one entry in the drawing for an iaudio7. This year we have two grand prizes and we will also give t-shirts to 4 second chance winners.As always, you can donate viato donations@getamarok.com . We are working on creating a way to receive direct bank transfers and hope to have information on that early next week. If you would prefer to send a check, please email greg@getamarok.com for instructions and a mailing address.During the last year we had several maintenance releases of Amarok 1.4.x "Fast Forward", but the really interesting stuff happened on the bleeding edge development front. Amarok 2 made it to beta and a final release is getting closer. There is a lot of exciting stuff to discover in the new Amarok: biased and fuzzy playlists, integration of internet services like magnatune, Jamendo or LibriVox, the new playlist, a reworked context view and a lot more. Thanks to Google, several of these improvements were made as part of Google's Summer of Code program, which brought several highly motivated students to our team. At this point many distributions already provide regular packaged snapshots so if you can, check us out when Beta2 is released next week.We were also more active than ever in promoting Amarok. For the first time in Amarok history we had a (well visited) booth at the world's largest IT expo, CeBIT in Hannover, Germany. We were also at LinuxTag in Berlin and several others. All in all, we participated at not less than ten events, giving talks and presenting Amarok at booths wherever possible. Oh, and we have been chosen as music management application on the EeePC which led to a trip to Taiwan for two Amarok developers So, as you can see we were very busy and worked hard to help people around the world to rediscover their music. We spent every cent from last year's fund drive to work in our free time on Amarok. Thank you for your great support to make that possible!