The Amarok team is proud to announce the immediate availability of the result of 2 years of hard work, the beta release of Amarok 2.9. This release is marked by improvements, corrections and polishing of nearly all Amarok features. Everybody is encouraged to test this beta release thoroughly so that we can release rock-solid Amarok 2.9 final. While this version has been thoroughly tested on our systems, we welcome additional tests by our users, as we simply can't cover all possible use-cases.

We still have two blocker bugs, a major one which sends Amarok into a loop:

and a regression:

We welcome help fixing these bugs so we can do a 2.9 release. This will be the last Qt4/KDE4.x based release, as new work porting Amarok to Qt5 and Plasma5 is waiting in the wings!

Some of the reworked areas that that you should try out and test:

a new collection version, make sure to not interrupt an eventual rescan

new statistics synchronization between Amarok collections and Amarok 1.4, Amarok 2.x, Clementine, Banshee, Rythmbox and Apple iTunes

new ASCII analyzer option in the analyzer widget

and many more. Plus, multiple bugfixes! The complete ChangeLog can be found in the source code here: ChangeLog.