Spring is over and summer in full swing for most of the Amarok team, and we’re excited to give you Amarok 2.4.3. We’ve tweaked the visual design a bit, removing the status bar at the bottom, and replacing it with more focused notifications up top, or where they make most sense. You’ll also see some nice new visual effects in the layout as well.

Along with the work at the sprint in Randa, we’ve worked on the Dynamic Playlists, and some of the Internet Services. The new Dynamic Playlist should be easier to understand. Some of the functionality changes are: New AlbumPlay example playlist, a Quiz-play bias that will pick a song that starts with the same character the last one ended with, and preventing duplicate tracks. In the meantime our Google Summer of Code and Season of KDE students have been hard at work in git branches bringing Amarok Mobile to fruition, and new podcast integration with Gpodder.net.



You will notice that you can now drag and drop on Collections, to copy or move within Local Music, and also directly from the Playlist. We also got patches for various bugs and wishes: you can now configure the names of Podcast episodes, thanks to Sandeep Raghuraman, and automatic scrolling in the Lyrics applet is possible, thanks to Jan Gerrit Marker. Classical music listeners, you now have the option to scrobble the composer as artist to Last.fm, thanks to Nicholas Wilson.



Many other bugs have been fixed. One of note had a bounty attached to it, which has been paid to Amarok. Thanks to Damiön la Bagh for your community-minded donation, which will benefit all Amarok iPod users, and contribute to the support of our developers.



The changelog below gives a fairly complete overview of the changes in this and the previous beta release.



PS: You might wonder why this is 2.4.3 and not 2.4.2 instead. There were technical problems with what we wanted to release as 2.4.2 and we had to skip that version number. Doh!









Join us and rediscover your music!

Version 2.4.3

Bugfixes

Fix KWallet auth requests on every track change. (BR 278177)

Display correct values for pretty times (playlist length) longer than 1 day.

Update playlist length correctly after removing track. (BR 273407)

Fix seek backward from dbus. (Thanks to Matthieu Bedouet) (BR 263287)

Prevent dialog querying last.fm settings being displayed on startup if none set.

Fix detection of smartphones in USB storage mode. (BR 277685)

Fix crashes on expanding a newly cloned dynamic playlist (BR 277750)

Don't block the UI while calculating the filename previews. (BR 233196)

Make M3U and PLS playlist files editable from Saved Playlists. (BR 245963)

Version 2.4.2-Beta 1

Features

Made Amarok compile with the Clang LLVM frontend.

Enable drag and drop on collections to copy/move within Local Music and directly from the playlist. (BR 223400)

Added KNotify scripting interface. (BR 260750)

Make podcast episodes download filename configurable. Patch by Sandeep Raghuraman. (BR 155075)

Automatic scrolling in lyrics applet (Thanks to Jan Gerrit Marker)

Option to scrobble composer as artist to Last.fm (Thanks to Nicholas Wilson)

Option to hide the OSD if another window is taking the full screen

Changes

Again write back ratings only if option is selected.

Moved the queue-editor action to the main menu under playlist to save space. Queue editor now has a shortcut: Meta+U.

Removed the redo action from the playlist toolbar to make it less wide.

Made some playlist toolbar actions collapse into a menu button for use on small screens.

Removed the statusbar. Moved progress info & messages to the Media Sources dock.

Removed the preview button and checkbox from the organize collection dialog.

General user interface cleanup (addition of browser widget backgrounds, etc.)

Removed the add button in the context toolbar. Applet explorer is opened on config.

Easier to understand Dynamic playlists

Made Amarok depend ffmpeg-0.6 or newer.

Use KImageCache if possible (kdelibs 4.5.0 and later), which should reduce the number of cache-related crashes.

Bugfixes