After the bug fixing goodness of Amarok 2.0.2, it is time to crank up the coolness factor by a few orders of magnitude. Deep in our hidden lair we have been hard at work plotting world domination - and occasionally working on the next major version of Amarok - and we are now ready to let the rest of the world have a taste with the release of Amarok 2.1 beta1.

Amarok 2.1 will come with many new features and some old favorites will make a re-appearance. Beta 1 gives you a sneak preview of all these improvements. While not quite ready for general use yet, the stability is quite good and overall the beta should be quite usable in most cases (standard "may eat your cat, spouse, favorite cupcake or pet iguana" warnings do apply however).

Major new features include a new, completely user configurable playlist with an easy to use drag-and-drop editor, cue sheet support, a new take on managing applets in the Context View, bookmarks - allowing you, among other things, to save and share favorite finds in the services, support for showing radio stations with many alternate streams as one track in the playlist, much faster startup when reloading large playlists containing non local tracks, as well as many other improvements, UI tweaks and bug fixes across the board. So download, test drive and cuddle this beta a little, provide feedback and bug reports and help us make Amarok 2.1 the best Amarok release ever.

Features

The collection scanner is now able to be run in batch mode, allowing for automated scans of both full and incremental types. In addition, all graphical dependencies have been removed, allowing for headless, remote runs of collection scans. A wiki page detailing how to do this will be made available shortly.

Covers are shown and written for iPod collections.

Phonon multimedia system can be configured directly from Amarok.

Cover art can now be disabled in the collection browser.

Scrobble tracks from streams that have title and artist metadata

Add support for showing a stream with multiple alternative servers as a single item in the playlist and add GUI for manually selecting prefered source.

Ampache service: Add support for Ampache 3.4.4 and 3.5.x.

Auto timecoding (position bookmarking) now exists for tracks with length greater than 10 minutes. (BR 148740)

Add a animated "loading..." screen when dynamically fetching info about an item to show in the service info applet.

Deleting tracks from the local collection is now possible. (BR 170999)

Add a filter-by-date-added to the collection browser. Use added:"today" or added:

Add an advanced but user friendly playlist layout editor allowing users to modify and create their own playlist layouts.

The Playlist can now render itself using layouts defined in XML. A number of default layouts are included and can be switched between.

Option to automatically scroll the playlist to the active item on track change.

New QtScript methods for accessing the playlist: Amarok.Playlist.selectedFilenames() & Amarok.Playlist.selectedIndexes(). Patch by Mathias Panzenböck .

New QtScript method for the Track prototype: imagePixmap( size ). Returns a QPixmap of the given size, or the default if the size argument isn't supplied.

New QtScript class 'DataDownloader' that returns results as a QByteArray instead of a string. Needed for image downloads.

Cue Sheets are now supported as in Amarok 1.4, plus each cue entry (usually a track) will be displayed as a timecode on the Progress Bar with a nice onMouseOver popup.

Ipod support now uses/depends on libgpod 0.7.0

Bookmarking specific positions within local tracks and downloaded local podcast episodes, with a nice visual indicator on the progress bar.

When the last.fm service is active, any track, from any collection or service, can be loved from the browser , and there will always be a love button for the currently playing track, no matter the source.

Dbus methods added: VolumeUp, VolumeDown and Mute. (BR 181130)

The feed url is displayed in the config dialog of a podcast channel. By left clicking in the url it's copied to the clipboard. (BR 180853)

The Playlist Browser can now show playlists from multiple sources, including media devices.

The Last.fm service now allows for the playing of all types of user stations (personal, loved tracks, recommendations, and neighborhood).

Arbitrary Tags can now be played in the last.fm service. (BR 139802)

Replay Gain support for most file formats that Amarok can read tags from. Reading Replay Gain tags from MP4 files requires libMP4v2. Musepack (MPC) files are unsupported due to a limitation of TagLib.

Bookmark Manager applet allowing for the creation, browsing, ordering and deletion of Amarok urls of different kinds. (BR 173512)

Amarok urls. Amarok can now load and generate "amarok urls" that allows any "view" to be bookmarked and later retrieved. A protocol handler is also installed that will launch amarok into the correct state, or make amarok show the correct view, if already running, when such a url is activated system wide.

Customizable playlist layouts. The playlist is now rendered according to an xml layout, allowing the playlist to assume a variety of different looks and supply customizable information.

Album cover art can be accessed via the scripting API. Patch thanks to Simon Esneault . (BR 179732)

New vertical Context View layout.

New applet toolbar in the Context View to arrange, select, and add applets.

Changes

New splash screen by Wade Olson .

Magnatune.com store: When downloading albums (either by purchasing or free membership downloads) remember the file format and download location for next time.

Links in the lyrics applet are now clickable and open with the default external web browser (BR 179396)

Collection browser has been pimped.

Bring back animations in the browsers if Qt 4.5 or later is detected.

The collection scanner is now being provided in a separate package.

The TagLib plugins formerly provided by Amarok are now being provided in a separate package. It should be available in most distributions as taglib-extras.

Improvements to playlist searching and filtering. No longer reset view to the top when clearing a search term. No longer scroll into the results when the "show only matches" option is set.

Improved implementation of volume muting. Mute state doesn't change volume level any more. (BR 172392)

Remove score, last played and play count from the current track applet for tracks that does not have any of them (mainly streams).

Don't pretend to be able to seek if the source isn't seekable.

File Browser UI has been tweaked for better usability.

The Bookmark Handler in the File Browser no longer causes a crash-on-exit, so it has been re-enabled. (BR 173634)

Performance optimisation when loading large playlists, and hence faster application startup.

Many small visual tweaks for greater consistency and better use of screen space.

Increased width of volume slider for greater precision.

Use the speex, trueaudio and wavpack support in TagLib 1.5, rather than our own plugins.

Double click on a podcast channel appends all episodes to the playlist.

Delete and download actions will only be shown when relevant to the selected podcast episode.

Major refactoring of the podcast model and view to allow custom actions per podcasts source.

Compilation fixed for OpenSolaris.

Show the cover menu when right clicking on artwork in the Tag Dialog.

Don't remove queued tracks from the playlist when repopulating dynamic playlists.

Major last.fm UI overhaul.

Progress indicator on system tray icon is back.

Now using KSystemTrayIcon.

QtScript: Importer.loadQtBinding returns a true or false depending on success.

Bugfixes

The full ChangeLog since 2.0.2 is about a mile long and follows below: