The Amarok team is proud to announce the immediate availability of the result of 5 months of hard work, the beta release of Amarok 2.8. This release is marked by improvements, corrections and polishing of nearly all Amarok features with over 460 commits since Amarok 2.7. Everybody is encouraged to test this beta release thoroughly so that we can release rock-solid Amarok 2.8 final.

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

The MusicBrainz tagger was significantly improved.

Amarok is now power-management aware with a pair of new options in the configuration.

The Audio analyzer visualisation is back: the widget is configurable by right click on it and it sits prominently under the Current Track widget.

The GUI layout can now be reset to default, so no more shuffling elements around if you want to go back to the original view.

Local Collection and Collection Browser were fixed to update correctly when tracks are changed or removed.

The Nepomuk Collection was improved to query the Nepomuk database dynamically.

Other new features: Opus codec support (with transcoding, needs recent TagLib), more keyboard shortcuts, ASX playlist support, improved file browser, better feedback for unplayable tracks, Last.fm integration improvements and much more.

The number of bugfixes is equally impressive: we closed over 400 reports of which more than 80 are bug fixes. Also 22 wishes were granted, some of which are to be found as new features. A couple of other changes have been done, for example behavior when (double-)clicking on tracks in various places has been tweaked slightly, splash screen has been removed and Album Artist level replaces Track Artist one by default in the Collection Browser.

Many of these changes were only possible with the help of students who were applying for Google Summer of Code and showed us their coding skills by fixing bugs. The final release notes will feature their names more prominently.

We're also happy to announce the return of Amarok's founder Mark Kretschmann who got back to Amarok coding after a two year hiatus. Many of the polishes in the GUI are his doing, we are happy to have him back. :)

With all those changes we count on you, dear users, to help us polishing the final release and test the new features and changes. Full ChangeLog will be published in the final release or is available in the source code.

See full article for download options. More of them can be added later.