It's the wonderful month of August and the Amarok Team is back with a very strong release. Amarok 2.8 is titled "Return To The Origin" as we are bringing back the polish that many users loved from the original 1.x series! The new Amarok is more fun to use, it's rock solid, and it has exciting new features.

This is also the release that sees the return of the project founder, Mark Kretschmann, and together our reunited team has created the best Amarok version yet. These are some of the highlights:

A fancy audio analyzer visualization applet

Smooth fade-out when pausing music

Many UI improvements and visual tweaks including better support for alternate color themes

Significantly enhanced MusicBrainz tagger

Power management awareness with a pair of new configuration options

Performance optimizations and responsiveness tuning all over Amarok

This release also features the first code contributions by our current Google Summer of Code students: please welcome Anmol Ahuja, Konrad Zemek and Tatjana Gornak. Our release manager Matěj Laitl takes part in GSoC as well.

Many more candidates have applied for GSoC internships, sadly we were not able to accept them all. But our thanks go to Vedant Agarwala who has contributed a lot of patches and continues to improve Amarok.

Outside the GSoC applications we also welcome new contributions by Harsh Gupta, Martin Brodbeck and Alberto Villa. In addition, Nick Adams has done a lot of work updating the Handbook. Thanks a lot, guys!

See full article for download options and a full change log.

List of All Important Changes

Features

Tracks from Recently Played List widget can now directly be added to the playlist. (BR 279263, BR 296090)

Before 2.8 Beta:

Ctrl+C copies the currently playing artist & title to the clipboard. (BR 228872) Patch by fleissig fleissig.

Volume fade-out is now also available for pause.

The Files browser now has a Refresh button. (BR 213666)

The active playlist item is animated with a soft glow effect.

Added an audio analyzer visualization applet.

Added a function for resetting the GUI layout back to default state. (BR 300753)

Pressing enter when searching collections now adds found tracks to the playlist and clears the search bar, this is a very convenient way to populate your playlist.

Allow to transcode only certain (different format, playability) tracks when transferring them to a collection; patch by Anmol Ahuja. (BR 312407)

On-Screen-Display fades in/out smoothly.

Added support for .asx playlists; patch by Tatjana Gornak. (BR 170207)

Add Radio GFM radio streams to Cool Stream Script. (BR 317978)

Added options to pause playback on system suspend and to inhibit automatic suspend if playing a track (enabled by default); patch by Anmol Ahuja. (BR 259862) (BR 222571)

Playlist files are now read asynchronously when possible; patch and great deal of refactoring by Tatjana Gornak. (BR 291934)

Added support to filter tracks to scrobble to Last.fm by label. Patch by Vedant Agarwala. (BR 140198)

Added transcoding support for Opus codec if ffmpeg is compiled with support for the libopus library, patch by Martin Brodbeck.

Added keyboard shortcuts for small 2 s seeks (Ctrl + Left/Right) and long 1 minute seeks (Shift + Left/Right) in addition to standard 10 s seeks. Durations are now configurable in amarokrc, see Amarok Handbook. Patch by Anmol Ahuja. (BR 177258)

Added support for files in Opus codec if Amarok is compiled against recent enough TagLib (post 1.8), patch by Martin Brodbeck. (BR 312905)

Added Ctrl+H shortcut to randomize playlist, patch by Harsh Gupta. (BR 208061)

Changes

The Jamendo service now uses a higher quality MP3 format instead of Ogg Vorbis.

Added an option whether adding tracks to playlist should start playing. (BR 322428)

Amarok now depends on Qt 4.8.3.

Amarok now uses FindFFMpeg.cmake from kdelibs

Before 2.8 Beta:

Removed LikeBack (a development feature in debug builds). (BR 312498) (BR 252323)

Collection Browser: Artist level was renamed to Track Artist and replaced by Album Artist by default. Various Artists item is no longer shown under Track Artist level.

Removed the splash screen.

Playlist-related actions were harmonized, double-clicking or pressing enter will append tracks to playlist, using any "play media" action or middle-clicking will prepend tracks to queue and immediately start playing. (BR 145468, BR 145490, BR 194549)

When a new collection plugin is enabled, its collections appear immediately without a need for restart.

Update the MusicBrainz tagger to MusicBrainz web service 2, make it show some more good suggestions for tagging, and add some options to help choosing the best results.

Add note about generating .mood files into Moodbar Options; patch by Harsh Gupta with tweaks by Matěj Laitl. (BR 289483)

Amarok now depends on Qt 4.8.2.

Add prepareToQuit() signal to Amarok.Window script bindings; patch by Anmol Ahuja. (BR 241066)

Data CDs are now recognized in Amarok; patch by Anmol Ahuja. (BR 316128)

On-Screen-Display now uses the system font instead of hardcoded sans-serif. (BR 248707)

Fancy behavior of some context menus showing different actions when Shift key is held has been reverted. All entries are now shown all the time.

The dynamic playlist behavior has changed. It will no longer generate "pretty good" playlists that do not fulfill the given biases. Instead it might add no song at all if given impossible-to-fulfill conditions.

The "tracks have been hidden in the playlist" warning when filtering the playlist is now displayed inside the playlist. (BR 260352)

Update tag widget for Layout edit, filter edit, organize collection and guess tag dialog.

When fadeout and/or Replay Gain isn't possible, gray-out related UI elements in order not to fool users.

Bugfixes