After months in the pipes, all tickets scheduled for the 0.19 release were completed!

We'll soon be able to release the 0.19, with all its great features, including:

Ability to suggest/review modifications on artist, albums and tracks pages

Admin UI to browse, search, review and delete artists, albums, tracks, libraries and uploads

A new "filter" feature to completely hide some artists in the UI, queue and radios

Support for OAuth2 authorization workflow

Dynamic page title to reflect the currently playing track

Improved error handling and display during import

Support for embedding a complete artist discography

Support for S3-compatible external storages

A dedicated "albums" tab to browse… albums

Prefetching of next track in queue, to reduce the time spent waiting for buffering

And many, many, many more bugfixes and enhancements! Check out the complete changelog here: https://dev.funkwhale.audio/funkwhale/funkwhale/tags/0.19.0-rc1

A release candidate to improve the quality of the final release

It's the first time we're doing that, so it's worth an explanation ;) Basically, the idea is to battle-test the current version of the software before releasing the official 0.19, to have fewer bugs to fix after the release and improve its overall quality.

How can you try the release candidate?

It should be as simple as following the upgrade instructions but using FUNKWHALE_VERSION=0.19.0-rc1 instead of FUNKWHALE_VERSION=0.18.X or FUNKWHALE_VERSION=develop (if you're running from develop).

Feel free to ask for guidance here if you have any issue!

What to test?

Ideally, you should use this release candidate as you would normally use Funkwhale, and report any issue you encounter using usual channels, so we can fix those before the actual 0.19 release.

We're especially looking for:

regressions (previously working features that are broken or not working as intended)

bugs in new features (OAuth support, S3, new admin UI, etc.)

When will the actual release happen?

We'll leave at least 14 days between the first release candidate and the official release. This will give enough time to everyone to spot critical issues, and plenty of time to translators to work on the new translations.

Depending on the feedback and bugs, we may extend this period, but otherwise, you can expect a release around May 16th.

Thank you for your help!