Monday, July 18, 2011

Amarok 2.4.2 Beta 1 "Nightshade" Released



This has been a busy spring and early summer in Amarok-land. Developers met up in Randa, Switzerland and sprinted with a lot of other KDE teams, including KDE Multimedia. Besides lots of good times, much coding progress and bugfixing was done too. You will immediately notice a new streamlined look, and some nice background graphics. The other big change is in dynamic playlists.
One we have been waiting for: 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: one 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. Good news for classical music listeners, you now have the option to scrobble the composer as artist in Last.fm, thanks to Nicholas Wilson.
We also have an updated dynamic playlist which 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, preventing duplicate tracks.
And of course we have quite a few bug-fixes, and changes under the skin. The changelog below gives a fairly complete overview of the changes in this beta release. Please help us test it and get it ready for prime-time.



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.
  • Added KNotify scripting interface. 
  • Make podcast episodes download filename configurable. Patch by Sandeep Raghuraman. 
  • 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

  • Don't let the album applet freeze Amarok for ages on track change. 
  • Fixed cover fetching from Google Images. 
  • Fixed a crash in the equalizer dialog when selecting "Off".
  • Fix finalization of track copy process to media device collections. 
  • Fixed crash on MusicBrainz search.
  • Avoid crash in ContextView when accessing Plasma::Applet::view(). 
  • Fixed playlist tooltip getting too tall for multiline comments. 
  • Made equalizer keywords (dB,kHz,...) translatable. 
  • Made equalizer preset names translatable. 
  • Fixed runtime error reporting of scripts. 
  • Fixed "Happy" moodbar theme. 
  • Fixed crash for invalid scripts trying to be stopped by the manager. 
  • Fixed collection menu items ordering. 
  • Fixed top level podcast location setting. 
  • Fixed double-clicking in collection using left-handed mouse setting.

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