Download Amarok 2.4

The developers behind Amarok have released version 2.4. This audio player features extensive options for playing and organizing music. It is primarily developed for KDE, but there are also versions for Mac OS X and Windows, but they are not at the same development level. Version 2.4 brings significant performance, usability and stability improvements, among other things. For example, most problems with the context pane have been solved, there is a completely rewritten collection scanner and there is integration with MusicBrainz. The complete announcement of this release can be found below.

Amarok 2.4 “Slipstream” Released

It’s been a busy end of year for the Amarok developers, as the seasons bring the chilling winds of winter for some and the searing suns of the summer to others. Most of the big development branches have been merged, and a lot of new features were implemented. A major version is always a big step forward and it is with pride that we are here to bring you the release of Amarok 2.4, codename: Slipstream.

This release brings significant performance, usability, and stability improvements: Most of the bugs involving the context pane have been squished, a completely rewritten collection scanner is presented (hint: it’s the thing that reads your music files’ tags) — Amarok now has the ability to write your statistics and covers directly to the audio files to keep the information across different devices and should detect compilations a lot better. At long last, we also have an option to hide the menu bar again.

Speaking of tags, there’s a new feature to work along with the rewritten collection scanner: Integration with the MusicBrainz music library to update your songs with accurate information. Having a well organized collection is easier than ever, now that you can select what you want tagged and do it with two clicks. We unfortunately had to remove the Playdar collection again that we added in beta 1. We hope to be able to add it back again as soon as we made a few changes to it.

Other notable features that have been added in this release, include:

• The ability to use iPod Touch 3G and possibly newer devices.
• Transcoding: Now Amarok allows you to convert tracks from one file format to another when copying from the file browser to the local collection. We will expand this to media devices in future releases.
• A new applet that fetches guitar and bass tab information for all your string instrument needs.
• OPML export for Podcast subscriptions.
• A map and calendar view for the upcoming events applet
• Support for UPnP (Universal Plug and Play) collections, you can now listen to music from UPnP servers on the local network.

Along with many more features, improvements and innumerable bug fixes. As always, it’s good to have a look at the complete Changelog since Amarok 2.3.2 below to make sure you’re not missing anything of interest.

Amarok 2.4 screenshot, click on the image for a larger version.