14 DAY TRIAL // Looking forward for a new, clean and bug-fixed version of your favorite Amarok player? Look no more. It is here now. The latest release of the 1.4 series has been announced at the well-known Linux Tag festival which took place in Berlin.
Among the numerous bug-fixes, this release also enjoys some other changes and added enhancements. For example a thing which I found very useful for the script authors would be the fact that the playlist is now able to send notifications to scripts if items are added, removed, reordered, or if the playlist is cleared and since we're talking about playlist I could also mention here a faster playlist handling. SQLite has been upgraded to 3.3.17. The lyrics scripts are now allowed to specify site, site_url and add_url from within the script. This will allow for "meta lyrics" scripts.
Highlights:
- new icon set, featuring KDE4 Oxygen colors (for 2.0 it is estimated that Amarok will have a complete Oxygen icon set) - default database backend is a lot faster due to a new SQLite version - introducing rockbox support for iPod - performance tuning - first rating star now lets you toggle between no rating, half a star and one full star - fix Quadratic loading in Playlists - fix detection of vfat devices on FreeBSD - Last.fm "Custom Station" stream works again
The Amarok team of developers proposes taking into consideration a forthcoming 2.0 version which should correspond as much as possible to the users' preferences. Therefore they've started a survey, which you can take here. I must say that this survey targets mainly the Mac and Windows users.
As the Amarok developers are always interested in a productive week hacking on exciting new Amarok features you can be sure you'll meet them at the aKademy annual meeting of the KDE community which will be held in the Department of Computer & Information Sciences at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, Scotland.