Five months ago, the Amarok team started to work on what last night it transformed into Amarok 2.1, the next major version of the controversial audio player. Dubbed "Let There Be Light," Amarok 2.1 boasts a plethora of new and interesting features, as well as many improvements and bugfixes over previous releases. But first, let's see what the Amarok team has to say about the new release:

"When Amarok 2.0 was released, we celebrated the first of many steps along what will be a long series of Amarok 2.x releases. The 2.0 release brought with it an entirely new foundation to build on, and a developer team more motivated than ever to make Amarok 2 the best music player possible. While Amarok 2.0 contained many new features and ideas, it was also lacking many features that users of the previous, very successful, versions of Amarok had come to expect. With the release of Amarok 2.1 we are not only starting to close this gap, but we are also introducing a number of new and unique features that will make your music listening experience even better." - was stated in the official release announcement.

Therefore, let us introduce you guys to the main highlights of Amarok 2.1:

· The playlist received many improvements and it will now let you filter and search its content and even the queue files. Moreover, users can now stop the playback after a particular song. But this is not all, as the new design of the playlist will let users to customize it the way they like (a couple of layouts are also provided);
· Powered by the GStreamer Phonon backend, the ReplayGain support is now finished and fully supported;
· Phonon is also in charge of the sound configuration, which allows users to change the system's sound settings directly from Amarok, without the need to close it first;
· IPod users will now have support for album covers;
· The Context View was redesigned (now uses the free space better) and it will display the applets in a vertical column. Moreover, handling of applets works more reliably, the applets will be skinned with your KDE theme and they can be reorganized;
· Another cool feature is the ability to create URLs of various audio streams, be it a song found on Jamendo or an audio book found on LibriVox. The URLs can be sent to a friend and, upon clicking the link, Amarok will open and automatically connect to the respective service and play the stream;
· Hooray, hooray, bookmarking has finally arrived and it will allow users to mark a position in any track and resume playback later!
· The new revamped interface for Last.fm will allow users to play songs by artist, tag or user. Moreover, local songs can be marked as "loved";
· The collection browser will display cleaner headers;
· Last but not least, support for compilations was greatly improved.

As we've mentioned at the beginning of the article, there's also a huge list of bugfixes and many other small improvements. And, as the developers always promised, future versions of Amarok 2.1 will bring even more of your favorite features... so stay tuned!

Amarok 2 was released on the 10th of December, 2008, after more than two hard years of development. It is one of the best iTunes-like media players for GNU/Linux, Mac OS X and Windows systems.

The source code of Amarok 2.1.0 can be downloaded right now from Softpedia. We also provide an Amarok 2 scripts section, updated daily. Give them a try right now!