14 DAY TRIAL // Lydia Pintscher announced yesterday the release of the much-anticipated Amarok 2.2 music player for the K Desktop Environment. Dubbed "Sunjammer," this version has a completely cleaned-up user interface, Playlist manager enhancements and fixes, a better Context View layout, faster music folder scanning and improved import capabilities, and even Dynamic Playlists that can better predict the music that you would want to hear.
"Many weeks have passed since our last version, and so many changes and improvements have found their way into version 2.2. Over all, the team is quite proud of all the improvements and was lucky to be able to plan and coordinate those in two developer sprints, one in Berlin and one during the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit, made possible by your support for Amarok and KDE. To put this into perspective: In the last three and a half months we closed 654 bugs, made close to 2200 commits to the code, of which more than a hundred were made in the first 24 hours after the release of version 2.1.1. The code statistics show that we changed a total of 1935 files, wrote 101693 new lines, and removed 73774 obsolete lines of code." - Lydia Pintscher says in the official release announcement.
The user interface has seen important improvements, with the Browser Pane moved on the left side of the window and with "bread crumbs"-styled navigation helpers on top. By using Qt4's widget functionality, almost every visual element of the window, including the Browser Pane, the Context View and the Playlist, is dockable and can be placed in any position or layout. They can even be stacked or, if you have no use for them, completely removed.
Development-wise, the makers of Amarok want to focus on improving the 2.2 series rather than adding major new features to it. In light of this decision, they plan to release a new version of Amarok approximately every six weeks, delivering bug fixes and a limited amount of new features.
Download Amarok 2.2 right now from Softpedia.