Jan 17, 2011 11:49 GMT  ·  By

Amarok 2.4.0 has finally landed, after many months of development. It's been close to a year from the previous major Amarok release and there are plenty of things to like in the fresh Amarok 2.4.0 "Slipstream."

Along with the expected performance improvements and bug fixes, new features like transcoding support, a brand new collection scanner, support for the iPod Touch 3G, MusicBrainz tag correction and other features should make Amarok users quite pleased.

"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," Amarok announced.

"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," it said.

"This release brings significant performance, usability, and stability improvements," it explained.

One of the big updates is under the hood and will likely go unnoticed by many users. The completely rewritten collection scanner is less prone to errors and should handle the task of keeping your music collection updated better.

Amarok 2.4 also enables users to save artwork data as well as play count in the music files making the info available on any device, player or other machines.

One small tweak should be very welcomed by those that prefer simple, clean interfaces, there is now the possibility to hide the menu bar again.

The MusicBrainz integration introduced in Amarok 2.4 should make for much cleaner and accurate collections, enabling users to mass-update and correct the tags of their files.

If you prefer to have all of your files in a particular format, Amarok 2.4 delivers, enabling users to convert the files added to their collection.

There are plenty of other new features and changes, you can check out the changelog here for a complete list.

Amarok 2.4.0 is available for download here on Softpedia.