The Amarok team has proudly announced a few hours ago the second beta release of the upcoming Amarok 2.0 music player for KDE lovers (and not only). The much-anticipated release, dubbed Nujalik (first beta's codename was Nerrivik), makes one step further towards the final 2.0 version, by bringing lots of improvements, new features and numerous bug fixes.

"The most significant change in this release is the switch from SQLite to MySQL-embedded as the database backend. MySQL-embedded allows us to leverage the performance increase of a MySQL configuration, whilst alleviating non trivial configuration that comes with a standalone server. Furthermore, this will allow us to expose using a standalone MySQL server in the future, if so desired, though this is not possible yet. Most noticeably, you will see much improved performance of collection scanning and searching, especially with very large music collections. Since there are technical intricacies involved with building MySQL correctly, we strongly recommend using an official distribution package as we are working with packagers to ensure a minimum of problems." said the Amarok team in the release announcement.

The most important changes in Amarok 2.0 Beta 2 are:

· Incremental scanning support;
· Download and listen to public domain audio books, thanks to the LibriVox library included in this version;
· The Last.fm and Lyrics applets were fixed;
· Improved stability.

Let's take a quick look at some of the features of Amarok 2.0 Beta 2:

· Support for Lyricwiki;
· You can now move files into collections in the Filebrowser;
· Support for Chinese lyrics from mp3.sogou.com;
· CTRL+1 (or 2, 3, 4) will toggle the sidebars;
· URL can be loaded from the clipboard by middle clicking on playlist with your mouse;
· You can now mute the sound if you click on the volume icon (in the toolbar);
· Some arrows were added so you can easily switch between containments;
· If you enable monitoring, Amarok will always check for music collection changes on start-up;
· Amarok will now remember the invisible/visible state of the browsers;
· You can now play music directly from your MTP device;
· A new option to disable or enable the “automatic cover fetching” function was added;
· During music collection scanning, any available playlists will be added to Amarok's Playlist Browser.

For a complete list of changes and bugfixes in Amarok 2.0 Beta 2, please visit the official release announcement.

About Amarok

amaroK is a music player for Linux and Unix with an intuitive interface. amaroK makes playing the music you love easier than ever before, and looks good while doing it. Download Amarok 2.0 Beta 2 right now from Softpedia.