14 DAY TRIAL // After two long years of hard work, the Amarok developers are more than happy to announce the release and immediate availability for download and testing of the first Beta build of the anticipated Amarok 2.9 open-source music player software.
According to the release notes, Amarok 2.9 Beta implements new statistics synchronization between Amarok collections and the Amarok 1.4, Amarok 2.x, Rhythmbox, Clementine, Banshee, as well as Apple iTunes music player software, adds a brand new ASCII analyzer option in the analyzer widget, and introduces an all-new collection version.
"The Amarok team is proud to announce the immediate availability of the result of 2 years of hard work, the beta release of Amarok 2.9," reads the announcement. "This release is marked by improvements, corrections and polishing of nearly all Amarok features. Everybody is encouraged to test this beta release thoroughly so that we can release rock-solid Amarok 2.9 final."
Being a development version, Amarok 2.9 Beta contains two known issues that the developers want you to help fix. One of them sends the application into a loop when using certain Audio-CD discs, and the other one is a regression related to Context View/Wikipedia. Users are being informed that Amarok 3.0 will be ported to Qt5 and KDE Plasma 5 desktop environment.
Those of you who want to take the first Beta build of Amarok 2.9 for a test drive can download the Amarok 2.9 Beta sources right now from Softpedia and start compiling/installing the app in a test environment. Once again, please keep in mind that this is a pre-release version, not suitable for production environments.