· Few things in life can influence us quite the way music can. Music can set a mood, make us relax or feel energized, and for many people there is that special song that is forever connected with a significant moment in their life. And great music needs a great player! With Amarok 2.2, codenamed "Sunjammer", the Amarok team is very proud to present the next step towards the ultimate music player!
· 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.
· Amarok 2.2 comes with an almost completely new look and feel. It now has a new layout for the Browser Pane on the left and an easier navigation using "bread crumbs" on top. All elements, the Browser Pane, Context View and the Playlist are dockable widgets, which you can place how and where you like. It is even possible to stack or remove them. Of course it's up to you to change the position, width and height to your liking.
· The Playlist has seen a complete overhaul and comes with many new features, allowing you to sort and shuffle the content. A layout editor comes with three different pre-configured layouts and allows you to build your own preferred layout you can save. This way you can have the playlist only contain the information that is important to you. Clicking on a track twice allows you to edit the content in-line in the playlist for quick tag corrections and song ratings.
· Playing an opera where you would like to find a particular passage easily? Do you have tracks with a lot of silence before a hidden song that you would like hear with a simple click? Just add bookmarks. Listening to audiobooks and podcasts is made so much easier with bookmarks too, since you can group and edit them with the bookmark manager!
· The Context View has seen layout improvements as well. It comes with automatic resizing for the applets and you can place them where you would like to have them. A new photo applet shows you pictures of the artist and a video applet finds contextual videos for the now playing artist. The Wikipedia applet has been extended to allow you to change the language of the content, based on the system languages installed, and you can show information either for the artist, the album or the track you are listening to.
· The collection has seen a lot of changes and bug fixes: Scanning has improved and is now much faster and more accurate, the import of the Amarok 1.4 database has been improved and you can use an external MySQL database now, too. Insert an Audio CD and it will show up in the Collection Browser, allowing you to play directly from the CD or to copy the CD content to your collection. The same applies to media devices: UMS devices show up in the Collection browser, as do various other media players.
· Dynamic Playlists have the new possibility to use Biases based on Last.fm and Echonest. Don't know what to listen to? Let Amarok decide with the help of Last.fm and Echo Nest.
· Amarok 2.2 marks the start of a series of 2.2.x releases that will focus on improving what is there rather than adding major new features. A new release will follow approximately every 6 weeks and bring with it bugfixes and improvements, as well as a few new features. So look forward to more regular Amarok updates in the near future.
· Features
· Allow pasting an URL from clipboard to playlist with middle mouse click. Patch by Felix Geyer .
· Support for copying aiff files to iPods. (BR 200820)
· Add openDesktop.org support to the About dialog to make it easier to interact with the Amarok team.
· Add inline editing of track metadata in the playlist.
· The Playlist supports different grouping modes.
· The playlist can be partly or fully randomized (shuffled) by selecting "random" as a sorting level.
· Info about the categories in the "Browsers" area is now shown in the info applet on mouse over.
· Magnatune.com store: Add support for the personal recommendations feature available to Magnatune.com members.
· Magnatune.com store: Add support for the membership "favorites" feature. Albums can now be marked as favorites using a context menu action, and the list of favorite albums is available in the info applet. From here clicking links can add albums to the playlist, navigate to the artist or album in the browser, remove an album from favorites and (for download members) start a download.
· Add a dbus ShowOSD method to /Player. (BR 213532)
· Playlist layouts can now show simple inline playback controls and a progress bar for the currently active track. This can be enabled on a per layout basis in the playlist layout manager dialog.
· Show position in track of the mouse (the position in the track that playback will jump to if pressing the mouse) when hovering over the progress bar.
· Amarok File Tracking can now use MusicBrainz track identifiers as embedded IDs.
· Allow sorting in the bookmark manager.
· Allow filtering in the bookmark manager.
· Add colums to the bookmark manger and make it possible to edit items inline.
· Add a small bookmark menu to the browser breadcrumb bar allowing for navigation to a bookmark, as well as creating a new bookmark based on the current "view" or calling up the bookmark manager.
· Magnatune.com store: Allow re-downloads of any previous Magnatune.com purchases by a given email, not just purchases made from a specific installation of Amarok.
· Inline editing of lyrics from the context applet. (BR 201342)
· Ipod initialization support when failed to read an iPod database.
· Improvements to the "Show Cover" dialog. Resizes to match the image, auto centers on screen, correctly handles images too large for the screen and supports zooming using the mouse wheel. Patch thanks to Pascal Pollet (BR 175901)
· Automatically expand collection browser search results and make the results keyboard accessible. Patch thanks to Tuomas Nurmi . (BR 172379)
· Audio CD support. Audio CDs now show up as a separate collection and tracks from the CD can be freely mixed with any other tracks in the playlist. Using the "Copy to Collection" menu its possible to copy (rip) tracks directly to the local (or any other writable) collection.
· Sortable playlist. The playlist can now be hierarchical sorted using a breadcrumb like interface to select sorting levels. Sorting can be easily reverted.
· Improved media device support.
· Video applet to show videos from YouTube, Dailymotion and Vimeo. The video can be appended to the playlist, and rendered within the applet.
· Photo applet to show images from Flickr, with customizable animations.
· Customizable user interface using dock widgets.
· Support for external MySQL database. See http://amarok.kde.org/wiki/MySQL_Server.
· GHNS integration for downloading and installing Context applets.
· Support for Context applets to be written in QtScript.
· Custom Dynamic Playlists using Last.fm.
· Drag and Drop support for album cover image. (BR 91261)
· Upcoming and previous tracks count for dynamic playlist is now configurable. (BR 177540)
· Changes
· Imported playlists can be directly edited from within the "Saved Playlists" category. The files on disk will be changed as well.
· Hueristics when deciding which album to use in a directory. See comments in (BR 196559)
· The "Service Info" applet is now simply called "Info" to reflect that it now shows info from other parts of Amarok as well.
· Remove the bookmark manager context applet and add a bookmark manager dialog instead.
· Magnatune.com store: Add a link to purchase gift cards to the purchase dialog.
· Reset playlist filter when using the "replace playlist" action. Patch by John Atkinson (BR 200709)
· Track lyrics are exposed through the DBUS interface.
· The database connection and tables now enforce UTF-8 for the character set and collation.
· The OSD registers itself as a notification window type on relevant platforms. Patch thanks to Danny Baumann . (BR 194517)
· Improvements to the Wikipedia applet. History, language settings and more.
· Improvements to the Current applet. Text slides on mouse hover.
· New navigation style in the browser sidebar.
· Improvements to the Albums applet. Show individual track times and highlight currently playing artist within compilation albums
· Removed PlayAudioCD from the scripting interface. It never worked anyway, and audio CDs are just treated as a collection and not a special case like they were in 1.4.
· Changed trackInserted and trackRemoved API signals. (BR 194220)
· Bugfixes
· Improved Amarok 1.4 import. Patch thanks to Michael Reiher .
· Improved performance and decreased memory usage when loading music shares (DAAP collections). Patch thanks to Duns . (BR 173048)
· Changing Amarok's settings no longer removes album covers from playlist. (BR 202258)
· Fixed crash on startup if another Amarok instance was still loading. (BR 202713)
· Fixed some album art in a folder not getting picked up if a subfolder contained any files. (BR 167158)
· Fixed broken selection in the "Saved Playlists" category.
· Fixed wrong Random Album mode behavior when playlists contains only one album. (BR 194066)
· Fixed double playcount increase for last track in queue (BR 188330)
· Fixed track drag-and-drop problem when special characters are present in file path. (BR 193878)
· Don't crash when trying to load an empty playlist folder. (BR 202643)
· Make using the mouse wheel over the progress slider correctly navigate in the currently playing track. (BR 195913)
· Correctly strip all formatting from text pasted or dragged to the comment field in the tag edit dialog. (BR 188270)
· Fix incorrect "current item" after deleting track(s) from the playlist causing up and down buttons to not move selection to the expected row. (BR 197203)
· Jamendo service: Fix destination filenames when using "copy to collection". (BR 171839)
· Jamendo service: Make torrent downloads work again. (BR 198200)
· Remove the video stream from the context view when removing the video applet during stream playback. (BR 201281)
· Fixed locales for Amazon cover fetching. (BR 188446)
· Fix crash on trying to edit a playlist layout with an invalid element value in the xml file. (BR 197128)
· Fix DBUS xml parsing. Patch thanks to Ryan Bitanga .
· Fix data caching issues causing incorrect values to be stored in the database and in some cases to be written to tags. Fixes multiple bugs.
· Correctly enable/disable "Prefer Tracks" menu entry. Patch thanks to Ralf Jung . (BR 191059)
· Do not show " " at the end of each filter value in the LibriVox service. (BR 190704)
· Cached lyrics will now be shown when offline. (BR 197589)
· Fixed pressing play after reaching the end of the playlist not starting the playlist from the top (or wherever the navigator thinks it should start. (BR 176445)
· Fixed local playlists being renamed to blank when user hits cancel
· Fixed giant Edit Filter dialog with some translations. (BR 197566)
· Files browser remembers its view mode. (BR 197122)
· Fixed non-Latin UTF-8 encoding tags not being correctly decoded.
Features:
· Compilations with more than 60 artists are supported.
· Option to hide the context view.
· Applets are now laid out according to two criteria: either fixed height or flowing to fill the CV. No more slivers of applets visible at the bottom.
· Load contents of an m3u file if specified when running amarok from the command line. File must be local.
· Added large source emblem in current track applet.
Changes:
· Removed option to purchase Magnatune.com albums using a Credit Card as this is unfortunately no longer supported by Magnatune.com. It is still possible to purchase albums using pre paid gift card codes, and all membership features still work.
· Make it possible to delete multiple selected playlists at once from the "My Playlists" category in the playlist browser.
· Show info box in CV if no applets are visible.
Bugfixes:
· Don't hide the "On/Off" button for Dynamic Playlists if the window is not tall enough. (BR 195886)
· Make it possible to change the width of a playlist layout element if the combined width of items in the row exceeds 100% (BR 195846)
· Keep width slider and width display from overlapping when setting attributes on a playlist layout element.
· Don't overwrite cached lyrics when lyrics script returns a "Not found" result. (BR 195213)
· Fixed the layout of the "Edit Track Details" dialog, which came up broken under some circumstances. (BR 195081)
· Reset total playlist time when the playlist is cleared. (BR 153160)
· Don't crash when starting a collection scan after another scan had been aborted. (BR 195242)
· Fixed non-UTF8 MPEG tag wrongly shown.
· Fix problem with supported filetypes not being copied over to MTP device (BR 186835)
· Fix problem with playlist names containing '/' not being saved (BR 975995)
· Allow cancelling of rename input box in playlist layout dialog (BR 976409)
· Loading playlists from the command line works again. (BR 191347)
· Fixed formatting of the debug output when using the -d option.
· Detection of compilation cover during the scan works again. (BR 172953)
Playlist Improvements:
· The playlist in Amarok 2.1 has undergone many improvements since the last release. You can now search and filter its content and queue tracks as well as tell Amarok to stop playing after a certain track. The biggest change however is the new playlist layout editor. It lets you make the playlist look the way you like it. Covers, ratings, genres or just a simple track name? It's up to you! It comes with a few layouts predefined and leaves the rest for your creativity!
Context View:
· The improved Context View comes with a new layout and makes better use of free space. Applet management has been improved and applets follow your KDE color scheme. Instead of using multiple pages with applets, new Context View displays them in one vertical column which can be reorganized with a handy widget at the bottom.
Bookmarking:
· Bookmarking is finally here! Bookmarking comes in two types, automatic and manual. When you are listening to a long podcast, audiobook (or any other track longer than 10 minutes) Amarok will automatically mark the last listened to position and auto resume playback when you return to the track. You can also manually bookmark a position in any track to save for later.
Amarok URLs:
· Amarok URLs allow you to create a link to a certain place in Amarok. For example, you could make an URL to a great song you found on Jamendo and send it to your friend. Her Amarok will open the Jamendo service and the song you found. Stumbled upon an exceptional audio book on LibriVox? Create a link and send it to your family. In this release we are just starting to explore what is possible using these URLs, so expect to see many interesting features based on this in the future.
Last.fm:
· The Last.fm service received an interface update and now allows you to play any tag, user, or artist radio. We have also added an option to mark songs in your local collection as loved. Now you can show how much love you have, even for local tracks.
ReplayGain Support:
· Amarok now supports ReplayGain natively. When it is enabled Amarok equalizes the volume of songs with ReplayGain tags to avoid big unexpected volume changes between songs. It currently requires the GStreamer Phonon backend.
Collection Headers:
· Headers in the collection browser now have a much cleaner, more distinctive look.
Media Devices:
· Album cover support for iPods has been added and many bugs have been fixed.
Compilation support:
· Thanks to the sleepless nights of many Amarok developers, identifying albums as compilations (aka "Various Artists") now works more reliably :)
Phonon Configuration:
· There's no need to leave Amarok in order to change the system-wide sound settings anymore. The Phonon configuration can now be opened from Amarok's preference dialog. This is especially handy when using Amarok in other desktop environments and operating systems.
Features:
· The collection scanner is now able to be run in batch mode, allowing for automated scans of both full and incremental types. In addition, all graphical dependencies have been removed, allowing for headless, remote runs of collection scans. A wiki page detailing how to do this will be made available shortly.
· Covers are shown and written for iPod collections.
· Phonon multimedia system can be configured directly from Amarok.
· Cover art can now be disabled in the collection browser.
· Scrobble tracks from streams that have title and artist metadata
· Add support for showing a stream with multiple alternative servers as a single item in the playlist and add GUI for manually selecting prefered source.
· Ampache service: Add support for Ampache 3.4.4 and 3.5.x.
· Auto timecoding (position bookmarking) now exists for tracks with length greater than 10 minutes. (BR 148740)
· Add a animated "loading..." screen when dynamically fetching info about an item to show in the service info applet.
· Deleting tracks from the local collection is now possible. (BR 170999)
Add a filter-by-date-added to the collection browser. Use added:"today" or added:
Changes:
· Show a statusbar message when loving a lastfm track.
· Show error message when Wikipedia information cannot be retrieved.
Bugfixes:
· Fix showing of book information from the LibriVox service.
· Don't crash if a script has uncaught exceptions.
· Open ogg files in Amarok when using Dolphin and other file managers. Patch thanks to Lubos Lunak . (BR 180155)
· Fix podcast episodes not ordered right because of incorrect parsing of pubdate. (BR 181338)
· Fix crash in tagdialog when editing tracks without an artist. (BR 183180)
· Statistics were not calculated properly in all instances. (BR 182025)
· Compilation fixes on Open Solaris.
· Trim URL before adding a new podcast.
· Add Ok button to the podcast configuration dialog to improve usability. (BR 181339)
· Add tooltips to now playing widget icons.
· Fix not possible to download episodes from newly added podcast channel. (BR 180851)
FEATURES:
· Add advanced, configurable, searching and filtering to the playlist.
· Add "Stop after track" option to the playlist menu.
· Queue track functionality has returned. (BR 171939)
· Growl support on OS X.
· Add automatic recovery option to MySQL embedded server.
· Greatly improved Librivox.org service script. It now works for all books, and dynamically fetches a summary of each book that is shown in the service info applet. The script now also has a propper icon in the service browser and its own emblem and default "album" cover for books.
· Sorting collection by Composer is now possible. (BR 177271)
· Service scripts can now dynamically fetch context info when items are selected (info can still be applied statically to each item as well).
· Album items from a service script can now have custom covers.
· Items from a service script can now have a custom emblem.
· Service scripts can now set custom icons for the service browser.
· Add simple filtering to the service browser.
· Podcast channels are automatically refreshed once per hour if autoscan is enabled.
CHANGES:
· MTP devices can now delete multiple tracks at once.
· Status bar notification on copying or deleting tracks on Ipod.
· Don't fold the Collection Browser after editing or updating the collection. (BR 166841)
· Replace the systray icon with a more modern logo.
· "Cool-Streams" radio service script is now enabled by default.
· Show more verbose output when copying tracks to the local collection.
· Custom Sorting in the Collection Browser has returned.
· Memory use optimizations.
· Playlist items now have tooltips. (BR 170844)
BUGFIXES:
· The QtScript Qt binding generator has been updated to the latest. This should complete some features such as Model/View in the QtScript API and fix building with Qt 4.5. (BR 177863)
· The Files browser now remembers its settings, like the active directory. (BR 173742)
· Fix problems with the collection scanner often missing a part of the collection, or potentially failing altogether. (BR 176154)
· Fix Context View crash when quitting the application. (BR 179110)
· LibriVox: Don't crash when double clicking "Enter Query". (BR 177991)
· Files could be deleted when moving files to an unwritable destination. (BR 178701)
· Don't override cached lyrics when fetching. (BR 178196)
· Show a warning when the collection scanner dies. (BR 176154)
· Set date correctly on MTP devices. (BR 171194)
· Ipod ratings are read/written/displayed.
· Ipod playcounts are read and displayed on Current Track Info applet.
· Lastfm Settings Dialog can now check to ensure username/password is correct. (BR 144456)
· Don't delete files if an error occurs during transfer. (BR 178701)
· MPRIS GetMetadata() call returns arturl for last.fm streams. (BR 178695)
· Fix grouping of various artist albums in the playlist. (BR 175604)
· Update statistics properly on Windows and Mac versions.
· Fix progress indicator disapearing when skipping in last.fm streams.
· Write the discnumber field for mp3 tags.
· Don't start a fadeout when stopping paused media. (BR 178057)
· More accurate Amarok 1.4 database imports.
· Ipod tracks' sample rate is now shown correctly in Tag Dialog.
· Tracks did not always report that their editable status correctly. (BR 177058)
· Gapless playback of MTP tracks one after another now works.
· Podcast with some unsafe characters in them caused database corruption. (BR 172594)
· Amarok no longer stalls on large Ipod copy operations. (BR 173707)
· Fix switching between basic and advanced mode in the filename scheme chooser.
· Fix MTP device attached on startup crashing. (BR 177201)
· Tracks with same tags as a track on Ipod are no longer copied. (BR 177198)
· When reaching the end of the playlist, actually show stopped state. (BR 177782)
· Fixes in playing tracks in repeat modes.
· The wikipedia applet did not give a status update when an entry was not found. (BR 173940)
· Add tooltips to icons in context view. (BR 174478)
· Fix icons and layout in Advanced Filter dialog.
· Completely redesigned user interface
· Tight integration with online services such as Magnatune, Jamendo, MP3tunes, Last.fm and Shoutcast
· Completely overhauled scripting API and plugin support to allow better integration into Amarok
· Migration from the KDE 3 to KDE 4 framework, and utilization of core technologies such as Solid, Phonon, and Plasma
· Users' Recommended radio is now shown in the Last.Fm Service.
· Playlist browser items can be deleted and renamed using the keyboard.
· Basic and Advanced view when editing a filename scheme are synchronized.
· Added delete button to Advanced view for defining a filename scheme.
· Importer for iTunes libraries now allows you to import your statistics from iTunes.
· The settings dialog now remembers the page that was last used.
· Track information can be edited from the file browser.
In addition, there are the following changes:
· User playlists added from files are now updated on collection rescans, so any changes in the file is reflected in the SQL playlist.
· Layout refactoring in the Organize Collection dialog.
· Enabled Last.fm scrobbling by default when Last.fm login is supplied.
· "Show active track" has been moved from the playlist context menu to the playlist toolbar
· The video and Last.fm applet have been removed for now as they are not ready for final release. They will be readded in later releases.
· playlist and statusbar recieved major attention
· database/statistics import from Amarok 1.4
· major overhaul of the Last.fm integration
· sorting by year and album in the Collection Browser is possible again (small, but often requested)
· shortcut to jump to current track in the playlist
· many, many bugs squashed and stability fixes
