Amarok is a music player from KDE that pretty much dropped off our radar these past few years, as it didn't receive any regular updates, with the last stable update being back in 2018.
Back then, Amarok 2.9 was introduced as a Qt 4-based app that was considered an outdated standard even in those days. As the years passed by, we saw many music players for Linux continue getting better, but Amarok was left behind.
Fortunately, that has now started to change. The Amarok 3.0 “Castaway” release, which is based on Qt 5 and KDE Frameworks 5 is here.
Let's take a look at the highlights of this release.
Amarok 3.0 “Castaway”: What to Expect?
Don't think that this release was something that just appeared out of nowhere; the developers were already done with most of the Qt 5/ KF 5 porting work back in 2015.
However, the process of finalizing the end result was slow. Take, for instance, the Alpha release of 3.0 was back in February 2021! It took them some time and effort, but they finally got it done.
With the Amarok 3.0 release, you get a new button to stop automatic fetching of Wikipedia pages and a new visual hint that shows you that context view applets can be resized in edit mode.
Following that, there are a few fixes made to address the loading of Flickr photos, lyrics.ovh as the new lyrics provider, and improved searching of composer/album info for local files in the Wikipedia applet.
The developers have also confirmed that in the following months, we can expect minor releases with fixes that will take cues from both newly reported, and previously reported bug reports and feature requests.
They also added that work on porting Amarok to Qt 6 and KDE Frameworks 6 will start in the near future, with the goal of having a usable beta release sometime in 2024.
There are plenty of other bug fixes and improvements with the 3.0 release too, you can learn about those in the official release blog and the changelogs.
📥 Get Amarok 3.0
The most straightforward way to get this release is from KDE Applications. You can also get it from the official mirror.
If you are interested in the source code, head to its KDE Invent repo.
💬 Well, this release was a surprise for me. What about you?
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