Software Update: Amarok 2.1 Beta 2

The Amarok program is a popular audio player for KDE and features extensive possibilities to create (dynamic) playlists, search for lyrics on the internet and adjust MP3 tags. In addition, Amarok can play streams from a kio source and supports various backends such as xine, NMM and MAS. The developers have released the second beta version of Amarok 2.1 with the following announcement:

Amarok 2.1 Beta 2 released

The Amarok team is proud to release the second beta of Amarok 2.1. In the last month, the Amarok development squad has been focusing on bug fixing, usability improvements and optimizations to enhance your experience. Our recently held developer sprint in Berlin, Germany has allowed us to improve Amarok with feedback from usability studies as well as discuss the road map for Amarok once 2.1 is released.

We are also very excited to be bringing on wonderful new students to work with us with the Google Summer of Code, Season of KDE and Season of Usability programs, which will usher in a number of great features and improvements in the upcoming months. Although Amarok 2.1 is still in beta status, we encourage you to upgrade and provide feedback – the more we hear from you, the more improvements you’ll get back!

Some of the changes since 2.1 Beta 1:

Features

• New Script method to get current track time in milliseconds. (BR 177073)

changes

• Pressing the return key in the playlist search activates the selected result. (BR 192126)
• Pressing the escape key in the playlist search clears it’s contents. (BR 192123)
• Optimizations to the insertion and removal of large numbers of tracks from the playlist. Especially clearing a large playlist is now about 300 times faster.
• Always scroll to newly inserted tracks in the Playlist.
• When removing upcoming tracks from an active dynamic playlist, add a similar number of new ones to keep if from “drying up”.
• Some action cleanup in the playlist context menu.
• When clearing the playlist, also reset the search/filter text.
• Podcast titles are stripped of unnecessary whitespace. (BR 177403)

Bug fixes

• Fixed incorrect track counts in the collection.
• Fixed duplicate scanning of playlists during collection scan
• Fixed drag and drop to other applications. (BR 177415)
• Fixed the filter widget in the Files browser. (BR 176139)
• Fixed crash when using context menu after collection update. (BR 190056)
• Fixed problem with Amarok showing wrong track length for Last.fm streams. Patch by Michael Quinn. (BR 188512)
• Fixed several memory leaks.
• Set the value of the slider to the actual scale when loading a fuzzy Bias playlist, instead of 100% in every case
• Don’t fetch all coverless albums automatically when opening the Cover Manager. (BR 176170)
• Podcast episodes are loaded correctly when restoring a playlist on startup. This means the local file will be played if downloaded. (BR 189328)
• Next button in the main toolbar no longer has a clipped shadow. (BR 176031)
• Fixed slider mouse events in RTL layouts. (BR 185465)
• Detect iPhones as iPods. (BR 184744)
• Clicking on “Stop after current track” disables the flag if it is already enabled.
• Show a track marker when the “stop after current track” flag is set. (BR 185888)
• Don’t flash the OSD when opening the settings dialog. Patch thanks to Andreas Heider.
• Podcast file formats are displayed correctly.
• Don’t crash when pressing Delete on empty playlist. (BR 189021)