Amarok 2.4 Inches Closer to Release, Needs Your Help

Amarok 2.4 Inches Close to Release, Needs Your Help

We're big fans of Amarok music player at OStatic. It's a powerful open source application that lets you play music you have and find music you don't, thanks to it's integration with notable music services like Last.fm, Magnatune, and Librivox.

The development team at Amarok is getting ready to release Amarok 2.4 in early 2011 and needs help from the community to test for bugs and hammer on its new features to check for stability. Whether you're a longtime Amarok fan or have been meaning to check it out for the first time, now's a great time to download this cross-platform music player and take a look at some of these cool new features:

 Transcoding: Now you can convert tracks from one file format to another when copying from the file browser to the local collection. We will expand this to media devices in future releases.

 Shiny new collection scanner, rewritten from scratch - it should now detect compilations in a more robust way

 Writing back to tags: there is now an option to have Amarok write statistics and album covers to the files directly, so you can save your play counts and tags in the files themselves.

 The ability to show and hide the menu bar

 Mass-tagging UI using Musicbrainz

 The ability to use iPod Touch 3G and possibly newer devices

 A new applet for guitar and bass tab information

 A map and calendar view for the upcoming events applet

 A new Playdar collection that lets you listen to music provided by a local Playdar service

Amarok 2.4 Beta is available for free download right from Amarok's website. Report any bugs you find at bugs.kde.org, and remember, this version may have some stability issues so make sure to backup your music securely before testing. Rock on!