Amarok Celebrates 10 Years

Amarok, popular KDE music manager, is turning 10 years old this month and the project is taking this opportunity to review the last year and look head to the future. Amarok 3 will debut at FOSDEM next February, and planning has already begun. So, it's time for the team to raise some money.

Amarok 1.0 appeared on the scene in the Summer of 2004, but dot releases had been introducing Linux users to this rocking piece of software for a couple of years by then. Its popularity was already growing. 10 years have passed and version 2.6, released August 14, 2012, is the current stable release.

Version 1.4.6 was released June 21, 2007

Version 2.0 was released December 10, 2008

In the last year alone over 1149 commits have been made, 1030 bugs were fixed, and two new versions were released. A roadmap is in place for the next big release, 3.0, but the team needs some operating capital. Developer Myriam Schweingruber said, "Some of our developers are willing to work one day per week at rock-bottom prices, and we would love to make that possible. So this year, we are setting a much larger goal than we have ever in the past, and are also cutting some other expenses such as our server costs. Remember, aside from this sprint to the future, everything we do, we do for free."

A preview of Amarok 3 will be presented at FOSEM 2013 next February 2. The roadmap is a bit sketchy on details of interest to end users, but it appears the interface will be written in QML, the direction of all of KDE. They hope it will be simple and easy to use with powerful advanced features.

Visit the Amarok home at kde.org to donate or get more information.