AmaroK 2.7 Released

Today, we have some open source applications gets a new release and one of them is AmaroK which happened to release AmaroK 2.7 ahead of KDE 4.10 which is scheduled to be released on February. It was supposed to be in January, but eventually got delayed for one month to ensure the quality before releasing it to public. If the delay didn't happen back then, it would be a perfect timing for both application to gets released in same month.

Anyway, AmaroK 2.7 aka Minor Tune has some interesting new features such as

• Preliminary version of the Nepomuk Collection plug-in
• Statistics Synchronization between collections and with Last.fm
• The File Browser's behavior and appearance was greatly improved
• Audio CD playback was resurrected

Here's the complete list of changes in AmaroK 2.7 with over 470 bug fixes and 15 feature requests were granted by the developers:

Features

• Track dragging support in Unique Tracks tab of the Synchronize Statistics action; allows you to do a "diff" between collections and transfer missing tracks. (BR 237266)
• Amarok now scrobbles tracks in streams if the stream correctly updates meta-data. (BR 240732)
• When scrobbling to Last.fm, Amarok announces suggested tag corrections (configurable). (BR 309697)
• Ability to scrobble recently played tracks from iPod (and the like) to Last.fm.
• Synchronization of labels and rating between Last.fm and Amarok collections; play count can be synchronized one-way from Last.fm to Amarok. (BR 206249)
• Statistics synchronization between collections, supports rating, first / last played time, play count and labels.
• New APG constraint: Specify a total file size for playlist. (BR 283618)
• Amazon store: Added support for Amazon MP3 in Italy and Spain. (BR 307981)
• Mark downloaded podcast episodes to keep, even when purge is enabled. (BR 261062)
• Nepomuk plugin: Play and manage tracks using the Nepomuk database.
• Support for reading and writing tags from/to mod, s3m, it and xm files. Patch by Mathias Panzenböck.
• Amazon store: It is now possible to add items to your shopping cart using amarok:// URLs.
• Amazon store: Use the context info applet to show further infos about a selected item.
• New argument --debug-audio to enable Phonon debugging.
• Amazon store: We now ship a utility to handle downloads from Amazon.

Changes

• Files page has been made more intuitive by making Places the root view and significantly improving breadcrumbs behaviour.
• Make dropping large directories into playlist more responsive by reading track metadata asynchronously in a background thread.
• Harmonize keyboard, mouse and context menu behaviour of the Files pane so that it matches Local Music and Saved Playlists panes. (BR 307386)
• Last.fm Skip button re-added after being removed in Beta by error. (BR 311733)
• Podcast episodes are now loaded asynchronously on startup to reduce delays.
• Removed alpha state and not really working spectrum analyzer applet.
• Before 2.7 Beta:
• Dependencies raised, Amarok now depends on Qt >= 4.8 and kdelibs >= 4.8.4.
• When configuring Last.fm plug-in, the changes are now applied immediately in most places. (BR 311331)
• If liblastfm is provided, it is strongly recommended to use version 1.0.3 or newer for fixes of bugs that otherwise prevent iPod scrobbling and synchronization.
• Configure Amarok dialog gets new Metadata tab to grab some weight from the Collection tab and to configure statistics synchronization.
• APG now saves its presets each time it's run, to lessen preset loss if Amarok crashes. (BR 294743)
• APG playlists no longer limited to 100 tracks. (BR 301829)
• The confusing "Local Collection Backends" category of plugins was removed from the Configure dialog. All backends are enabled from now on.
• Statistics of tracks outside of collections are only read/saved to file tags (if enabled) instead of being kept in the database.
• Last.fm Skip button removed; Last.fm API no longer provides it. (BR 305576)
• Optional liblastfm dependency raised to 1.0.0. (BR 302597)
• Add composer button to wikipedia applet (BR 272982)
• New optional dependency for Amazon downloads: clamz.

Bugfixes

• Fix a regression where stream metadata would be forgotten on start. (BR 305389)
• Fix scrobbling of plain files streamed over http. (BR 309976)
• Fix scrobble-before-play behaviour when playing Last.fm streams.
• Fix double-scrobbling when playing Last.fm streams. (BR 311852)
• Fix The size of rating stars should not change in inline editing (BR 209684)
• Various improvements that should result in more stable Audio CD playback (modulo phonon-vlc BR 313046). (BR 305708, BR 308084, BR 311446)
• Fix queued track indicator overflow, patch by Riccardo Ferrazzo. (BR 253802)
• Fix Amarok crashes when selecting song with Enter [@ Playlist::PrettyListView::trackActivate] (BR 312439)
• Fix amarok starts at beginning of playlist if you previously stopped during a track (BR 312183)
• Audio CD: fix crash due to no composer being set. (BR 293698)
• Audio CD: fix track recreation on startup. (BR 312685)
• Fix incorrect display of folder names containing & (ampersand) in File browser breadcrumbs. (BR 244817)
• Fix Media Sources pane growing in size when navigating in it. (BR 246029)
• Fix Media Sources breadcrumb items sometimes appearing as new windows. (BR 285712)
• Fix editability and drop-ability of playlist folders.
• Make track announcements via KDE Notifications instant. (BR 263952)
• Fix dynamic playlist progress bar.
• Fix Last played bias is ignored or doesn't work. (BR 311906)
• Fix amarok dynamic play list with biases EchoNest similar artist gives no results. (BR 291162)
• Fix When I try to create a dynamic playlist by Last.fm similar songs creation takes a lot time. (BR 301716)
• Fix updating of Amarok database playlists then track uid changes. (BR 312128)
• Fix hangs and inappropriate messages when trying to play a track from a saved playlist that has been deleted in the mean time. (BR 308371)
• Fix existing files preventing complete transfer of tracks to collection. (BR 312001)
• Fix crash then doing Last.fm love with uninitialized Last.fm plugin. (BR 311857)
• Fix Last.fm streams not being correctly recreated on startup. (BR 305576)
• Fix Ampache albums & track not being shown, a recent regression. (BR 310862)
• Fix crash in Network Requests Viewer. (BR 311760)
• Definitely prevent crash when using File Browser breadcrumbs. (BR 265626)
• Prevent crash in ServiceBase::setModel triggered by Last.fm rewrite. (BR 311723)
• Fix incorrect display of Last.fm tags and other items. (BR 244555)
• Before 2.7 Beta:
• Fix empty collection when using DynamicCollection=false (BR 265419)
• Fix suboptimal KWallet usage in Last.fm plugin. (BR 292096)
• Fix crash in Last.fm plugin caused by sloppy KWallet usage. (BR 306134)
• Fix WMA files interpret Album as Album Artist (BR 276015)
• Fix after adding next slash previous one disappears in organize collection (BR 296136)
• Fix Dynamic Collection and other features not working if the database was initially created by a very old Amaork version. (BR 302837)
• Fix incorrect "Stop after current" indicator behaviour in some cases. (BR 253822)
• Fix untranslatable texts in preset dynamic playlists. (BR 276023)
• Better Last.fm scrobbling behaviour and error reporting due to rewrite, should fix long-standing problems. (BR 293320, BR 285820)
• Update stream meta-data correctly even with phonon-gstreamer back-end. (BR 300189)
• Fix available transcoding encoders detection with ffmpeg 1.0. (BR 309454)
• Fix playback resuming with phonon-gstreamer; raise phonon-vlc dependency to at least 0.6.1 as a side-effect. (BR 290612)
• Create collections even for SD/MMC/etc. cards on PCI-connected slots.
• Fixed some incorrect logic in the PlaylistLength constraint, which was causing the APG to create playlists that were shorter than expected. (BR 293616)
• Improve Duplicate files found dialog. (BR 308762)
• Fix crashes in SqlRegistry because of its false thread-safety. (BR 230991)
• Fix crash on malformed DAAP reply. (BR 284186)
• Fix first & last played time not remembered for files outside of collection.
• Nepomuk plugin now makes Nepomuk ratings visible in Amarok. (BR 174630)
• Fix some track tag modifications not being updated until restart (e.g. changing disc number from 1 to 0).
• Repeat playlist correctly with a single track playlist. (BR 290955)
• Don't append playlist when pressing enter while editing. (BR 305203)
• Fix track transfer to iPods in de (and perhaps other) locale. (BR 305134)

I will start building this package on my computer...