Amarok 2.3.0 is out!

[MikeTbob]

WOOT! I love me some Amarok, is anyone else using 2.3 yet? Comments, suggestions and opinions are welcome. I haven't really had time to mess with it yet but the new features should be awesome.

From the Amarok website.

Amarok 2.3! What's New

* Newly redesigned Toolbar. When this is detached, you'll have a very streamlined Amarok at your fingertips, in a sliver of screen space. See it live: New Toolbar in Action

* New and much simpler Local Collection browser. The old browser, while having many features, was never really an integrated part of Amarok, neither in terms of look and feel or actual code. In the "Saved Playlists" and Podcast categories you'll find the new "merged view" button just like in "Local Collection."

* When a new source of playlists or podcasts becomes available, Amarok will switch off merged view and show a new collapsible list of your new listening sources.

* You can drag and drop playlists, podcasts and whole podcast channels to add them to the device or service.

* Amarok on a Small Screen. Some folks run Amarok full screen, but how about those of us on laptops, netbooks, and even smartphones? We need a smaller screen footprint. It turns out that one can already run Amarok tabbed! Until recently, the Amarok layout was fixed, but it is now much more configurable. You might have noticed that if you unselect Lock Layout (View > Lock/Unlock Layout), you can close or move any of the panels, and the toolbar. Here is a look at what it looks like with the panes stacked and tabbed:

[oz]

Thanks for the alert, Mike!

I can never stick with KDE for long because of the all the various instabilities, but I might try Amarok again the next time I do install KDE4. It's probably been about 4 years since my last experiences with Amarok and they weren't so good at the time, but I'm betting they've made plenty of improvements since then.

[AugustFalcon]

WOOT! I love me some Amarok, is anyone else using 2.3 yet? Comments, suggestions and opinions are welcome...

Amarok is still unusable for me: opensuse 11.2, KDE 4.3. With this release it now crashes during startup. Prior releases would at least start. None of the 2.x versions have been stable for me. Sort of miss the Shoutcast stuff in 1.x versions.

It seems that most of the linux sound stuff is flakey and has poor or nonexistent user documentation. VLC is the most stable for me followed by Songbird.

But, I have spent enough time trying to get the linux stuff to work so I just use iTunes on an older XP system for my music. Strangely -- it just works.

[peteh]

When I first came to linux I used Kaffeine for everything multimedia.
But I tried Amarok and stuck with it for a while towards the end of 1.4.
I think Amarok 2.x has been great and apart from a couple of db glitches which were easily fixed I've not had any real problems with it.
It's my only choice now for music, tho' I still like Kaffeine and use it for TV and dvd.

[MikeTbob]

Amarok is still unusable for me: opensuse 11.2, KDE 4.3. With this release it now crashes during startup. Prior releases would at least start. None of the 2.x versions have been stable for me. Sort of miss the Shoutcast stuff in 1.x versions.

It seems that most of the linux sound stuff is flakey and has poor or nonexistent user documentation. VLC is the most stable for me followed by Songbird.

But, I have spent enough time trying to get the linux stuff to work so I just use iTunes on an older XP system for my music. Strangely -- it just works.

I've had a few troubles with Suse myself but not many with Amarok.....unless you count the mysql issues. Really the only problem I had was that sometimes after an update to mysql, Amarok would not load my media library. Vlc is all around solid, I use it occasionally.