"Return To The Origin" - Amarok 2.8 is here

It's the wonderful month of August and the Amarok Team is back with a very strong release. Amarok 2.8 is titled "Return To The Origin" as we are bringing back the polish that many users loved from the original 1.x series! The new Amarok is more fun to use, it's rock solid, and it has exciting new features.

I am really excited about Amarok 2.8, as it marks the first Amarok release in several years that I have personally contributed to. During my hiatus I had mostly been a user of Amarok, and sometimes also a bit of an advisor, but now our team is reunited and it feels great to be back home. My personal focus this time was all about bringing back the polish that our users loved about the Amarok 1.x series! Many of you will remember the fancy audio visualizer that makes a return - to the origin.

We sincerely hope that you like Amarok 2.8. A lot of hard work went into it - Ten years altogether.

Enjoy the new Amarok. Rediscover your music.

Important note about Amarok and KDE 4.11

Hello everyone, welcome to my new blog. In case you don't know me yet, I'm Mark Kretschmann, known in KDE mostly as the Amarok guy (I started it about 10 years ago). I used to contribute regularly to Planet KDE, back then on our Amarok server, but what happened then is Google Plus, and a server move. As I became more active again in Amarok development after a hiatus I figured I could start blogging again, now that the "huge" release 2.8 is approaching really fast. If you'd like to follow me on G+ where I'm very active, you can do it here.

Now an important message for Amarok users: If your Amarok has started to crash after upgrading to KDE 4.11, please upgrade your Amarok to version 2.8-Beta. Due to a change in a library, the older 2.7 series is not compatible with KDE 4.11 at this time, but the 2.8 series is. You can find the Beta release packaged for many distros, e.g. it's here for Ubuntu/Kubuntu/Debian: Kubuntu Beta PPA

In other news, the final Amarok 2.8.0 release is coming really soon. We're preparing it currently, but it will take a few days until it reaches you. I am going to post a detailed article about this important release here as well (hint: It's a glorious release with lots and lots of good stuff!)