With all the hoopla that has been surrounding KDE 4, I’d almost forget there’s another major piece of software working on a milestone release. Okay, maybe not as major as KDE, but Amarok is arguably the best and most popular media player on the linux desktop. KDE’s move from QT3 to QT4 pretty much forced all other independent QT applications to do the same, but obviously the Amarok developers didn’t want to stop at merely porting their media player. Amarok 2 will use the new KDE 4 technologies, “like Phonon for audio and Solid for device interaction, along with extensive use of SVG and Plasma for the new interface” (quote from Wikipedia). It’s shaping up to be as radically different from Amarok 1.4 (the current stable release), as KDE 4 is from KDE 3.5. And that’s a very good thing indeed.

Keep in mind that, at the moment, Amarok 2 is in very heavy development. The current release is Alpha 2, which means nothing has been finished yet; not the feature list, not the looks, and there are still a lot of bugs to be squashed. That means that sometimes it works surprisingly well, and sometimes it doesn’t. For example, in the nightly build of August 5th I lost the ability to add anything to the playlist (I didn’t build it myself, but it was available in the KDEmod “playground” repository). I solved it by deleting all the configuration directories. Another thing: I can’t make a song stop. It just fades out, then restarts. I blame Rihanna, because the first time I noticed it happening, Amarok was playing “Don’t stop the music”. Fair warning: use it at your own risk, and don’t expect it to be a replacement for 1.4 just yet.

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