A new version of the open-source music player Amarok has been released, the first major update to the Qt-based media app since 2018.
Amarok 3.0 is the first stable release to use Qt 5 and KDE Frameworks 5, and work to port the music player to the the newest Qt 6 and KDE Frameworks 6 is, its devs say, soon to get underway.
“Common usecases should work quite well, and in addition to fixing KF5 port related regressions reported in pre-releases, 3.0 features many bugfixes and implemented features for longstanding issues, the oldest such documented being from 2009,” devs say.
“However, with more than 20 years of development history, it is likely that not every feature Amarok has been tested thoroughly in the new release, and specifically some Internet services that have changed their API in recent years are not available, at least for now.”.
While Amarok 3.0 works with KDE Plasma 6.0 it’s a great fit on Kubuntu 24.04 LTS, which continues to use the KDE Plasma 5.27 LTS series which, like Amarok 3.0, is based on Qt 5 and KDE 5 Frameworks.
Among new features, fixes, and notable changes:
- Visual hint that context view applets can be resized in edit mode
- Menu entry for collapsing all expanded items in collection view
- Song progress shown on OSD
- Ability to copy track details from current track context applet
- Drag and drop rearranging in queue editor
- Dynamic mode no longer shows non-functional play mode controls
- Prefers symbolic systray icons to improve integration with KDE Plasma 6
- Display missing metadata errors in Wikipedia applet
- Button to stop automatic Wikipedia page updating
- Defunct lyricwiki replaced with new lyrics provider
- Better relevancy of Flickr photos in photos context view applet
— Oh, you think “Wikipedia in a music app” sounds strange? Admittedly it sort of does now but many moons ago when local media players were Very Important Programs™ it wasn’t uncommon to find all sort of web integration baked inside your music player.
In some ways, Amarok was the instigator of the trend and doubled-down on contextual additions in its controversial 2.0 release, resulting in forks like Clementine (later forked itself into Strawberry) modelled on the older Amarok 1.4 UI.
Download Amarok 3.0
I can’t find a Flathub or Snap Store listing for Amarok but given that’s it’s only just re-emerged into release-land with its first stable release in 6 years, that’s understandable. Still, it’d be great to see this new release more widely available.
In the mean time, you can download Amarok 3.0 source code from the KDE website.