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After more than six years since the last stable release, the Amarok open-source music player has been updated to version 3.0, a major release years in the work that brings an updated UI and other features.
Linux oldtimers may know Amarok from the days of KDE 4 when the beloved Plasma desktop was known as KDE Software Compilation (SC). Although Amarok is part of the KDE Project, it is developed and released independently of other KDE software collections like KDE Gear.
Amarok comes with great features like dynamic playlists that match different criteria, collection management with rating support, integrated Internet services, support for basic MTP and UMS music player devices, scripting support, cover manager, as well as replay gain support.
The latest release, Amarok 3.0, introduces an updated UI that was finally ported to the Qt 5 and KDE Frameworks 5 application frameworks to provide users with a more modern interface. If you’re asking yourselves why not port it directly to Qt 6/KDE Frameworks 6, the Amarok devs plan to port the app to these frameworks in the following months to make it more usable on the latest KDE Plasma 6 desktop.
Other highlights of the Amarok 3.0 release include a visual hint for resizing context view applets in edit mode, dragging and dropping tracks from the context view to the playlist, a new menu entry for collapsing all expanded items in the Collection view, and a new button to stop automatic updating of Wikipedia pages.
Furthermore, Amarok now allows for copying track details by clicking on the current track context applet, allows users to rearrange tracks in the queue editor using drag and drop, and adds the ability to show the song progress on OSD, which has been unified to use system-styled rating stars.
Amarok 3.0 also adds support for more recent technologies, such as the TagLib 2.0 library for reading and editing the meta-data of several popular audio formats, as well as the FFmpeg 5.0 multimedia framework. Of course, many crashes, bugs, and other issues were squashed for a more stable and reliable music playback experience.
Check out the release announcement page for more details. Meanwhile, if you want to give Amarok a try, you can download it as a Flatpak app on the Plasma desktop from the KDE App Store using a package manager like Plasma Discover, or on other desktops using an AppStream-capable application store like GNOME Software.
However, you should keep in mind that due to the porting to Qt 5 and KDE Frameworks 5, this Amarok release lacks some functionality like some Internet music services that have changed their APIs in recent years, compatibility with Amarok 2.x scripts, and downloading of scripts via KNewStuff.
Last updated 2 weeks ago
