Amarok "Fast Forward" 1.4.1-beta1 on the road

Usually one might expect nothing special from a minor release. But as you know: Amarok is different! The developers of your favorite media player have held a meeting in the Netherlands, all to improving Amarok!

The most visible result of the meeting is a major improvement to the user interface: the "current" sidebar tab has been moved to the top of the playlist. This is also one of the major reasons why we do a beta release for 1.4.1, we want you to try the new layout, report problems, bugs and how do you like it. All this feedback will justify whether we remove it for the Fast Forward series, and delay it until 2.0, or to leave it and make it as awesome as possible.

Another often requested feature is the possibility to use different scoring algorithms. This is now possible using scripts with the improved script manager. There have also been various under the hood changes, which might lead to regressions or totally new bugs - so we ask everyone to test this beta and report issuses, to make 1.4.1 rock!

As usuall you can find more details in the ChangeLog. (XXX: Update url to the correct revision)

To help us determine how people generally configure amarok (to help us determine which changes need to be made, especially to the new context browser), please take a screenshot of your Amarok and send it in to [[email protected]]. Thank you, we appreciate your help.

FEATURES

All new Context Browser layout.
LibVisual 0.4 supported and required.
Great new icon theme by Vadim Petrunin.
Support for custom scoring algorithms, via scripts.
Creative Nomad Jukebox support (incomplete but working). Contributed by Andrés Otón and T.R. Shashwath.
Inotify support. On kernels 2.6.13 and above with Inotify support compiled in, the collection will be instantly updated as soon as a watched folder changes.

CHANGES

Changed name spelling from amaroK to Amarok.
Many usability improvements, as a result of our cooperation with OpenUsability.