A new version of the Qt-based music player Amarok is available to download.
Amarok 3.1 arrives three months after Amarok 3.0, which was the first release in nearly 6 years and saw the developers complete their port to Qt 5 (which receives further polish here, in 3.1).
With Qt 6 now out, work to port Amarok to Qt 6 and KDE Frameworks 6 has been gaining momentum. Although that effort isn’t complete here in Amarok 3.1, the team says it’s “not that far away” – which is great to hear.
Amarok 3.1 revamps its Last.fm integration plugin with more modern authentication and informs users of connection errors (for scrobble fans, there’s nothing worse than losing a week’s worth of playback stats unknowingly).
The “Similar Artists” context applet also returns in this release, newly reworked for Amarok 3, and a feature request first opened in 2009 (!) gets resolved in this update, namely: ‘remember the previous destination provider when saving playlist’.
Other changes include a bump to KDE Frameworks 5.89, code cleanups, Qt 6 prepping, and disabling gapless playback if ReplayGain is active and the next track is not from the same album (risking the changes that its audio levels may be different).
Bug fixes a plenty, including restoring playlist queue on quit/restart, improving compatibility for exported playlists with other media software, threading-related crashes in the CoverManager — see the official announcement for more details.
Download Amarok 3.1.x
You can download Amarok 3.1.0 source code from the KDE website and compile it by hand. Amarok is currently on Flathub or the Snap Store but a beta build is in testing for the former – so keep an eye out for word of that going stable.
If that sounds like effort, Ubuntu, Linux Mint, or KDE neon users can choose to use an unofficial Amarok PPA maintained by a community member. This PPA only packages Amarok and Taglib for 22.04 – 24.04 – no extra surprises, which is great to see:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:joe-yasi/amarok-kde5
sudo apt install amarok