After over half a decade since its previous stable release, Amarok, the open-source music player, has seen a major update to version 3.0. This significant upgrade has involved years of development and introduces an array of new features, including an updated interface.
Those experienced with Linux might remember Amarok from the era of KDE 4, when the much-loved Plasma desktop was referred to as KDE Software Compilation (SC). Despite being a component of the KDE Project, Amarok’s development and releases occur separately from other KDE software collections such as KDE Gear.
Among Amarok’s impressive features are dynamically changing playlists that can meet various criteria, efficient collection management with rating support, integrated internet services, basic support for MTP and UMS music player devices, scripting capabilities, a cover manager, and replay gain support.
The most recent release, Amarok 3.0, unveils an upgraded user interface that has been transitioned to utilize the Qt 5 and KDE Frameworks 5 application frameworks– a move that results in a more contemporary user interface. You may be wondering why the Amarok team didn’t jump straight to Qt 6/KDE Frameworks 6. The answer lies in their strategy: the app is to be ported to these upgraded frameworks in the weeks and months ahead, to enhance its usability with the cutting-edge 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 10 hours ago