Amarok 3.1 "Tricks of the Light" released!

Friday, 2 August 2024  |  The Amarok Development Squad

The Amarok Development Squad is happy to announce the immediate availability of Amarok 3.1 "Tricks of the Light"!

Amarok 3.1 player window with a customized layout, featuring the new Similar Artists applet

Coming three months after 3.0.0 and two months after the first bugfix release 3.0.1, the main development focus in 3.1 has been getting Qt6 / KDE Frameworks 6 based version closer. We are not quite there yet, but not that far away anymore. And there are some quite nice new features too! Amarok 3.1.0 brings in a refreshed Last.fm integration, which uses more up-to-date account connection mechanisms, and is better at informing users of any Last.fm errors. Similar Artists context applet does a comeback, and there's naturally also a nice bunch of smaller features and bug fixes; this time the oldest fulfilled feature request was filed just under 15 years ago.

Changes since 3.0.1

FEATURES:
  • Last.fm plugin updated to use token-based authentication method and to notify user of session key errors (BR 414826, BR 327547)
  • Reintroducing Last.fm Similar Artists context applet - a new Amarok 3 version
  • Remember the previous destination provider when saving playlist (BR 216528)
CHANGES:
  • Amarok now depends on KDE Frameworks 5.89.
  • Cleanup of unused code and various changes that improve Qt6 compatibility but shouldn't affect functionality. (n.b. one won't be able to compile a Qt6 Amarok with 3.1 yet, but perhaps with the eventual 3.2)
  • Remove old derelict openDesktop.org integrations from about dialog. This also removes the dependency to Attica framework.
  • Disable gapless playback if ReplayGain is active and the following track is not from same album, to avoid volume spikes due to delay in the applying of ReplayGain (BR 299461)
BUGFIXES:
  • Small UI and compilation fixes
  • Fix saving and restoring playlist queue on quit / restart (BR 338741)
  • Fix system tray icon menu reordering
  • Fix erroneous apparent zero track progresses on track changes, which caused playcount updates and scrobbles to get skipped (BR 337849, BR 406701)
  • Fix 'save playlist' button in playlist controls
  • Sort playlist sorting breadcrumb menu by localized names (BR 277146)
  • Miscellaneous fixes to saving and loading various playlist file formats, resulting also in improved compatibility with other software (including BR 435779, BR 333745)
  • Don't show false reordering visual hints on a sorted playlist (BR 254821)
  • Fix multiple instances of web services appearing in Internet menu after saving plugin config.
  • Show podcast provider actions for non-empty podcast categories, too (BR 371192)
  • Fix threading-related crashes in CoverManager (BR 490147)

In comparison to changes between 2.9 to 3.0, the git repository statistics between 3.0 and 3.1 are somewhat short:

Tuomas Nurmi: 164 commits, +11910, -29957
l10n daemon script: 97 commits, +207075, -237380
Pino Toscano: 13 commits, +1, -11152

However, this is an excellent spot to send a huge thank you out to everyone who has been on board outside the git history; translators, packagers, bug reporters, writers, commenters, and of course: users - music fans all around the world! Happy listening, everyone! You rok!

Getting Amarok

In addition to source code, Amarok is available for installation from many distributions' package repositories, which are likely to update to 3.1.0 soon. A flatpak is currently available on flathub-beta.

Packager section

You can find the package on download.kde.org and it has been signed with Tuomas Nurmi's GPG key.