Amarok 3.0 "Castaway" released

[Posted April 29, 2024 by jake]

The Amarok music player project has announced the release of version 3.0, which is codenamed "Castaway". It is the first stable version using Qt 5 and KDE Frameworks 5, and the first stable release since the final Qt-4-based 2.9.0 in 2018.

The road to 3.0 has not been a short one. Much of the Qt5/KF5 porting was done in 2015 already, but finishing and polishing everything up has been a slow, sometimes ongoing and sometimes stalled process ever since. 3.0 Alpha was released in February 2021 and has been since used by many people, as have been nightly builds of git master available for various distributions. Now in the past few months, an effort was made to get everything ready for a proper 3.0 release.
Common usecases should work quite well, and in addition to fixing KF5 port related regressions reported in pre-releases, 3.0 features many bugfixes and implemented features for longstanding issues, the oldest such documented being from 2009. However, with more than 20 years of development history, it is likely that not every feature Amarok has been tested thoroughly in the new release, and specifically some Internet services that have changed their API in recent years are not available, at least for now. It might well be that getting them in better state wouldn't require huge effort, however, so if you know your way with Qt and KDE Frameworks and your favourite Internet music service does not work with Amarok 3.0, you are extremely welcome to join in and help!

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Amarok 3.0 "Castaway" released

Posted Apr 29, 2024 23:05 UTC (Mon) by pawel44 (guest, #162008) [Link]

Great news! After many years of using KDE, I switched to Gnome for better Wayland support. Now there are probably no such big differences, and the Amarok evokes sentiments. I guess it's time to go back to KDE.

Amarok 3.0 "Castaway" released

Posted Apr 30, 2024 2:43 UTC (Tue) by ccchips (subscriber, #3222) [Link]

I have found that Audacious is the one I prefer to use, after trying several others.

Amarok 3.0 "Castaway" released

Posted Apr 30, 2024 9:37 UTC (Tue) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

I'm still on Clementine - when I can be bothered to get sound fixed ...

That's the Amarok/KDE3 combo iirc - updated to KDE4 et al rather than the ground-up rewrite when the official Amarok project updated. Still has its quirks, but suits me.

Cheers,
Wol

Amarok 3.0 "Castaway" released

Posted Apr 30, 2024 10:34 UTC (Tue) by KaiRo (subscriber, #1987) [Link]

I'd love a cross-over between Amarok and Clementine - and one that is actually maintained well. It should support multiple playlists like Clementine does with its tabs but also remember playback location when the computer (and the application) is restarted like Amarok has.
And yes, otherwise the differences are small...

Amarok 3.0 "Castaway" released

Posted Apr 30, 2024 12:45 UTC (Tue) by jzb (editor, #7867) [Link]

Have you tried Strawberry? It's a fork of Clementine that's actively maintained (last release was January 11th of this year). It has playlist tabs (though that's not a feature I use, so I can't say much about it) and I *think* it remembers playback location, but TBH that's not a feature I've worried about.

It's a pretty solid music player and handles a decent-sized (~900GB) music collection very well.

Amarok 3.0 "Castaway" released

Posted May 1, 2024 16:48 UTC (Wed) by mbunkus (subscriber, #87248) [Link]

As a fellow former Clementine user & lover, can confirm that the switch to Strawberry is worth it. Very glad to see the Clementine line being actively continued.

Amarok 3.0 "Castaway" released

Posted May 3, 2024 11:46 UTC (Fri) by KaiRo (subscriber, #1987) [Link]

Thanks, I'll take a look at that!

Amarok 3.0 "Castaway" released

Posted Apr 30, 2024 2:54 UTC (Tue) by flussence (subscriber, #85566) [Link]

I did a project for fun once where I crammed a KDE4 desktop on an original eee701 netbook, with this and a full web browser. It came out to a little over 300MB for the rootfs and, despite expectations, it all ran pretty smoothly. Good to see this surviving.

Amarok 3.0 "Castaway" released

Posted Apr 30, 2024 4:58 UTC (Tue) by vasvir (subscriber, #92389) [Link]

Now they will have to resume the porting efforts for Qt6

Amarok 3.0 "Castaway" released

Posted Apr 30, 2024 8:24 UTC (Tue) by chris_se (subscriber, #99706) [Link]

To be fair: while I don't know about KF5 -> KF6, but at least the Qt5 -> Qt6 transition is much more straight-forward than the Qt4 -> Qt5 transition.