Up North, frost sparkles in the morning sunshine, while the Southern climes head into spring. All over the world, the Amarok team proudly presents Amarok 2.5, the most advanced release yet.

Some of the features we are happy about:

We have simplified the version scheme to 2 numbers again to reflect our development process. 2.5 is a big feature release and has many bugfixes. The next planned version will be 2.6, with new features.

As promised, we've started a new year of donation mentions with the generous donators of the past Rocktober funding drive. Thank you all for contributing to Amarok, we hope you are pleased with this release.

Update: We have just uploaded a new Windows version with an important bug fix. If you were experiencing issues with the Windows build, please check out the updated installer.

We have the following download options available:

Source tarball Windows installer Instructions for various Linux distros

The Amarok team presents the first beta for the 2.5 release. Please test as much as possible so the final release, scheduled 2 weeks from now, will be as bug-free as possible.

Amarok 2.5 brings you the following major features:

A full changelog will be published with the final release.

In the last twelve months, we have made more than 1900 commits, closed over 2120 bugs, released 3 new versions of Amarok, wrote a Amarok Handbook, attended conferences and had a big developer sprint in Switzerland along with much of the KDE Multimedia team. We mentored 2 successful Summer of Code projects and contributed to the Code-in Google organized to get high-schoolers introduced to Open Source projects.
For those using Windows we now offer a fully supported Windows version that can be downloaded from our wiki.


Some of the highlights we worked on in Amarok itself:

In order to keep Amarok going forward, we need your help. Costs such as server maintenance and travelling expenses are too much for the development team without some backing. Remember, everything we do, we do for free! And this is where you come in!
In the near future we are bringing Amarok to more devices near you. Teo Mrnjavac has prepared a refactor of our codebase to enable porting the core of Amarok to a new User Interface using Qt Quick. The results of this will be found standalone on MeeGo 1.2 Harmattan devices (better known as the Nokia N9) as Amarok Move and on along with Plasma active on a whole spectrum of form-factors, including tablets.
With your support we can deliver these ports faster and more polished, so be generous.

This year’s Roktober, our annual fundraiser, has a goal of 5000 Euros. Reaching this goal will help us handle this next busy year. The funds will help us develop more powerful features in Amarok, pay for our servers, and send team members to conferences; we may even run a developer sprint or two!

As a sign of our appreciation for your support we will add donors agreeing to it to a special section in Amarok’s About Dialog. Your name will then appear in each version of Amarok that gets released in the next 12 months.

If you agree to be listed in Amarok’s About Dialog as a supporter please send an email to roktober@getamarok.com after you donated with your name as it should appear there (and if you have one, your nickname on opendesktop.org). If you are sending this from a different email address than your donation please mention this as well.
Should you have any problems or questions please also email roktober@getamarok.com.

So join us, and throw in your share to Rok the World!
Here’s how to contribute:

In the left sidebar of this page you can see two donate buttons. The upper one is for donations via Paypal and the lower one is for donations via Google Checkout. Choose your preferred one and donate to support Amarok development. Thank you!

Amarok is part of the Software Freedom Conservancy, Inc., which is a 501(c)(3) non-profit based in NY, USA. Donations are often tax-deductible on the donor's USA taxes. If you want to donate via paper check in USD, you can send your check to:
Software Freedom Conservancy, Inc.
137 MONTAGUE ST STE 380
Brooklyn, NY 11201-3548
USA If you'd like to donate by wire transfer or other means, please contact <accounting@sfconservancy.org> for instructions.