Amarok without a doubt is one of the best free and cross-platform music players and is also one of the major components of the KDE desktop environment. It supports few multimedia frameworks (Gstreamer/Phonon and player engines such as Xine), has beautiful UI design, lets you easily manage “big” music collections … what can I say, it rocks!.
But, to be honest I haven’t used it in a while because I’m drifted towards Gnome and their applications because I use Ubuntu and in Ubuntu which is primarily build on Gnome, when you try to install Amarok, it requires some decent amount of dependencies outside of Gnome.
Anyway, if you’re an Amarok fan (despite some of the recent UI changes that some criticized) who uses KDE as the primary desktop then you’d love to know that few days ago they released Amarok 2.5 beta 1.
And the 2.5 release should be released within the next few days if everything goes according to plan as well.
Comparing with recent changes there aren’t a lot of changes but the 2.5 beta 1 brings few major features according to the official release page …
*. Re-written USB storage support (not sure what that means actually… perhaps USB3.0 has something to do with it).
*. Few bug fixes concerning the iPod plugin.
*. And a new Amazon MP3 store support, so if you’re willing to spend few bucks, now like with Banshee, you can use Amarok to purchase music files through Amazon!.
Although I didn’t tested this but I think you should be able to install Amarok 2.5 beta in Kubuntu/Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot (don’t seems to have beta packages for other Ubuntu versions) by using a PPA channel thanks to Paulo Dias.
As usual, type the below commands in your Terminal window install it.
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:paulo-miguel-dias/peppa
sudo apt-get install
sudo apt-get install amarok
Yep, I think that should do it. Enjoy!.
