Amarok 2.2 – Reloaded, revamped, rethinked, reeverything!

I have a little secret to share with you, Amarok 2.2 Beta 1 is almost out!! shhhh, don’t tell anyone, it might scare the little puppy 🙂

Are you curious to what incredible and life changing goodies it will bring to your life? Do you?

Then keep on reading…

First off, i’m pleased to announce that the amarok devs have ears, that’s right, they actually LISTEN to user requests, and so, they added a much asked feature to amarok 2.2, the ability to change the layout has you see fit. the following screenshot shows MY amarok 2.2 git build with MY way of organizing the myriad of information that amarok provides.

AS you can see for yourself, i organized the playbar below, and added two tabs (yes, you can do that and much more), one with the collection browser and other with the info center (which was revamped BTW).

Thats good for keeping us busy for half an hour, but there will be a time when you eventually will have the urge to actually LISTEN to some music.

Well, the playlist was revamped also, a lot of functionality was added and/or tossed around, so lets see some new features.

There are 2 new buttons to the right, and they add some nice features.

The one at the utmost right allows you to determine what tag will sort your playlist (this is all dynamic BTW).

The second one is a revamped way of organizing an configuring something that was introduced in amarok 2.1, the layout manager.

Next on the list, one of my preferred features and a pet peeve that got added recently, the ability to change the playlist tags (including ratings) without the need to open the evil (evil in the sense of too much bloody mouse clicks) tag editor. Justble) click once, the playlist item will then change aspects and will allow you to change the SENSIBLE tags (tags like music time won’t be changeable).

Under the hood, the amarokers did even a more splendid job. Now and for all times to come, the local browser is not for local content anymore, it allows ipods, etc like it did, but also cds are treated as removable collections and the great new advent of VFAT devices (you know , those chinese kinda-alike ipods that you and me own?).

You can even mix and match by drag and drop between them, truly life changing 🙂

But amarok was never JUST to play or organize music, but everything musica related, lyrics, wikipedia info, ratings, etc etc.

Well now we have photos and videos pulled on the fly by several sources, thanks to the KDE infrastructure magic you can even PLAY THE VIDEOS inside amarok itself, just drag them to the playlist or doble click them (same behaviour) and you are done!!!

Now, lets get serious here. Are you one of those sorting freaks, that index your refrigerator eggs, and catalong girlfriends/boyfriends by age, size and height? Well, then this feature is for you!!!

Sort your brains out, with this new playlist sorting, never ending, all you can eat sorting mechanism.

But what about me, the “OMG i can’t decide what i want to listen!!!” type of person?

Well, in amarok 2.2, the dynamic playlists are even more dynamic, powerfull and PINK!

Ok, maybe not PINK 😛 but even more powerful then in 2.1, that’s for sure 🙂

Another thing that you will notice eventually is a little button, with two stripes that pratically shows up everywhere in the layout.

What does it do? Well, in one word… Bookmarks… which are now much more that just that, you can bookmark virtually everything amarok can put his paws onto. Seeing to believing.

If you click on the bookmark manager you get…

Also, thanks to the new tagging/indexing system that the amarokers developed, each song has its own unique identifier inside the tag, so if you move your music around, amarok WILL recognize it and hunt it down.

All the plasmoids got some love too, the current track allows you to dran and drop the cover, the album is more alike the 1.4 one, the lyrics are editable on the fly, the wiki got the same features 1.4 add (artist, albm, etc).

Well, this are some of the MANY MANY changes amarokers are doing to the mighty wolf.

And this is only a beta 🙂 expect them to keep coming your way.

My only question at this point is!

CAN YOU TAKE IT???

Enjoy!