Amarok 2.2.1 “Weightless” released
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A large amount of work went into the Podcast section, where you can now manually mark podcasts as New. Also, it is now possible to group podcasts. When a network connection is detected, podcasts will now automatically update themselves, and they show emblems to indicate their status.
The playlist received attention as well. The inline editor in the playlist can now be used for resizing elements as well as for editing metadata. Track bookmarks can now can be deleted directly without having to go through the bookmark manager. Also, there is a new keyboard shortcut (Ctrl-J) for jumping to the playlist search box, in addition to many more shortcut possibilities.
Under the hood, the collection scanner has been improved. It will no longer process subdirectories of changed folders when those subdirectories themselves are unchanged, which leads to a very significant speed increase for those with relatively flat collections. It will also filter out directories that have been passed in multiple times, instead of scanning them twice. In addition, the process for parsing the output of the collection scanner has been highly optimized: speed increases in the range of 30 to 300% have been reported!
Amarok 2.2.1 also introduces the Script Updater. This updater checks for updates to first-party scripts (those the developers include with Amarok itself), allowing us to quickly release updates in case of changes to the sites they connect to. It uses cryptographic signing to ensure that only updates released by the Amarok team are ever used.
As usual, a significant amount of bugs have been fixed and stability has been improved, as you can see in the changelog below.
Features
- Podcasts will only be automatically updated when there is a network connection (using Solid).
- The SMB (Samba) protocol is now supported in the playlist. Patch by Steven van der Vegt <[email protected]>. (BR 178691)
- Podcasts have better indication of status with emblem icons. (BR 209433)
- The information from the podcast feed can be written to the downloaded files. Both manually and automatically.
- Track bookmarks can be removed directly by using the delete icon shown in the popup when the mouse is over it.
- Add a menu allowing the creation of any known type of bookmark to the Bookmark Manager.
- CTRL+SHIFT+F toggles full screen mode. Patch by Rick W. Chen <[email protected]>.
- Podcast episodes can now be marked as new/old manually.
- Podcasts can now be grouped in the playlist and show useful info in the tag editor.
- Playlist files can be droped on the "Saved Playlist" category to import them into Amarok. (BR 193476)
- Playlist files from the default playlist location are now loaded by default. (BR 209596)
- Added view menu to menu bar for ease of use.
- Saved playlists and folders can now be deleted with the keyboard.
- Added "Copy on Write" when trying to edit a read only (one of the default) playlist layouts. The changed layout is now simply saved under a new name.
- Added context view bookmarks, allowing saving and restoring of applet setups.
- Enhanced --debug feature: When a function takes very long to run (> 5s), we print a special message (DELAY) that can be searched easily.
- Middle-clicking an item in the Collection Browser appends it to the playlist. Patch by Felix Geyer <[email protected]>. (BR 197423)
- Added feature for removing duplicates from the playlist. Patch by John Atkinson <[email protected]>. (BR 200445)
- Allow changing of playlist layout item sizes using the inline editor.
- Initial KNotify support.
- Show total playlist file size in a tooltip when hovering over the total play list time. (BR 91640)
- Implemented "Jump To". Press Ctrl+J to focus the playlist search. (BR 92400)
- Made Love/Skip/Ban/Enqueue/Dequeue available in Shortcuts configuration dialog. (BR 136232, BR 187542)
- Added a function to automatically update the built-in scripts if newer versions are available.
Changes
- Do not automatically fetch the entire Jamendo database every time the Jamendo service is started.
- Database now does consistency checks on a semi-regular basis, with full checks upon full rescans.
- Removal of most SQL during scan result parsing means enormous speedups during collection scanning. (BR 210201)
- Usability improvements for the Videoclip applet.
- Restore the proper custom bias when switching between saved biases (BR 209350).
- Don't crash when receiving bogus data from Last.Fm when asking for recommended songs (BR 208173).
- UMS device plugin now checks MIME types of tracks both by content and filename. Thanks to Aran Cox <[email protected]> for the patch.
- Some optimization of SQL queries during scan to speed things up. (BR 210201)
- Use an emblem for indicating a podcast episode is on disk. (BR 209433)
- Scanning speedups by getting rid of unnecessary code paths and optimizing some queries. Patch by Egbert König <[email protected]>. (BR 209822)
- New main toolbar and renaming of ToolbarNG to Slim Toolbar.
- Huge performance improvements for the Cover Manager. Thanks to Michael Reiher <[email protected]> for the patch. (BR 210454)
- Improved usability and look of main control buttons.
- Multiple usability improvements for the Dynamic Playlist UI.
- Moved the Podcast category to the top level of the Content panel.
- Renamed "Browsers" panel to better suited "Media Sources".
- Improvements to the row heights in the playlist, making especially the size of the rating stars more consistent.
- Usability improvements in the Context View's applet tab bar.
- Collection scanner won't scan a directory more than once if passed in multiple times. Should significantly speed up certain incremental scanning cases.
- When doing a recursive incremental scan, the scanner will no longer scan subdirectories of changed directories if those subdirectories' mtimes have not changed, for extremely large speedups in some cases. For very flat collection trees, the difference is basically between a small incremental scan and a near full rescan.
- Ask the user for confirmation before refetching lyrics and overwriting cached ones.
- It is now possible to stop editing lyrics without saving changes in the lyrics applet.
Bugfixes
- Fix issue where data structures were loaded with wrong values. (BR 212676)
- Videoclip applet didn't work correctly on some systems. Thanks for the patch go to Jacopo De Simoi.
- Proportions of layout stay correct after window resizing. (BR 200527)
- The GUI layout is now crash persistant. (BR 211509)
- Ensure that ReplayGain float values are stored in the database with a period, not a comma. (BR 212676)
- Fixed crashes with Icecast Directory script. (BR 206579)
- Enabled C++ exceptions handling in Amarok. This fixes various crashes with liblastfm. (BR 212115)
- Reversed the priority of repeat and random modes. Repeat now always takes precedence. (BR 178056)
- Fixed crash if closing amarok while the JamendoXmlParser is running. (BR 208468) (BR 211015)
- Systray information now updates correctly for streams. (BR 211748)
- Made playlist layouts translatable. (BR 189751)
- Fixed issue with collection scanner seeing duplicate tracks if they contained the default MusicBrainz UUID. Patch by Egbert König <[email protected]>. (BR 209822)
- Fixed issues with certain types of tracks not correctly getting grouped together in the playlist when grouping by something other than album.
- Splash screen no longer hides KWallet on startup. (BR 210179)
- On Screen Display was not shown when cover image changed. (BR 195188)
- On Screen Display was not shown on automatic track change. (BR 209376)
- Automatic playlist scrolling was broken in some cases. (BR 193459)
- The On Screen Display now uses a sane font size with all display resolutions. (BR 195186)
- Fix rare regression where inaccessible subfolders (due to permissions) in the collection could not be picked up by an incremental scan when permissions were fixed and their mtime updated, requiring a full rescan.
- When using a MySQL server with "Watch Folders For Changes" disabled, very long periods of idle Amarok could allow the server to close the local connection. This is now detected and should be worked around.
- Correctly set the lyrics applet's title when displaying HTML formatted lyrics
- Track selection is now correctly preserved when using Dynamic Playlists. Patch by John Atkinson <[email protected]>. (BR 208349)
- Cover Manager no longer stops when one cover cannot be fetched. Patch by Tycho Andersen <[email protected]>. (BR 205032)
- Magnatune.com store: Fixed problematic use of external unzip command for unpacking downloaded album zip files. (BR 138499)
- Magnatune.com store: Download high quality covers when purchasing or downloading albums. (BR 176177)
- Correctly modify the Lyrics Applet's title when its state changes.
Source from here
