KDE's Amarok 3.0 Music Player Released After Six Year Hiatus - Now Ported To Qt5

Released back in March of 2018 was the Amarok 2.9 music player for this KDE project. Shipping today is finally Amarok 3.0 as the first major release in six years and now ported to Qt5 and KDE Frameworks 5.

Yes, that's Qt5 and KF5 compared and not yet Qt6 and the recently released KDE Frameworks 6. But the Amarok developers hope to begin porting to Qt6 and KF6 in the coming months with potentially having that more incremental update ready still this calendar year in beta form.

Much of Amarok's Qt5/KF5 porting was complete nearly a decade ago but the project stalled a bit in more recent years while back in 2021 was the 3.0 alpha release.

Today's Amarok 3.0 release announcement notes:

"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!

In the following months, minor releases containing small fixes and additions, based on both newly reported and longer-standing bug reports and feature requests, are to be expected. Work on porting to Amarok to Qt6/KDE Frameworks 6 should start in the following months, the goal being to have a usable Qt6/KF6 based beta version in 2024 still."

It's nice seeing Amarok come back to life after all these years and having fond memories of it going back to the KDE 3 days. They did manage to beat GIMP 3.0 to shipping... Here's to hoping the Qt6 and KF6 port will go along smoother and more quickly than this much belated release.