amaroK - backstage

For all who don't know it already: amaroK 1.4 (codename fast forward) beta1 is out.

So there are now about 30 collections of hotest new features, but no background information. Might be something to change for /me, so here I go.

1.4's development started in november and was quite fast (forward) since first day after braching the 1.3 series. Most active within the first weeks: Martin Aumueller (not that this had change ;-)), he introduced a new dependencie against libgpod (as seen in gtkpod) and improved the iPod support immensly. Then sebr put iriver support in and blah blah blah ... finally Jeff Mitchell started working on generic media device support (as in "any vfat device") using the HAL backend. So that's about media device crap (still haven't got one :|).

While this, markey excluded the collection scanner into an own binary to increase stability (by no amaroK crashes because of collection scanner crashes). Then he took a shot at the lyrics sites (you might have heard that lyrics support in roK >1.3.8 is broken due to a change at lyric.com.ar), so he made the whole thing script based, and now anyone can write it's own lyrics-fetch-script for any lyrics site.

There is quite some other stuff, from other people, though I'm getting tired so: others also done awesome things, check svntalk

Derek Nelson (admrl) helped a lot with great artworks (really good to know a artist being around ;-)), he also polished the beta1 release pic (taken by firetech). By the way, we'll start a official amaroK artist team (with a sexy name, like roKymotion ;-))

Talking about roKymotion, we've made some cool stuff since foudning, actually every news posted at amarok.kde.org has been produced (and approved) by the roKymotion team and we've also made some internal proposals how to get amaroK promotion more efficient and funier done.

Last but not least:
We have two new official authors (named them already at the very top)
Martin Aumueller (aumuell)
Jeff Mitchell (jefferai)
for their awesome work at media device support and various other parts of amaroK.

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And since I promised yesterday to tell something about irc: while amaroK is still not using konvi as a kpart, the amaroK bot got reseted (madpenguin8 [former hoster] suddenly disappeared so oggb4mp3 [new hoster] used a quite old backup) .. anyway, welcome back amaroK!! :-D

#amarok: the channel gets flooded by support from Christie Harris (dangle) (roKymotion member), so I now have to say "Awesome job Christie!" .... not that she'd be the only supporter, just the loudest ;-)
#amarok.de: well, sometimes less amaroK related stuff than overall opensource or KDE discussions (quite cool actually)
#secretamarokchannel: gets flooded by me with mostly bad ideas about reforming anything (wiki, site, team, project structure, etc.)

apachelogger: uses to be quite more often apacheLAGger than apachelogger (damn snow causes even worse internet connection)

So that's my short overview about amaroK and the other roKish stuff ;-) .... tomorrow: kubuntulogger